Where have you gone, Andy Van Slyke?

It's the end of 2006, which is in danger of ending just like it started, on a prolong losing streak by a lifeless baseball team. It would be a fearful kind of symmetry, a long losing streak to start the year, a long losing streak in the middle, and a long losing streak at the end. The Reds no long have anything to play for as Scott Spezio and his bright red ball tickler tripled home three runs, putting the Cards on top of the Brewers 3-2 and the Reds officially out of the NL Central race, while leaving the Astros playoff hopes on some serious life support. Bronson Arroyo and Marty McLeary will take the mound tonight in what is almost a meaningless game. Almost meaningless as both teams are now eliminated and the only thing on the line at the moment is last in the NL Central (we've slipped back into a tie with the Cubs) and the NL batting title, which Freddy can probably wrap up with a couple hits tonight (it may be wrapped up already, though I'm a bit too lazy to do the m...

Today's PG Notebook : "I think payroll is overblown," [McClatchy] said. "If you do the job you're supposed to do with your minor-league system and get the players in place, payroll will become less of an issue... Somebody could look at the amount of money the Toronto Blue Jays spent this offseason and say, well, that should guarantee a playoff spot. Or, quite frankly, the Boston Red Sox. Then, you look at the flip side, and the Florida Marlins, because they spent $15 million, should have the worst record in baseball. Payroll is not indicative, exactly, of how successful you're going to be." This is one of the truest things McClatchy has said. Teams can win and have won with payrolls similar to the Pirates. Payroll is not the problem. The problem that McClatchy dances around with this quote is that the Pirates' Opening Day payroll this year was somewhere around $47 million. Of that $47 million, Jeromy Burnitz made $6M, Joe Randa made $4M, Sean Casey ...

The Pirate offense is really sputtering down the stretch here. If I'm not mistaken, they've only scored 2 runs since the 6th inning of Wednesday's marathon game, which is not good (it's three full games, in fact). These games are flying along, too. Thursday's game took 2:15, last night's game clocked in at 2:31. I'm not saying that Harang is not a good pitcher (because he is), but 9 K's, no walks, and 89 strikes in 125 pitches is probably at least as much of a function as the season being over for the Pirates and the players seeing the end of the tunnel. With the Cards win yesterday, the Reds more or less will join them in that position, as I think the Reds have to win out and the Cards will have to lose out for the Reds to end tied for the division. The one interesting story is still Freddy's race for the NL batting crown, and the Pirates are milking that for all it's worth with their "WE WILL cheer him on" commercials, their "Go ...

The Bucs close out 2006 with their 5th consecutive series against playoff teams or contenders, as the Reds are still hanging on by the skin of their teeth in the NL Central race. They're 2 and 1/2 back of the Cards and 2 back of the 'Stros. Tonight Harang and Duke take the mound, while everyone hopes that maybe more than 500 people will show up for this one.

I've been meaning to get to writing about this Gene Collier article about the rotation since I saw it sometime around midnight yesterday. His basic premise is that the rotation is too similar with all these pesky lefties around and that's why we tend to lose the last game of most series. Charlie has already tackled the main premise of the article and proven that it's just not true. His research shows that there's not really any statistical basis for Collier's argument. What I was going to write about was something that Charlie vaguely touched on at the beginning of his post, that there's not really any reason to consider Gorzelanny, Duke, and Maholm to be similar. The easiest thing to look at is their K/9 numbers. In the minors, Gorzelanny's was 8.98, Maholm's was 7.22, and Duke's was 7.25. It's not really fair to compare their pro numbers yet as they're all still getting adjusted and their strikeout numbers will all be down in their first ...

They finally got today's game in, but probably only because they had to. It really would've been impolite for us to win. I mean, we made them hang around for longer then the length of a typical game (last night excluded), the least we could do is help them with their late playoff aspiriations. The players played like they didn't want to be at the park today. There were only 8 hits today, three by the 'Stros, and the whole thing only took 2:15 once it got started. It was nice to see Gorzellany make a solid start (his first since his return from the DL), but I wouldn't put much stock into what happened today. In a funny note, David Pinto at Baseball Musings said this about the game : There's no one in the ballpark. It's so quiet you can hear the ball hitting the first baseman's mitt on the broadcast. I think Pirate fans are ready for this nightmare of a season to finally be over.

The Pirates and Astros are scheduled to play one last game in 2006, but I don't think the game has started yet due to rain. This could be a blessing in disguise for the Astros, or it could be a nightmare. Certainly there is a danger of them coming out flat today after fighting back from a 5 run deficit and playing until midnight last night, so if this thing gets pushed back to, say, Monday, it might be a good thing for them. However, if this thing gets stretched out until some time tonight ( which it may ) but still gets played, the 'Stros won't get out of Pittsburgh until late tonight and the purpose of a "getaway" game will be defeated. If this one happens, it'll be Gorzellany vs. Oswalt, which is a pretty good matchup to watch.

That was, without a doubt, the longest baseball game I've ever attended in person. It seemed a lot longer than it was because the Pirates didn't score at all after the fifth and the Astros only scored twice after the sixth. I think the Pirates did some good things early, but every inning blended together after a while. We swore that Sanchez should've been leading off the inning since Jack Wilson made the third out, on the logic that Duffy had gotten on and stolen a base. We wore close, we'd just kind of confused the 11th and 12th innings. It's much easier to do than you'd think, especially without a scorecard (which would've been useless by then). Anyways, early on Doumit crushed a no-doubter and the Pirates were hitting the ball all over the park. Chacon looked pretty good through 5 and the Pirates had built a 6-1 lead. Jose Bautista also made a nice little diving catch of a diving quail Berkman hit to him at third. The Astros fans one section over were loo...

