Excuses excuses

I'm sick of it. The umpire made the wrong call, it happens. What Tony Randazzo didn't do was give up 5 runs after the 8th inning with a 3 run lead. He didn't give up the game tying run even though he had two outs with only a runner on first. Mike Gonzalez, Rick White, and Mesa took care of those things. He didn't give up three extra base hits to Giambi who only had 7 on the whole season coming in, Kip, Mesa, and Ollie took care of that. He didn't walk .232 hitting Bernie Williams 5 times in three days. He didn't miss two routine fly balls in the outfield. The series is over. We played like crap, and it's not Tony Randazzo's fault, it's our fault. Would we have won on Wednesday with his call? Sure, but we still should've won without it. Look at this crap we're now churning out in our pregame media notes:

Pittsburgh's defensive unit has turned 17 double plays in the past eight games. ... It would have been 18 had the first-base umpire made the correct call last night.

That isn't going to help us win more baseball games, in fact it will probably go further in the opposite way, ensuring that we don't recieve anything that remotely looks like help from the umpires. I don't care if the umpires admitted it was the wrong call. Let it go. The Braves didn't moan like this when we got a call against them two weeks ago (and it looked to me on that play that Julio Franco was safe by a larger margin than Sheffield was out and with the way Mesa has been pitching, the Braves would have almost certainly won that game). The bottom line is that the Pirates made me sick this week with their "effort" against the Yankees, but this senseless whining is making things even worse.