Cardinals 8 Pirates 3

Well, things stopped in that game just as quickly as they started, to the point that the only reason to care about it by the end was Mackowiak's quest for the cycle (which ended a homer short, not surprisingly given his power outage of late). Not many runs, no great defense, not even any Big Country power bombs (or any bench-clearing action at all for that matter). Vogelsong pitched a solid 4 and 1/3 out of the pen, giving up only one run via John Rodriguez. Gonzalez pitched two scoreless, and White and Mesa each gave up a run in an inning of work. Despite this, Mesa and White will probably remain the go-to guys in the pen. And I was wrong, watching the rookies wasn't fun. McLouth bumbled around in the field and on the bases and Eldred struck out a lot. Still no real word on what caused the pre-game fight, though it certainly seemed to be instigated by Perry (who seemed to have thrown a punch at Duncan) and by the actions of the Pirates last night. Maybe it was just frustration boiling over, but today would seem to be a funny day for that to happen, what with us winning 10-0 last night and all. Whatever it is, it's pretty embarassing if we did incite it, there's no reason to be upset over the Luna/Castillo play. If it was anyone's fault it was Castillo's for not getting out of the way. I don't know if we'll ever know the full story. I do know that we're going to need to get some decent starts, our pen has worked 16 and 1/3 innings in the last two nights.