0 comments by Pat Lackey on 7/20/2015
It’s time for a brief WHYGAVS History Lesson. Once upon a time in the olden days of the internet, WHYGAVS was a tiny little blog with barely any readers on blogspot. It wasn’t even WHYGAVS back then, people actually called it by its full name and the URL was very unwieldy. One night, a terrible […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey
I fully accept that the Pirates are currently wedged between a rock and a hard place and haven’t had time to properly respond to Jordy Mercer’s injury, but the lineup that it’s left them with tonight is horrendous, with Travis Ishikawa at first and Sean Rodriguez at third. I will continue to hope that this […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey
0 comments by Pat Lackey
This is likely just a blip on the radar until we get any news on Jordy Mercer (which I suspect will be coming shortly), but
0 comments by Pat Lackey
It would be one thing to be sitting here on a Monday morning, discussing only the Pirates being swept by the Brewers. Saturday’s game created some bad circumstances, the Brewers are playing well, Clint Hurdle’s decision to sit Andrew McCutchen on the third day back from the break certainly leaves some questions about how much […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 7/19/2015
I don’t understand this any better than you do, but here are the Pirates’ records against NL Central teams this year: Cardinals: 5-5 Cubs: 4-6 Reds: 2-7 Brewers: 6-5, but 1-4 since a 5-1 start The Reds and Brewers are just completely awful this year, and the Pirates have lost five of the seven series […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 7/17/2015
Andrew McCutchen’s slow start was scary. It wasn’t scary because there was a chance Andrew McCutchen was going to put up a .600 OPS season or even a .700 OPS season, it was scary because it was a sign that maybe his peak was ending. This happens, of course, as players get older, but most […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 7/16/2015
There’s a cool little juxtaposition in the Big Data Baseball (I didn’t get a chance to read this right when it came out and I’m not sure I’ll do a full review, but I hope that the constant references that I’m making to it as I read it are enough of an endorsement for anyone reading this site […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 7/15/2015
During the very first off-season that this blog existed, the Pirates tried to sign Bill Mueller. I’m having a hard time remembering 100% of the granular details, but what I can piece together from my old blog posts (holy cow — pretty much every stylistic flourish I used to use back then make me shudder) […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 7/14/2015
The All-Star Break is four days long. The Pirates have four All-Stars. This is a meaningless coincidence, but I have started series on far flimsier grounds. Welcome to Four All-Stars in Four Days. When I was a kid that devoured Pirate lore like a hung-over Pac-Man in a maze full of bacon pellets, there was […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 7/12/2015
If last night was about an individual, tonight was about a team. I’ll admit it: I thought the Pirates were done when Neil Walker’s long fly ball off of Trevor Rosental came up just short of the warning track in the bottom of the tenth. Asking for another huge hit from McCutchen seemed like a […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey
The Pirates have spent so much time chasing the Cardinals in the first half of this 2015 season that it feels a little crazy to think that if there’s pressure on any team in this game tonight, it’s on the Cardinals. I think that’s true, though. Obviously all of the games between these two teams […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey
Now that I’m fully awake this morning and have verified that what I thought happened last night did indeed happen, let’s take a little bit of time to talk about the rumor mill that started churning when Jon Morosi mentioned during the broadcast that the Pirates were interested in acquiring journeyman outfielder Jeff Francouer. We […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey
Look, I don’t know what to say about this game. If your biggest complaint about the Pirates so far in 2015 was that they’ve played well against bad teams but don’t have a lot of signature wins in important games, well, you’ve got to find a new biggest complaint. One of my absolute favorite moments […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 7/11/2015
After a year in baseball purgatory, AJ Burnett made a beeline back to the Pirates in the hopes of closing out his career on a winning baseball team. Today, Burnett gets the ball with a chance to move the Pirates within 3 1/2 games of the first place Cardinals in front of a national TV […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 7/10/2015
Aaaand exhale, just a little bit. We’ve spent much of the first half of this season talking about the Pirate pitching staff (for good reason, of course), but I think that this one belongs to the offense. After Matt Carpenter hit a two-run homer in the third to turn a 1-0 Pirate lead into a […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey
Last night’s loss was discouraging for the Pirates for a few reasons. Not only did the game turn on relatively few plays that could’ve bounced the Pirates way, but a win in a pretty lopsided pitching matchup would’ve been a great way for the Pirates to open this series. Obviously it didn’t work out that […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 7/9/2015
In the first inning, Gregory Polanco doubled and moved to third on a Neil Walker single. When Andrew McCutchen hit a sharp ground ball to Mark Reynolds, Polanco froze, then tried to go home when Reynolds went to second to start the double play. He was thrown out at the plate to complete the oh-so-rare […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey
The Pirates are on an incredible run right now. Their 32-12 record since May 22nd represents perhaps the best sustained run of Pirate baseball in my lifetime. A lot of things have happened during that run that are worth talking about and considering during next week’s All-Star break, but tonight the 32-12 record really only […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey
This feels like a recurring pattern lately: the Pirates play poorly early on, keep the game from getting out of hand, right the ship, and then chip away until they find themselves ahead late in the game. Tonight’s particulars: Charlie Morton looked awful in the first two innings, but somehow escaped the top of the […]
