Astros 7 Pirates 4

I'll be honest, I didn't pay much attention to tonight's game. Duke got pounded pretty good (10 hits in 6 and 1/3rd) though he kept the walks down and the defense didn't really help him much with Joe Randa making an error that lead to two runs and Ronnie Paulino allowing two important "wild pitches" (both announcers seemed very skeptical of the actual wildness of these pitches) to skip by him. We did the flurry of singles thing again, but apparently that magic only works once a night and it wasn't enough. As previously mentioned, Willy Taveras continues to give Chris Duffy hope that someone that is mostly bad at baseball but very fast and very "center fielder"ish can bat leadoff for a decent team and rack up a very long hitting streak, thus rendering very long hitting streaks irrelevant. Seriously, if somehow Willy Taveras gets to 56 games, I think baseball will cease to exist as we know it.

Besides that, I was actually more interested in another game tonight, Oliver Perez's debut in Mets'... I dunno, how 'bout in Mets' "ugly." They can have their own uniquely named color scheme. Predictably, Perez pitched very much like he did with us this year, in a maddeningly frustrating manner. His first four innings against the Phils went like this:

1st- ground out, walk, walk, ground out, K (looking)
2nd- K (looking... by Jose K!), ground out, K (looking... by Abe Nunez!)
3rd- K (swinging), K (swinging), ground out
4th- ground out, pop out, walk, K (looking... Jose K again!)

Very good. No hits, three walks and six K's, so at least the K's balance the walks. The fifth then went like this:

Walk, fielder's choice, walk (the pitcher), fielder's choice, single (first hit of the night) HBP, Grand Slam, K (looking)

Only Oliver Perez could pitch five innings and give up 5 runs on two hits (of course the 7 Ks, 5 walks, and a hit batsmen were characteristic as well). No word on velocity, though, which is probably the key to it all. In other news, Ryan Howard is a beast (he was the author of the grand slam) and Greg Brown and Steve Blass were fondly remembering the days when Brad Eldred was a better prospect (the guy did have 50 RBIs in a month once) than Howard and hinting that they thought maybe Eldred could reach that status again, giving stupid and uninformed Pirate fans hope that one day Brad Eldred might have 46 homers and 121 RBIs on August 26th.