For the first time this season, Buster Posey is leading the National League batting title race, however temporary it might be. And there's some added intrigue now as well, since Andrew McCutchen suffered a knee injury on Thursday too.
McCutchen entered Thursday batting .334, just barely ahead of Posey, who came into the final Giants home game batting .331.
But with the Pirates already eliminated from the playoffs, a big old bunch of insult got added to injury. Or, if you prefer, literal injury got added to insult: "Cutch" went 0-4 during the Pirates game on Thursday and suffered a knee injury while trying to make a diving catch.
As Craig Calceterra of HardBallTalk.com writes, the severity of the knee injury is currently unknown. But with the Pirates out of the playoffs and McCutchen being the future of their franchise, there's a chance that anything remotely serious might hold him out.
Posey took immediate advantage of McCutchen's struggles and hit a single in the second inning (he was driven in immediately by a Hunter Pence homer) and another single in the third inning.
Those two singles give Posey, as we stand right now with the Giants up 6-0 in the fourth inning, a .334 average on the year.
That puts him an ever-so-slight lead on McCutchen, with the chance to build on that lead later Thursday and through the rest of the season, or to keep battling Cutch down the stretch.
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Posey's quite unlikely to lose his lead though: he'd need to go hitless in four at-bats on Thursday to end up tied with McCutchen for the lead. Which means he'll likely wake up Friday as the leader in the National League batting-title race for the first time this season.
