0 comments by Pat Lackey on 7/25/2014
There is not going to be much time to breathe in the National League in the second half of this season. The Pirates have won five of six out of the break, and now they go on the road to play the Rockies in Denver. That means that they need two or three more wins […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey
The Pirates’ offensive turnaround this year has been a big topic of discussion lately. You likely know the basics. They’re fourth in the National League in runs scored despite playing in a pitcher-friendly park, their position players have a 110 OPS+, and their on-base percentage of .334 is the best in all of baseball. As […]
The bottom line is that if you take Liriano’s wSL/C from last season at face value and extrapolate it into 2014, Liriano would have saved himself 9 runs; the difference between his current ERA of 4.43 and a projected ERA of 3.43.
Great work at Beyond the Box Score that goes much more in depth on Liriano’s slider, which has been a point of conversation in the last two weeks or so. Check the whole thing out.
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0 comments by Pat Lackey on 7/23/2014
If Tuesday night’s win was unnecessarily complicated for the Pirates, this one was nice and easy. Dan Haren looked terrible in the first inning and the Pirates made him pay for it; of the nine batters that came to the plate in the first, the Pirates had three hits, drew three walks, hit two hard […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey
Rather than re-hashing the same old same old “The Pirates need Francisco Liriano back on track to contend” that gets trotted out every time he starts, let’s take a minute a check out his Brooks Baseball page to see if the narrative that he’s looked better since his return from the disabled list except for […]
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 […]
