After a reasonably successful opening home stand, the Pirates are headed out for their first extended road trip of 2015. They’re in Arizona tonight, which you probably remember as the place where a bad baseball team full of bullshit machismo injured Andrew McCutchen last August because Ernesto Frieri was bad at baseball. Kirk Gibson is gone now, but Tony La Russa is still overseeing the whole operation there, which means that my loathing for the Diamondbacks has not diminished.
It’s early and I haven’t seen a Pirate lineup yet (this post is going up now because I’m going to a Bulls game in Durham tonight), so I don’t know if Starling Marte is back, but Gerrit Cole is on the mound, looking to continue his impressive start to 2015. Josh Collmenter starts for the Diamondbacks. His strikeout rate at the moment would be envious of Zach Duke’s career Pirate strikeout rate.
First pitch is at 9:40. I would like to hope there will be no extraneous drama tonight, but I suspect that will not be the case.
Photo by Christian Petersen/Getty Images
