Pirates 5 Marlins 4- Roller Coaster

I really would have enjoyed watching tonight's game on TV, but apparently FSP decided to give their staff a long holiday. Somehow, two nights in a row we managed to beat a good baseball team in the manner that we usually manage to lose. Lots of errors and a couple timely hits and bam! We have a two game winning streak. We cashed in on a throwing error by their catcher (with Ollie at the plate no less!), and Luis Castillo's throwing error lead to Freddy Sanchez's second big hit in as many nights (can someone please tell me why this guy has been benched for so long? I mean he was so benched I lost hope of ever seeing him start regularly and then suddenly all of a sudden he's starting again... I'm so confused). We then withstood their barrage of homers off Perez, then rode a two run homer from the D-Train to victory. Perez was again tough to read tonight. He made it through six innings only throwing 85 pitches (60 for strikes, much better than AJ Burnett's 96-56 ratio), striking out six and walking none, but this time gave up 7 hits, three of the over the fence variety. This is still more encouraging than the early season starts, but I'm curious about his velocity (ie, did he tone it down a bit tonight to throw more strikes and in return gave up more hits) so if anyone was at the game I'd be curious to hear a velocity report. But all in all, there wasn't much to complain about tonight. The bullpen was great again, this time Meadows, Gonzalez, and Mesa getting a very rare 1-2-3 save (his first since the Chicago debacles, don't you hate how that's plural). And on top of that, Jack Wilson was 3-for-4 and upped his average to .217!!! That's almost solidly above .200! We've already taken two from Florida in a series I wondered if we'd be able to salvage one win out of. Of course we can't stop there, taking three out of four from the Marlins would really be sweet (well, bittersweet because of how much it's helping out the Braves, but hopefully we can take care of them next). Consider this homestand properly launched.

20 games in 20 days: 6-6