D'Backs 5 Pirates 4

What everyone says in the comments on the post below is true, when you're 16 games below .500 there isn't much that should bother you, there isn't much that you shouldn't see coming, you should always expect the worst from your baseball team. And yet, somehow the Pirates find a way to make each loss worse than the last. To further the Office Space analogy established in Dejan's last few Q&A's (which have been moved to Friday's to accomidate his new weekly Monday chat:

Peter Gibbons: So I was sitting in my cubicle today, and I realized, ever since I started working, every single day of my life has been worse than the day before it. So that means that every single day that you see me, that's on the worst day of my life.

That's kind of like the Pirates season. When a team has 44 losses in mid-June, you think you've seen everything. Then, it gets worse. After coming back from a 4-0 deficit to tie the game against a team that's lost 9 of 10, they managed to load the bases with no outs in the bottom of the 9th before striking out three consectutive times. In this scenario, the infield and outfield are in, so anything besides a pop-up, a grounder hit right at someone, or a strike out wins the game. And all we can muster from Burnitz, Sanchez, and Castillo is three whiffs. Then, to add insult to injury, Torres avoids damage after a shaky 10th and Ronnie Paulino leads off with a double. Hernandez bunts him over, then Jose Bautista and Jack Wilson fail to score the run from third. So we're now looking at five guys who had a chance to bring home the winning run from third base, three of whom had their opportunity with less than two outs. That's a failure of epic proportions right there. It's disgusting, despicable, and disheartening (there are your "Killer D's" for 2006 right there McClatchy, shove those stupid "Doumit, Duffy, Duke" bobbleheads right up your ass you stupid clown). I would question Jim Tracy's decision to leave Torres out for the 11th, given that Torres has been doing his best Brian Blowringer/Rick White impression recently and he gave up 2 hits in the 10th, but it can't be Tracy's fault. He doesn't make mistakes. Besides, it's not like we were going to score anyways, because if we didn't do it in the 9th or 10th it was never going to happen.