0 comments by Pat Lackey on 4/24/2015
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 […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 4/23/2015
When the lineups were announced before this game and I saw Starling Marte on the bench with his hand problem and Andrew McCutchen out with a scheduled off day, I thought to myself, “Well, this is doable if Gregory Polanco does everything by himself.” As it turned out, he almost did, though he got a […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey
It’s only been two games, but I’ve been quite impressed with the 2015 version of Jeff Locke. I don’t like to jump to too many conclusions based on just a couple of games, but Locke’s control looks vastly improved this year and his ground balls are way up. Obviously Locke’s control has varied pretty widely […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey
Well, that was exhausting. With Mark Melancon “unavailable” last night (we’ll see where things go from there), it seemed like the Pirates were in great shape after Rob Scahill got the last out in the sixth inning for Vance Worley. Caminero in the seventh, Hughes in the eighth, Watson in the ninth with a 4-1 lead […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 4/22/2015
The long and short of it is this: last night was awful enough that it makes me not particularly want to care about the Pirates tonight, but the season is young enough that last night doesn’t have to matter. It would be nice if the Pirates somehow found a way to split this series with […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey
The end of this game felt inevitable in the worst way possible. After a roller-coaster game that saw the Cubs with leads of 1-0 and 4-2, the Pirates with leads of 2-1, 5-4, and 8-5, and ties at 1-1 and 5-5, Mark Melancon stood on the mound with an 8-6 lead. Seeing what this dynamic […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 4/21/2015
Look, I’ll admit it: seeing Jorge Soler and Kris Bryant turn around 100 mph fastballs to create a late-game rally for the Chicago Cubs is disquieting. There is a voice in my head screaming, “RED ALERT! RED ALERT! I THOUGHT WE HAD MORE TIME BEFORE THE CUBS WERE READY!” right now. It’s early in the […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 4/20/2015
In the first inning, it looked like the Pirates were going to get to Jake Arrieta. Josh Harrison hit a sharp ground ball up the middle that Starlin Castro made a really slick play on, then Gregory Polanco scorched a single to center, stole second, scored on Andrew McCutchen’s single, then McCutchen moved to third […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey
Much of the 2014/2015 off-season was spent talking about the Cubs. They signed Jon Lester, poached Joe Maddon away from the Rays, they have a huge stable of minor league talent, they kept Kris Bryant in the minor leagues to save a season of service time despite having more money than Croesus, etc. etc. etc. […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 4/19/2015
I suppose there are a lot of things that we could focus on with this win, but Gerrit Cole’s third inning is what sticks in my memory. Cole loaded up the bases in the first before escaping with a flyout, then gave up two runs in the second that immediately erased the Pirates’ early 2-0 […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey
There’s something particularly wonderful and gratifying about what’s happened at PNC Park the last two nights: the Pirates came into this series against the Brewers mired in a terrible offensive slump with an ugly record. The starting rotation got off to an excellent start, but there just weren’t many runs to go around. Two games in […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 4/18/2015
There were a lot of positives in last night’s game for the Pirates; with the offense mired in a pretty ugly funk, both Gregory Polanco and Starling Marte had multi-hit games to help spark the Pirates to score some runs against a pitcher that shut them down just a few days ago. Polanco had three […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 4/17/2015
First off, a bit of news: Chris Stewart’s disabled list stint is over, so he’s back with the Pirates and Tony Sanchez is headed back to Indianapolis. I strongly suspect that Sanchez will be back before long, but I suppose we’ll see. For now, there wasn’t much that Sanchez was going to be able to […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey
You, as a Pirate fan, have almost certainly seen some of the things being written about Mark Melancon’s alarmingly decreased velocity to open the 2015 season. I’m a little behind on this one (I apologize that I’m just getting to this now, I’m awfully crunched for time at the moment between TAing and trying to not be a […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 4/15/2015
0 comments by Pat Lackey
The good news is that the second phase of the AJ Burnett Experiment went quite well. He cruised through six innings, he struck out eight Tigers, he walked two, threw 69 of 111 pitches for strikes, and got three times as many groundouts as flyouts. He only ran into trouble in the seventh inning, when […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 4/14/2015
I’m traveling today and I have a bit of an automobile situation, so I’m not sure when I’m going to have access to the computer once my current flight leaves Chicago. As such, I’m just going to go ahead and put the preview for today’s game up a little bit early, as opposed to risking […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 4/13/2015
It’s hard to imagine a more picturesque afternoon at PNC Park than this one: Josh Harrison hit the first pitch in the bottom of the first over the fence, Gerrit Cole kept the Tigers off balance for six innings with a fastball that averaged 97 mph and a ton of swinging strikes on his off-speed […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey
It’s been just over six months since a meaningful Pirate game has been played at PNC Park (we don’t need to talk about that game). We’ve been through an off-season, spring training, those weird and stupid Philadelphia games, and a week of regular season baseball, but it’s hard to feel like baseball is really back […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 4/12/2015
There was a brief moment in which I was sure this game was headed in the opposite direction. After Casey Sadler mostly cruised through the Brewers’ lineup on the first pass, he gave up a hard-hit double to Hector Gomez in the eight spot. When Carlos Gomez came up shortly after, Sadler barely got a […]
