Seen It Before

Watching the game yesterday and thinking, oh, this is all too familiar. A comedy of errors and the team falls on its face with just another loss piled up on top of all the rest of those losses in other games during the season. The pitcher throws wildly and the other team takes advantage. In this case the other team doesn’t even get one hit in an inning, but manages to send 10 batters to hit and plates 4 runs. Now, the surprise, the team with the comedy of errors, is not the Pirates, not this season. It is the Marlins and Carlos Zambrano, no surprise there. You never know what’s going to happen with Carlos Zambrano, you may get a well thrown game, but more than likely you’ll get a poorly thrown game and probably some tirade after. That was a normal occurrence with this pitcher in Chicago and nothing short of that is expected of him with his change of address. On this day he gift wrapped a 4 run inning for the Pirates. They have not had a present like this since Brian Cashman said, can you take this ace pitcher from us and we’ll give you most of his paycheck. It’s a gift that keeps on giving and the Pirates will take those presents any day and all day. Oh yeah, do you know who the pitcher is that faced Zambrano? It was that ace pitcher that Mr. Cashman generously donated. Hmm….7 2/3 innings pitched, 8 hits, 1 earned run. I mention this ace pitcher’s (AJ Burnett if you are a Pirates fan living under a rock and didn’t know who I was talking about) stats because, obviously you need good pitching to win, great pitching to accomplish greater things. You can’t always take advantage of gifts like the Marlins gave yesterday with bad pitching. That’s the difference between the Pirates of pre-2011 seasons and the current Pirates. Even with this gift the Pirates with their second half pitching meltdown last season may not have come up with the win in the second half last year, but this year the pitching has been strong, the starters and bullpen have equally contributed to that strength. This year the Pirates take full advantage of gifts from other teams. I’ll also point out to the Pirates management that the official attendance was somewhere around 39,000. I don’t know how many people of those 39,000 paid to see the game, but I can be pretty sure that if you have 39,000 people at the game, that more people are paying to see it than if you have 10,000 or less people at a game. That’s what happens when you actually put a competitive team on the field in this City. To borrow a famous line from a great baseball movie, “If you build it, they will come.” This is not Iowa though, it’s the Burgh, and this is not Shoeless Joe Jackson and Moonlight Graham it’s Andrew McCutcheon and Neil Walker. The people will come from all around Pittsburgh to see this team compete. They Pirates fans that became sick of management incompetence will come to see this team play. ‘Nuff said, go Bucs.

Burnett shows his approval of a Barmes to McGehee Double Play.