Since I moved to North Carolina at the end of the summer of 2007, I’ve really only been able to get to PNC on weekends that I’m home for other reasons. Because I’m lucky to be home at all, it’s hard to complain about it. But there’s nothing in the world like seeing PNC when it’s full, and so I was really excited to find out that the Pirates were playing the Phillies at home the same weekend that two of my friends were getting married in Hermitage.
There was plenty of red at PNC last night (somewhere around a quarter or a third of the 30,000+ in attendance, maybe), but that only served to bring out the best in the Pirate fans that were there. Pirate fans can understandably lack pride in their favorite team from time to time, but not when the park is full of Phillie fans and the Pirates are winning.
All of which means it was a perfect backdrop for WHYGAVS Night (game recap will be follow WHYGAVS Night recap, so if that’s all your interested in just scroll past the pictures):
Among the commenters that you might recognize, we’ve got TracoBucco (on the left in gray with the camera strap around his neck), Doctor Geeves (standing in the front right), and brian2 (to my right with the paint on his hat, looking at the scoreboard), as well as various other readers and friends of mine (or people that fall into both categories). Of course, sitting in the bleachers has its drawbacks:
I always want to draw special attention to the backs of this year’s shirt, made to commemorate both Andy Van Slyke’s number and the 18th consecutive losing season and the brainchild of WHYGAVS Night veteran bwzimmerman, who unfortunately couldn’t attend this year due to living in Arizona:
And of course, sitting in the bleachers has it’s own major drawbacks:
I say this every year, but being a Pirate fan isn’t something that easy to do in isolation. The best part about WHYGAVS for me has always been the reminder that there are passionate Pirate fans everywhere that care every bit as much about the team as I do. Accordingly a huge thanks is due to everyone that showed up last night. It was really a lot of fun, both to get back to PNC Park and to watch a Pirates game with a bunch of Pirate fans.
Most fortunately of all, Ross the Boss finally showed up for a game. As the innings wore on last night, we kept looking over to the K-board in disbelief as his strikeouts piled up. The PitchFX confirms what we all saw in the park, which was that he wasn’t throwing all that hard, but he was mixing up his fastballs (two-seamer and four-seamer) nicely with his slider and changeup and it kept the Phils off balance all night. He also had command of all of his pitches (64 of 95 pitches were for strikes), which is something that hasn’t been true of many of his other starts this year. Philadelphia didn’t really seem to hit more than a ball or two all that hard over his seven innings and except for some shaky work by Pedro Alvarez the defense played strongly behind him. With only one walk (and an intentional one at that) and five hits, it wasn’t much trouble keeping the Phillies off the board. They really only threatened in the sixth and that fizzled out with Lastings Milledge’s diving catch.
The offense was lackluster again, but the way the team has played in this nice little spell of wins (three in a row and four of five) is a lot more like the team I was hoping to see when the season started. We all knew the offense was going to have its rough spells this year, but the pitching staff was supposed to be capable of something better than the pitching staffs that the Pirates have had in the past. That’s certainly not the way things played out for most of the early parts of this season, but each of the Pirates stretches of good baseball this year have coincided with excellent pitching. If nothing else, let’s hope the second half of the season brings some more consistency on the mound.
