Pirates 3 Cardinals 2

In the past two games, Albert Pujols is 5-for-7 with 3 doubles and a homer. The rest of the Cardinals are 8-for-55 (.145). That's apparently the recipe for two wins in a row against the Cards at PNC. Snell pitched very well in his 7 innings, allowing only 5 hits and 3 walks to go with 6 Ks and Pujols' 2 run dinger and picked up his 10th win while Freddy added 3 more hits to pad his average to .344 and contribute in some way to all three Pirate runs (singled in Duffy in the first, scored on a Burnitz single in the fifth, and singled Duffy to third in the sixth to set up Bay's go-ahead sac fly) as the Pirates worked around the aforementioned Pujols bomb. Chris Duffy also contributed 3 hits, 2 runs, a stolen base, and an outfield assist which is pretty much all you can ask for from a center fielder/leadoff hitter, though perhaps we would do well to ask for it a little bit more often than we've seen it thus far from the Duff man.

Perhaps most impressive tonight were the lefties out of the pen. First off, we had John Grabow's impressive 8th which featured only 13 pitches, three batters, and 2 strikeouts. Somewhere along the line Grabow has defied all of my expectations for him and turned himself into an effective reliever, allowing only 1 run in 15 and 2/3rds innings of work since his miserable outing against the Tigers on July 2nd. Gonzo came in to close down the 9th for his 20th save, invoking memories of his first two saves this year, which he nailed down on a total of 9 pitches. He only needed 6 tonight to set the Cards down (my dad and I were trying to count but Lanny has a maddening habit of skipping pitches early in the count that he deems unimportant; he prattles on about something useless and suddenly it's a 1-1 count without him mentioning a thing about the at-bat). Perhaps he can build on this and shy away from the legacy of Mike Williams and Jose Mesa. And of course this win is important because it clinched the series win for the Pirates at home against the Cards, something that hasn't happened since (and I don't have the stats in front of me so I'm guessing here) the dawn of man (or probably more accurately, the dawn of PNC Park... did you know Pujols has 19 homers in PNC? That's just crazy).