White Sox 4 Pirates 2

This team is absolutely fried. Tonight the White Sox fell all over themselves, failing to drive runners in in key situations, making base running errors left and right, and we still couldn't even make it feel like a game, final score notwithstanding. Snell managed to dance through raindrops long enough to keep us in the game even though he didn't seem to have his best stuff (difficult to tell, in the first inning the scoreboard showed his velocity at like 103, then they shut the radar gun off for the rest of the game, presumably because there was a problem). After Snell departed, Jim Tracy went back to Salomon Torres, even though we just cut the White Flag and brought up Jonah Bayliss to ensure that we wouldn't need to keep overusing Torres (side note: how bout that roster shakeup, cut the mop-up guy, bring up Bayliss, and demote Perez to the pen, leaving a pen with Torres, Bayliss, Hernandez, and FOUR semi-effective lefties, and they wonder why we lose... I'd guess Marte will have to be traded by the time Gorzelanny gets the call-up on Saturday because keeping four lefties in the pen, especially when three of them have been no good and one (Gonzo) has been extremely lucky this year, is insanity). Still, Sal pitched well for 1 and 2/3rds tonight before Tracy went and pulled one of my favorite moves in the book in the 8th, bringing in John Grabow to pitch to lefty Jim Thome. I'd presume it was because there were runners on and somehow people think that Grabow has been good with runners on instead of lucky, plus the fact that Grabow and Thome are both lefties. NEWSFLASH: In Grabow's career, lefties have hit .292/.346/.462 against him while righties have hit .280/.361/.406. That, by definition, does NOT make him a LOOGY because he's actually WORSE against lefties. To no one's surprise, Thome singled in the insurance run and slammed the door. Then again, Tracy's solution to fix a struggling lineup is to move his recently anemic at the plate shortstop with an OBP of .311 to the leadoff slot, slide the also badly slumping Jose Bautista (OBP:.329) to second, and keep Freddy Sanchez, he of the .353 average and .390 OBP batting fifth, BEHIND Jason Bay. If that seems like a good idea to him, I don't imagine what would seem like a bad one.

There were two highlights from the ballpark tonight. Craig Wilson got a 9-3 outfield assist on a runner at third base. It looked bizarre, but it was actually a very nice play by Sean Casey. Mackowiak singled into right with runners on first and second. Craig got his throw in to Casey, who saw Pieazlsdjtsar;lgssky stranded way of second base and Thome not moving from third. Instead of throwing to get Jackass out at second and allowing Thome to score, Casey ran the ball towards AJ between second and third, then shifted directions when Thome drifted off third and beat him with the tag before Thome could get back to the bag. Awful play by the White Sox, but good play by Casey, as ugly as it looked. He got the lead runner with the least amount of throws possible. That least amount of throws thing is key, Jack Wilson and Jose Castillo are both playing terrible defense at the moment. Besides one play by Jack on a slow bounding ball in the hole, neither can get to anything that isn't hit right at them, and both have trouble fielding the balls that are actually hit right at them. They're supposed to be the best combo in the NL up the middle, but they look awful. The second highlight was seeing not one, but TWO Irate Fans shirts, albeit briefly, on the Jumbotron. One was of myself, as the camera zoomed in on the giant group of morons behind me dressed in Pirate garb(there was a girl up there who honest to God though Jason Kendall was our catcher, they also gave 15 varying accounts of what happened in the Rob Mackowiak double-header without getting one right, they even decided on a group consensus that it was Mackowiak's birthday instead of the day his son was born), I tried to position myself so that the shirt was clearly visible, but the camera cut away quickly. Also, in a group shot of left field there was a shirt that was clearly visible for a couple of seconds. That's right, PNC cameramen can't avoid the Irate Fans in a middling crowd of 24,000, THE IRATE FANS ARE COMING!!!