Catching up

I'm a little behind on things here (it being the last weekend before finals will do that to a guy), so let's see if I can get caught up. I only caught highlights from last night's game, but Burnitz's liner up the middle off of Lidge last night was an incredibly bad break. As Dejan mentions in his game recap today, the Bucs have now lost 7 times by 2 runs or less and got the tying run up to the plate in each situation. Sure, this isn't a World Series team or a playoff team, but if it keeps on rainin', the levee's going to break.

As I said, I only saw highlights of Duke's game last night, but it sounded like he had a pretty middling outing. He simply isn't going to win a ton of games by only throwing 62 of 107 pitches for strikes (he threw 71 of 104 for strikes in his last outing, the excellent start against the Cubbies). Still, the rotation keeps coming around and if Snell can give us a good start tonight that will make a full turn of the rotation (and 6 of 7 total) with good starting pitching. Snell has certainly been shaky early on this year, but his best career start came against the 'Stros (albeit not in Houston). He's up against Taylor Buchholz in his second career starts. Snell is due for a good start and the bats are due to wake up a bit, but then again good things never seem to happen to us in that stupid little park in Houston (unless they involve close games, Brad Lidge, and Jack Wilson... go figure), so maybe getting our hopes up tonight isn't a good idea.