When the Cubs took at 3-0 lead, I was ready to say, "Well, you can't win every night." When the Pirates hit three homers in a rowin the fourth to tie the game upand then went ahead in the sixth, I was ready to say, "Maybe there's something special about this Pirate team."  Then Jason […]

After Sunday's Charlie Morton scare, where Morton pitched poorly and came off of the mound in the second inning complaining about a popping noise in his foot, Morton will start tonight for the Pirates without missing so much as a start. Circumstances have changed greatly since the last time Morton pitched, though. On Sunday, Morton […]

Here's the rule: there's no complaining about the circumstances of victories at this point in the season. There's no "if the Cubs weren't baseball idiots that bunted with their leadoff hitter with two runners on and nobody out in the ninth inning of a 3-1 game …" There are only wins.  On Sunday, after being […]

After their roller-coaster road trip to Milwaukee, St. Louis, and Texas, the Pirates return home to PNC Park tonight to kick off an 11-game homestand against the Chicago Cubs. These 11 home games are the last regular season games to be played at PNC this year, and given that eight of them are against lousy teams, […]

As we draw closer and closer to the end of the season and it becomes more and more apparent that the Pirates will, at the very least, be one of the National League's wild cards this year, one of the biggest questions around the team has been about Gerrit Cole and his availability through the […]

Andrew McCutchen stayed on the bench all afternoon, AJ Burnett gave up five runs, and Kyle Farnsworth was the Pirates' closer. Despite all that, the Pirates finished up a sweep of the Texas Rangers (who need wins every bit as badly as the Pirates do right now) with a 7-5 win this afternoon that was […]

First things first! The kind gentlemen at Productive Outs had me on their podcast last night to talk about the Pirates. You should check it out. The Pirates have a chance to sweep the Rangers this afternoon, and we're reached a point in the season at which I'm no longer happy to say things like, […]

When the Pirates took a 4-0 lead in the top of the fifth inning, I thought that maybe they were going to coast to an easy win. That would've been a little bit of a relief after last night's nailbiter. Almost immediately, the Pirates started to let the Rangers back into the game. Francisco Liriano […]

Last night and today has been a lot of fun, but that's over and done with now. The Pirates have 82 wins and a winning season is clinched; now it's time to focus on winning the NL Central.  Last night's win was actually a huge step in that direction as much as it was the […]

I want to do a roundup of some of my favorite reactions to 82, but I want to start somewhere else first. A really cool thing happened last night when I tweeted out the link to my "82 wins" posts; everyone that was still awake started sharing their first Pirate memories with me. I retweeted […]

This is how it starts: in 1989 in a living room in front of an old cathode-ray tube TV, the kind with the power button that pulls out into a little knob to adjust the volume and the individual buttons for channels running down the side, with a four-year old asking his dad a non-stop […]

For the first time since 1992, the Pittsburgh Pirates will finish with a winning record. Think about that and just breath it in for a second. Just enjoy it. The "82 wins" post will come later tonight, because I've been writing it for eight years now and it's still somehow not finished. For now, let's […]

Five days ago, Gerrit Cole took the mound against the Brewers and before the game started, I wrote that I thought it'd be awfully appropriate for him to get the Pirates' 81st win. If you had told me that night that Cole would, in fact, help the Pirates to win 81 and that he'd also […]

This weekend went about as badly for the Pirates as you would've dared to believe that it could on Friday. Not only did the Pirates lose three times, but they got blown off of the field three times in the sort of fashion that leaves you turning the Sunday game off in the second inning […]

There have been a couple of points in the last month where it was easy to say, "If the Pirates don't start playing better, they're going to be in third place soon," but with the Reds just a game behind them, playing great baseball right now and an easy schedule ahead, we're really entering into […]

In hindsight, it was probably giving up nine hits in a row that did the Pirates in.

With the Pirates off last night, the Cardinals lost to the Reds (their third loss to the Reds in four games and their fifth loss in seven against the Reds and Pirates). That sets the scene for the final Pirates/Cardinals series of the year (for now?) this weekend at Busch Stadium thusly: the Pirates have […]

I don't really know what else to say here other than this really, obviously was not the Pirates' night. It was apparent from the second inning onwards that Francisco Liriano had absolutely nothing tonight, but he was allowed to stay out on the mound until the Brewers had seven runs. This is a larger and […]

There's not much to say about this game: Francisco Liriano is on the mound. The Pirates are one win away from clinching a winning season. A win tonight ensures that the Pirates will go to St. Louis this weekend with at least a 1 1/2 game lead on the Cardinals (the Cardinals are playing four […]

Let's take a minute here and step back and talk about what just happened on the field at Miller Park: In the top of the ninth inning of a tie game, Clint Hurdle sent Travis Snider, he of the three home runs and .321 slugging percentage over 266 plate appearances to the plate as a […]