When I came home at 8:30 tonight and turned the TV on I expected a lot of things, but not a 7-1 Pirate lead. That’s just what I saw, though. It stayed that way, too. I don’t mean that that was the final score of the game; I mean that I wasn’t hallucinating it. The Pittsburgh Pirates did indeed rack up a win tonight, and they did it in pretty convincing fashion.
First credit for the win goes to Zach Duke. When you pitch eight innings, your night-terror-inducing bullpen only has to throw one. When you hold the other team to one run, your overmatched offense only has to score two. We’re now officially in to mid-May and Duke’s ERA is 2.53 and he just picked up his fourth win. Tonight’s line was pretty typical for how he’s pitched this year: 8 innings, 4 hits, 5 Ks, 1 walk, and just one run on a first inning Albert Pujols dinger. I’m still expecting some backsliding from Duke, but I’ll admit it; the guy looks good this year.
Is it strange that I feel like we wasted all of these runs tonight? We scored by stringing a bunch of hits together in the second, then by stringing a couple homers together in the fourth. And not just any homers, Brandon Moss and Adam LaRoche homers. The two coldest guys on the coldest team in baseball homered in the same inning tonight. Baseball is a funny sport, isn’t it?
