0 comments by Pat Lackey on 5/6/2015
There is a moment when you’ve been watching a baseball team mired in a slump that pushes you beyond the tipping point of what you can handle as a baseball fan. And that moment is when the Pirates are losing 3-0 to the Reds and when they finally score a run in some way other […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey
There is only one thing that could make a concerned Pirate fan feel better about a baseball game. They are these four words: Gerrit Cole is starting. There is only one way to dig out of an early season hole and that’s to win the game that’s right in front of you. Gerrit Cole was […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 5/5/2015
I have very little to say about this game: we tend to characterize the games like the ones the Pirates played in St. Louis over the weekend as “hard to watch,” but they were compelling baseball games from an objective standpoint. There was no compelling reason to watch this game once the Reds got up […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey
One of the starkest truths of the 2013 and 2014 Pirates was this: they were much better at PNC Park than they were away from it. One of the unavoidable truths of the 2015 Pirates is this: they need to be better this week than they were last week. The Reds have cooled off considerably […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey
One year ago today, the Pirates were 12-19. That was the NL’s third worst record through May 4th, and it put the Bucs behind the Brewers by 8 1/2 games in the NL Central. The Pirates finished the season from that point on at 76-55, erasing the deficit with the Brewers, nearly catching the Cardinals, […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 5/3/2015
Ugh. Let’s talk about this tomorrow. Or never again. Either tomorrow or never again. One or the other. Photo by Dilip Vishwanat/Getty Images
0 comments by Pat Lackey
Do we have to talk about yesterday’s game? One of my least favorite 2014 memories was the carbon-copy back-to-back walkoff losses the Pirates had in St. Louis in the early summer, one on a Matt Adams walkoff homer and one on a Kolten Wong walkoff homer. We’re barely into the 2015 season at all and […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 5/2/2015
There’s not much to say right now; the Pirates’ first big road test of 2015 against their likely biggest NL Central rivals has not started well. In four games, they lost pretty decisively twice to the Cubs and once in the sort of incredibly avoidable and frustrating loss that’s more or less defined their rivalry with […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey
Before the game, I wrote this: Last year, the Pirates were 8-11 against the Cardinals. They lost six of those games by one run (two of those were walkoffs), and another one on a walkoff two-run home run. The Pirates lost the NL Central by two games last year. There are plenty of things that happen […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 5/1/2015
The Pirates’ April was pretty up-and-down, but 12-10 isn’t a bad month (it is, in fact, much better than their last April). They’ll have to play better than that at some point, though, and a weekend series against the Cardinals seems like a good place to start. The Cubs looked pretty good against the Pirates […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 4/30/2015
In the second inning, things started to look ugly for the Pirates. Gerrit Cole walked Kris Bryant to start the inning, then Bryant moved to second when Pedro Alvarez missed the pickoff throw from Cole. Miguel Montero hit a ground ball down the first base line, and it bounced off of Alvarez and into right […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 4/29/2015
The situation, such as it is: the Pirates have played awful, uninspiring baseball two straight nights at Wrigley Field, which is unfortunate because the Cubs now appear to be a legitimate NL Central rival. They aren’t hitting well, they aren’t pitching well, they aren’t fielding well at all. This is the exact sort of game in […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 4/28/2015
It’s amazing how quickly two ugly losses can make you forget about a five-game winning streak. The Pirates played bad, bad baseball against the Cubs tonight; they threw the ball around, they ran the bases poorly, they hit poorly against a bad pitcher, they pitched poorly, they got thumped. In short, it was hard to watch. […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey
The worst part of the 2014 Pittsburgh Pirate season was the interminable stretch in the late spring/early summer in which it was clear that the Pirates were playing somewhere below what they were ultimately capable of and unclear if they were going to be able to get their shit together quickly enough to make another […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey
Sometimes, there’s just not much to say about a baseball game. The Pirates only seriously threatened to score once last night, in the fifth inning. The problem is one that I think Pirate fans are probably familiar with; when the offense isn’t clicking on all cylinders, there’s always the risk that they’re going to tumble […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 4/27/2015
When I look at the first three weeks of the 2015 Major League Baseball season, this is what I see for the Pittsburgh Pirates: opportunity. If I had to describe the Pirates first 19 games this year, the word I would probably use is fine. The offense has had its share of fits and starts, the […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 4/26/2015
Last Tuesday, the Pirates lost to the Cubs with a second straight bullpen meltdown. They were 6-8 with five wins against the Brewers, who have managed to become an MLB punchline faster than any team in recent memory. Since then, they’ve torn off five straight wins against the Cubs and Diamondbacks. This weekend, they swept […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey
Much as it was gratifying to see the Pirates win a game started by AJ Burnett last night, it’d be great to see them get a win this afternoon in a game started by Francisco Liriano. Liriano was a little uneven in his last start against the Cubs, but has on the whole been excellent […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey
It’s nice to see this Pirate team start to win some baseball games in different ways. They came into this game having lost quite a few pitchers duels (almost all of them with AJ Burnett or Francisco Liriano on the mound — six of their eight losses have been started by those two, even though […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 4/25/2015
When the Pirates made Gerrit Cole the first pick in the 2011 draft, the vision that they had for Cole was clear: a snarling, fire-breathing ace that would chuck 98 mph fastballs in the eighth inning and turn a manager to stone when he came to get the ball from him after 108 pitches. That’s […]
