0 comments by Pat Lackey on 7/12/2014
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, […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey
Towards the end of last summer, whenever I’d watch Pirate games with my non-Pirate fan friends here in North Carolina, they would make fun of me. “Why are you so nervous?” they’d ask. “Aren’t the Pirates going to make the playoffs pretty much no matter what at this point?” I was particularly neurotic in the […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 7/10/2014
Well, that was cathartic. After losing two coin-flip games to open the series, then getting outplayed pretty clearly last night, the Pirates managed to salvage something from this trip to St. Louis tonight by beating up on Shelby Miller and the Cardinals’ bullpen, while getting a complete game from Edinson Volquez. Given that the Reds […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey
I would start this post by asking if you remembered this 5-4 Pirate win over the Cardinals from the 31st of last July, but I suspect that I don’t need to. The Pirates fell behind 4-2 early against Adam Wainwright, but fought their way back to 5-4 on an eighth inning Russell Martin single. The […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey
This game was long and terrible and I don’t want to spend much more time thinking about it, so let’s do bullet points: At one point in I think the third inning, the ESPN announcers mentioned that the Cardinals had fouled something like 17 of Brandon Cumpton’s 60 pitches off. On most nights, that would […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 7/9/2014
Look, I can’t spend much more time talking about the bullpen or the Pirates’ record against the non-Cubs teams in the NL Central. The bullpen needs to pitch better in close games that they don’t have a lead in, and the Pirates need to win games against the Cardinals, Cubs, and Reds. That’s it. Starling […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey
If you want to look at the first two games of this Pirates/Cardinals series with absolutely zero emotion and only with cold logic, the conclusion that you would probably draw is this: the Pirates have continued to play well this week, but a combination of bad luck and a thin bullpen has cost them two […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 7/8/2014
The Cardinals have two walkoff home runs off of Justin Wilson and Ernesto Frieri in a series where Mark Melancon has thrown zero pitches. We sure have evolved an efficient model of bullpen usage here in the era of statistics and sabermetrics. Image credit: CPG Grey, Flickr
0 comments by Pat Lackey
Four times this year, the Pirates have won the first game of a series against a division foe, only to drop the remaining two or three games remaining in the series. Since most of those series happened when the Pirates were struggling, the first win was encouraging and the subsequent losses were deflating. The Pirates […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey
Clint Hurdle was evasive before last night’s game about Gerrit Cole’s status on Wednesday, and now we know why: Cole’s bullpen session didn’t go well and he’s headed back to the disabled list with his strained lat. There’s still not a whole lot else to go on here: the comments from both Hurdle and Cole […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 7/7/2014
In seven innings tonight, Charlie Morton allowed one hit (a first inning double through the shift by Matt Adams) and two walks. He only faced three hitters in the second, fourth, sixth, and seventh innings. He only threw 84 pitches. He gave up zero runs. In seven innings tonight, Adam Wainwright allowed seven hits and […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey
The Pirates are 12-5 against the NL East. The Pirates are 9-4 against the NL West. The Pirates are 6-7 against the American League. The Pirates are 20-25 against the NL Central. The Pirates have only lost two series since the beginning of June; those two series were against NL Central teams. In short: the […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey
When writing about the Pirates’ three All-Stars last night, I mostly wanted to focus on Josh Harrison, since I figured Harrison would be one of the more controversial choices (as he should have been) for the NL team. I briefly laid out how dominant Tony Watson’s been in the last calendar year or so and […]
