0 comments by Pat Lackey on 7/22/2014
Let’s start here: since 2005, my Mom has been asking me to be in a post on WHYGAVS. If we’re being honest, I can’t ever tell how serious she is about it or if she’s just giving me a hard time (I mean, I hardly ever put MYSELF on WHYGAVS, geez, Mom, don’t you want […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey
Vance Worley probably doesn’t have much time left in the Pirates’ rotation. Between the rumors that the Pirates are interested in acquiring a starter and Gerrit Cole’s recovery from his lat problem, it’s hard to imagine Worley’s got more than a couple of starts left as a Pirate. Tonight, he’ll face off against Josh Beckett […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey
With nine days left until the trade deadline, I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that this year’s deadline is going to be a lot like last year’s. In the National League, the top eight teams are within four games of each other (not four games of a playoff spot; four games of each other) and in […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 7/21/2014
I suppose it was unreasonable to hope that the Pirates would win all 67 games that they played after the All-Star Break, so a game against Hyun-Jin Ryu seems like as good a place as any for the Bucs to take their first post-Break loss. Really, they were never in this game at all. Edinson […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey
The Pirates and Dodgers are two of the eight teams participating in what seems like it’s going to be a mad dash for five National League playoff spots this year, but you’d hardly know it from tonight’s lineups. Yasiel Puig and Hanley Ramirez are both on the shelf for the Dodgers with various ailments, while […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey
In the last few months, I’ve dug pretty deep into Mike Duncan’s great history podcasts. His The History of Rome is more or less essential listening if you’re interested in that particular type of history. Since Rome concluded, he’s started on Revolutions, which is a tour of, well, revolutions, through the Western world; how the English Civil Wars […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 7/20/2014
As crazy as it seems, if the Pirates can finish off their sweep of the Rockies at PNC Park this afternoon, there’s a pretty decent chance that most of the damage done by their 2-5 week against the Cardinals and Reds will be washed out before the first full week after the All-Star Break begins. […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 7/19/2014
I don’t know why, but I didn’t really feel like the Pirates were going to lose this game when Carlos Gonzalez hit the two-run homer in the seventh inning that turned a 1-0 Pirate lead into a 2-1 deficit. Given that the Pirates are still afloat in the wild card race and the NL Central […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey
Last night was a nice win for the Pirates, in the way that it’s always nice when a good team finds a way to beat a bad team. The Pirates probably played closer to poor than they did to well, but Francisco Liriano pulled himself together after two rough innings and the Pirates’ offense strung […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 7/18/2014
I’ve written quite a bit about the Pirates’ situation in the last two days, so tonight is easy: Francisco Liriano is probably the first or second most important piece to getting the Pirates back into the playoffs in the second half. In his last start on Sunday, his stuff looked OK but his control was […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey
For as maddening as the first 95 games of the Pirates’ 2014 season has been, there’s one thought that keeps cropping up in my head: This Pirate team is really close to being really, really good. With no disrespect meant to the 2013 Pirates, almost everything that happened last year felt a little bit like […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 7/17/2014
When the Pirates punted almost every big decision of the off-season, leaving what one could reasonably assume to be a decent amount of cash unspent (you can look at their offers to Josh Johnson, James Loney, and AJ Burnett and guess that they had at least another $12 million to spend this winter, maybe a […]
“More goes into it [shifting] than stopping ground balls from getting through. It’s more about getting hitters to change their approach.”
Clint Barmes, in David Manel’s excellent piece about the Pirates’ shifts at Bucs Dugout. Go read the whole thing.
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0 comments by Pat Lackey on 7/15/2014
Andrew McCutchen’s history with the Pittsburgh Pirates coincides nearly perfectly with the genesis of this blog. I started writing in April of 2005, and McCutchen was drafted two months later in June. Actually, I was not terrible impressed with the Pirates’ selection: [McCutchen] put up some amazing numbers in his senior year of high school, […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 7/13/2014
Of course, everything that I wrote in my pre-game post about this past week not being so bad and the Pirates being in decent shape going into the All-Star Break all presupposed a situation in which the Pirates won this afternoon. Instead, Francisco Liriano lost his control after the first inning, served up a home […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey
After Friday night’s Tony Watson meltdown and last night’s Charlie Morton implosion, it felt like the Pirates were on a train ride directly into All-Star Break Hell after an awful week against two division opponents. Then, Andrew McCutchen put on his cape, bailed the team out, and now the Bucs are one win away from […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 7/12/2014
I tried to stay away. Really, I did. There was just one hitch to my plan: I didn’t actually have anything else to do tonight, so my plan to avoid the Pirates was to hole up in my apartment and watch TV on my iPad. My iPad that flashes a notification whenever runs are scored […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey
I have had too much late inning Pirate shenanigans for one week, I think. Charlie Morton pitches for the Pirates against Mike Leake. It’s hard to say any of these game are “must win” because the Pirates have lost pretty much every single game you could put that label on this year and will still […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 7/11/2014
I have a few thoughts: Yup, I think it’s time to have “that” conversation with Pedro Alvarez. I wonder if the Mets will trade Blake Taylor back for Ike Davis? I really don’t think it’s ideal to look at a pitcher who’s given up four hits in a row and already blown a two-run lead […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey
To put it simply, now would be a very good time for the Pirates to start playing better against their NL Central rivals. I wrote about the eight-teams-for-five-spots race in the National League this afternoon, but it wasn’t really all that long ago that the Marlins and and Rockies were in the thick of things, […]
