I never know what to do with myself for the first few weeks of baseball season; it’s always awesome when baseball comes back, but it’s incredibly hard to find meaning in anything that happens in the first few weeks of games. If you’re worried about how Francisco Liriano will hold up to a full season of work immediately following a nearly-full season of work, all you can do is watch him take the mound for his first few starts, see how he looks, and start to really form an opinion from there. Same goes for, say, Pedro Alvarez’s strikeouts or a first base platoon that you’re fairly uncertain about. That’s just the reality of a long baseball season.
Anyway, that’s neither here nor there; it’s just something that was on my mind after last night’s blow-out win against the Cardinals. Francisco Liriano tries to build on his impressive Opening Day and extend his long run of success in PNC Park and against the Cardinals tonight. He’ll face Joe Kelly, who confused me for most of last year. Kelly throws really hard, but hardly ever strikes anyone out. As a result, his strikeout rate and walk rate are both unimpressive, but he managed a sub-3.00 ERA last year thanks to a groundball-heavy profile anyway. He pitched quite well against the Pirates last year, but struggled in his NLDS start at PNC.
First pitch tonight is at 7:05.
