0 comments by Pat Lackey on 9/3/2014
I don’t know, I’m sort of all out of things to say about this Pirate team at this particular point in time. Tonight, Jeff Locke took the mound and had absolutely zero command of the strike zone. This has been a recurring problem of late, but there hasn’t even been a slight consideration to removing […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 9/2/2014
I really hate dwelling on bad losses while there’s still a playoff race. I mean, the last two days have sureyl both been deflating days to be a Pirate fan and the Pirates’ situation in said pennant race is awfully precarious because of how these two games have gone, but if the Pirates close this […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey
When the Pirates announced that Tony Sanchez and Stolmy Pimentel would join the team on Labor Day, it was understood that there would be a number of additional call-ups in the next 24 hours after Indianapolis’s season officially ended with yesterday’s game. They announced the rest of the call-ups today and while there were two […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 9/1/2014
After Gerrit Cole allowed a single to Pete Kozma with one out in the bottom of the seventh inning, Greg Brown and John Wehner wondered aloud if it was odd that there was no one up in the Pirate bullpen. Cole had only thrown 85 pitches to that point and hadn’t encountered much resistance from […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey
The late afternoon yesterday was not kind to the Pirates: in Pittsburgh, Chris Heisey hit his second home run of the afternoon (and only his seventh of the year!) to help the Reds steal a 3-2 win from the Pirates. In St. Louis, the Cardinals turned a 6-4 deficit in the bottom of the eighth […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 8/31/2014
This is approximately how the Pirates’ season has gone: a stretch of solid play that makes you hopeful, followed by a stretch of bad play that goes on a few days beyond the point where you think, “If they don’t start playing better here, the season will be over,” which is then immediately buoyed by […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 8/30/2014
The Pirates are in a funny position against the Reds this afternoon, because I think they’re clearly a better team than the Reds right now and am kind of half-hoping that they’ll sweep Cincinnati this weekend, but they’re clearly under a bit of added pressure today because Johnny Cueto is looming tomorrow afternoon. Vance Worley […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 8/29/2014
I thought that this game was going to be all about Edinson Volquez. His breaking ball looked as good tonight as it has at any point in 2014, and he had the Reds flailing like crazy at it. He took a no-hitter through six innings and into the seventh before Devin Mesoraco’s single spoiled the party. […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey
There’s no such thing as a small series or an unimportant game from here on out. The Giants, Braves, and Pirates have all been playing good baseball lately after all having summer swoons at various points in the last month or so, and suddenly it seems like the race for the National League wild cards could be […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 8/27/2014
After two days of ugly bullpen work from the Pirates, this game was pretty much exactly what they needed. Ike Davis hit a looooooong home run in the bottom of the second inning to give the Pirates a 2-1 lead and Andrew McCutchen hit a sac fly in the third after the Cardinals cut the […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey
If the Pirates beat the Cardinals today, they will have taken four out of six from the Cardinals and Brewers over the last six days. That’d be a pretty good result, and given the general state of the wild card race, if the Pirates can win series against contenders down the stretch, I think there’s […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 8/26/2014
Despite my obvious devotion to Andy Van Slyke as a kid, the iconic early 1990s Pittsburgh Pirate memory for me has always been Barry Bonds’s walkoff home run off of Lee Smith. I’m sure that almost every Pirate fan that remember 1991 remembers that home run; Bonds crushes a ball to right center and throws […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey
In order to maintain any hope of winning anything except for the second wild card, the Pirates need at least one and probably two wins in the last two games of this series at PNC Park against the Cardinals. They certainly weren’t outplayed by the Cards last night, but a loss is a loss at […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 8/25/2014
I don’t know what to say about this game that hasn’t been said about one of the other million close losses the Pirates have to key divisional opponents this year: the Pirates hit John Lackey hard for most of his start tonight, but only ended up with Pedro Alvarez’s solo home run to show for […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey
Imagine, for one second, that the Pittsburgh Pirates do manage to pull themselves together in such a fashion over the next five weeks that they make the playoffs. If they do this, the most likely outcome is that they will play the St. Louis Cardinals in the one-game playoff. So where do you, a Pittsburgh […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey
I was set to put up a quick summary of yesterday’s game and where the Pirates are in their playoff quest when I came into lab this morning, only to find out that the Pirates had demoted Gregory Polanco to make room for Clint Barmes. So let’s start there, obviously. I see a lot of […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 8/24/2014
These two wins to open the series against the Brewers have been nice. They’ve re-established the Pirates as legitimate wild card contenders, and served as a reminder that the Pirates have an offense to be reckoned with when it’s functioning at full capacity. What these wins have not done, quite yet, is re-establish the Pirates […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 8/23/2014
When idiot bloggers say things like it’s “insane and inexcusable” to play Pedro Alvarez at first base in the pennant race, it sort of circumvents an entire discussion about Pedro Alvarez and Ike Davis. Ike Davis isn’t really hitting like an ideal first baseman, he’s consistently on base and Pedro Alvarez isn’t consistently anything. Alvarez, […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey
The situation has not changed much from yesterday: the Pirates won, which meant the Brewers lost, the Cardinals lost, the Giants won, and the Braves won. That means that the Pirates are still in third place in the NL Central, a significant margin behind both the Brewers (five games) and the Cardinals (3 1/2), while […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey
When Jeff Locke took the mound in the bottom of the first, walked Jonathan Lucroy, and served up a two-run homer to Ryan Braun on a silver platter, I got a sinking feeling in my stomach. I’m sure I wasn’t alone on that front; we’ve all seen that movie before. Locke’s control looked awfully iffy […]
