Giants 3 Pirates 2, the view from 144

Walked into the ballpark with the Pirates lineup being announed and was immediately disappointed. As I said yesterday, my worst fear for Craig Wilson was for him to get benched and he did. But not just that, Lloyd was also playing the "weak up the middle" lineup with Rob "I swear out of 400 career games less than 40 have been at second base why do you keep playing me here" Mackowiak at second and Tike "No one ever taught me how to catch a flyball with two hands over my shoulder properly" Redman in center. To make things worse, Mark Redman had absolutely nothing on the ball tonight. In the first the Giants strung a few hits together and put a 2 up on the board. They stung line drives all over the ballpark tonight, two of which would have been homers in any other park but were instead tracked down in the left center notch by Bay and Redman. We put together a mini-rally in the 4th with Daryle Ward coming as close to humanly possible to hitting a homer without doing it on an RBI double to deep center followed by a sac fly to bring in Bay and knot the score at two. After 5 Mark Redman had thrown 90 pitches and was having control problems and was getting hit very hard. How the Giants only had 2 runs to that point was beyond me. Anyways, after David Ross's 1 out double, it seemed like a perfect place to hit for Redman. He was obviously struggling and the bullpen was very well rested after two great starts, a day off, and a rain out. If there's been any night all year our bullpen was ready to go 4 innings it was tonight. Instead Redman (maybe the worst hitting pitcher ever, I'm not lying, look it up) struck out and so did Matt Lawton. Redman then responded by serving up a homer to Mike Matheney, the career .239 hitter with a grand total of 51 homers in 11 Major League seasons. Not that anyone was surprised. The Pirates went down quietly, not getting a hit the rest of the way out on their way to getting four hit by BRETT TOMKO (who had nothing on the ball at all after the fourth inning, I might add). In the 8th inning Lloyd made the curious choice of bringing Freddy Sanchez up to pinch hit instead of all-time Pittsburgh Pirates career pinch hit home run hitter Craig Wilson, who happened to be on the bench this evening. This was especially baffling because the top of the order wasn't hitting well tonight, so it's not like on base specialist Sanchez would've done us a lot of good with a walk (or with the flyout that he hit for that matter).

On the positive side, the post-game fireworks were awesome. They seemed to go on a little long, maybe to make up for the lack of fireworks during the game.