Week 2 in Review

The Buccos played 7 games this week for the second week in a row, which leaves them with more games than any team in the league. They pulled out a 3-4 week, which shouldn't be that disappointing in the light of their 1-6 first week, but in all honesty things weren't that much more encouraging this week. Two of the wins came over the Dodgers and they required a total of 8 homers (5 by people with the surname Wilson, if you still insist upon calling Thor by his mortal name). In starts other than Duke's gem on Saturday night against the Cubbies, our starters put up an ERA of 10.92, a WHIP of 2.24, and a K/BB of 0.86. Throw in Duke's one solid start and you still get 9.08/1.99/1.13. It's only a week, but that is a terrifying week, especially given that the first week was only vaguely better. I don't think I could summarize any better what went wrong with this week, because that's it in a nutshell. If I'm remembering correctly (and I think I am), the only game that we scored first in was our 2-1 win on Saturday. We hit a ton of homers fueled by the 8 we hit on Tuesday and Wednesday, but they've served mostly to dig us out of two holes and make the final scores of most of our losses look respectable. We also lost a guy who is arguably our third best offensive player and All Around Nice Guy(tm) to a broken back. Early reports say he's gone 6-8 weeks, but I think that might be optimistic.

If we're looking for positives on Week 2, they come in the fact that we won three games, our second best offensive player gained a starting spot (and probably played well enough to add another Player of the Week trophy to his mantle, though it may go to Pujols after today's performance), and our bullpen shored itself up pretty nicely this week in a Herculean effort (our starters averaged less than 5 and 1/3 per start this week). Oh, and we found out that Craig Wilson changed his at-bat music back to U2's "Elevation", which is waaay cooler than that stupid Killers song he had last year.

Next week the Cardinals come to Pujols N' the Cardinals' Park (because seriously, they own us here), then we head out to whatever the hell they call that bandbox in Houston now. I'd say a good week for us would be to somehow salvage a split down the middle and roll into the 23rd at 7-13, but I'll be ecstatic if we can avoid being 4-16 with the way things are going right now (though I'm fairly confident we'll get another good start out of Duke).