Atlanta

Zach Duke and John Smoltz will face off tonight with Duke taking the place of the "glitch-elbowed" Tom Gorzellany. As we speak the scribes (or more accurately, the people who replace "Kris Benson" and "Jason Schmidt" in the form columns with "Ian Snell" and "Tom Gorzellany" and "10 losing years" with "14") at Pirates.com are probably churning out tons of tripe comparing the young Pirate staff to that of the Braves circa 1990 (I wouldn't know, I can't even bring myself to look). That is, of course, stupid because John Smoltz has had one of the most unique careers in the history of the game. That's all semantics and I know we've discussed it once already since we faced Smoltz once this year. Smoltzie has owned us in the last few years, he's won both of his starts against us since returning to the rotation last year and he also converted all six of his save opportunities against us during his span as a closer. Not that I expected anything else. The Braves are 7 games under .500 and still only 5 and 1/2 games back in the Wild Card race. Since there's like 8 teams in front of them it's unlikely they'll get the extra playoff berth this year, but it would be nice to finish them off this week, just for good measure.