Sorry for the late recap again; it was a late night working on FanHouse stuff and somehow, writing up the Pirates’ rain-shortened 6-1 loss wasn’t high on the priority list.
In a lot of ways, it seems appropriate that the Pirates would lose 6-1 in a short gameon the night that the Penguins clinch their second straight berth in the Stanley Cup Finals. Baseball season in Pittsburgh used to run from April until late July when the Steelers’ training camp begins. Now, their season has been shortened from whenever the Penguins finish playing, which is June of late, to late July. This is entirely deserved, of course, because the Penguins are young and exciting and good, while the Pirates are pretty young, but not consistently exciting and definitely not good yet. It just seemed fitting to me that when the Penguins’ game ended, I looked to flip back to the Pirates and their game was unexpectedly over for all intents and purposes.
Before it did end, Freddy Sanchez picked up two hits and Andy LaRoche added a hit to extend his hitting streak to 11. Both of those things are good. Ian Snell gave up three runs in the first three innings, all crossing the plate with two outs. Then he did away with all of those pretenses and gave up three more in the fifth without recording any outs at all. Neither of those things are very good and let’s face it, neither is Snell.
