Pirates 11 Cubs 6

Anytime you win a game that Juan Pierre leads off with a home run, you should be thankful. Juan Pierre leadoff home runs might be like the harbinger of doom to an opposing baseball team, but there's not enough of a sample size on Juan Pierre home runs to be sure. Still, the Pirates responded to Pierre's homer with 9 runs and Snell answered by shutting out the Cubbies in the rest of the first and then the next four innings, for good measure. This is where the problems started. Just like his last start, Snell ran out of gas in the 6th inning and nearly gave the whole thing back. The Pirates are going to have to be extremely careful with young Ian from here on out, he seems to be hitting the wall earlier and earlier in his starts and the Bucs may want to think about capping his pitch count a little lower than they have been. Just about everyone chipped in on offense during the 19 hit explosion last night. Duffy, Sanchez, and Paulino had three hits apiece with Bautista, Doumit, and Castillo each adding two and Bay blooping a homer over the right field wall to get the scoring started. Still, the hits seemed to be mostly singles again with only 3 of the 19 hits going for extra bases. I'm not sure but it seems to me that we're hitting a ton of singles lately and not much else, though 19 of anything is usually good enough for a win, as was the case last night.