I'm heading down to PNC for what will likely be the last time in 2006. Unfortunately due to classes and extra lab work I can't meet up with the Irate Fans, though I'll put my shirt on and try to say hi. Tonight would be the one chance the Bucs have to win in this series (without Oswalt or Pettite pitching), but the Astros have straight up owned Chacon this year. Add that to the fact that the Astros still more or less need to keep winning to stay in this thing and, well, things don't bode well for us tonight.

This week's poll question: Which Pirate has surprised you the most this year? Is it Freddy Sanchez and his run at the NL Batting Title? Is it Ronnie Paulino and his steady play all year? Is it Ian Snell, who most certainly would tell us once again that "Snell doesn't do polls,"? Is it Jose Bautista and his 16 homers and an OPS of nearly .800? Is it Matt Capps and his, I dunno, he was in A ball last year and didn't suck too bad this year? Or is it someone else entirely? As usual, feel free to discuss in the comments. Last week's results: Will the Pirates break out of the Grand Canyon in 2007? Negatory- 64% Pository- 36% I've also been told that sometimes after clicking on the "Vote" pop-ups are happening. I can't really control this, it's all Pollhost trying to make some money, just ignore 'em. I don't really know of any free poll servers that wouldn't use pop-ups though, so it's the best I can do right now. And it seems li...

The Astros just needed this one more than the Bucs do. The Pirates can smell the end (two errors, two unearned runs tonight) and the Astros can smell a playoff spot. This is not a good combination for the Pirates this week. Snell kind of got roughed up in his five innings tonight, though three walks didn't help his cause much. There was a nice little moment in the second inning when Jason Bay and Jose Bautista launched home runs and I thought to myself, "Holy shit! Jose Bautista has 16 home runs this year? We should probably find him a position for next year." Beyond that, tonight didn't really offer much else (except for four hits for Freddy Sanchez, which was nice).

Houston comes to town tonight having made up something ridiculous like 5 and 1/2 games on St. Louis this week and finding themselves only 2 and 1/2 back with 6 to go (St. Louis has the extra game in hand). That makes this a tough series. I'd love to see the Pirates play well to the end of the year, but I'd also kind of love to see LaRussa and co. choke just about as hard as anyone in history. The Bucs need one win to wrap up both a winning record after the break and a winning record at home, so I'd like to see them get that for mostly arbitrary purposes. Tonight Ian Snell and Andy Pettite take the mound. Snell needs this win for 15, the Astros need this win for the playoffs. Should be interesting.

The Stats Geek writes today about the Buccos need for power and how addressing that need may make them competitive next year. Charlie responds to the post over at his blog , if I've got some time this afternoon after lab I may look into a couple of the things that Charlie suggests (mostly the run differentials of the Pirates over the time spans that the Stats Geek is looking at). It's also important to remember that just because a division is awful one year doesn't mean that it will be the next. The NL West barely got a team over .500 last year, this year the division may get the Wild Card and the Rockies and Giants were competitive in the race until recently. The State College Spikes will replace the Williamsport Crosscutters as the Bucs' NY-Penn League affiliate next summer . This was probably inevitable because State College is owned by the same group that owns the Curve and they only had a one year contract with the Cardinals, likely knowing that the Bucs co...

With 2006 having been over since some time in mid-April, people have understandably been focusing on 2007 for quite some time now. As the Pirates have put up a good record since the All-Star break, people have understandably gotten more and more optimistic about 2007. There's been lots of discussion about the young pitching staff and how good they might be, about the Pirates poor run differential over that time period and what that may mean, and about the abysmal performance. There's a time and a place to discuss that, but it's not now or here. Instead, I want to talk about the one thing that people have been ignoring. It's the biggest obstacle that the Pirates have to winning baseball in 2007. I'm talking about the people that run the team. Kevin McClatchy has been the public face of the team since 1996, and he always gets lots of blame for everything that goes wrong. Thusly, people are quite excited about what would appear to be the decent prospect of him not retu...

Two things to share on this morning of a Steelers' hangover off-day. First up, DL revealed to DK yesterday that the entire coaching staff is coming back for 2007 . I actually don't have as much of a problem with this as I probably would've in June. I'll get more in depth on that once the season ends, especially Tracy and Colborn, but how can you not love a first base coach named T-Bone? How can you argue with two guys named Cox and Kuntz? Does anyone really know what a bullpen coach does? Of course, Jeff Manto may or may not be bat-shit crazy and I would like to see a different hitting coach, but beggars can't be choosers. Also (via Bucs Dugout ), Wilbur Miller has updated his Pirate Player Profiles with all of the recent draft picks and reorganized most of the site. If you're anything like me, you could probably spend the entire afternoon clicking around, reading about the abject failure of this team to build any semblance of a minor league system. Since it...

You'd think scoring one run in the first inning, then not scoring again for 8 innings, and losing 2-1 would be rare. You'd probably be right, but that wouldn't help explain the Pirates' performances the last two days in San Diego. Both games opened up with Chris Duffy getting on base and scoring in the first inning, then the Pirates not scoring at all while the Padres chalked up 2 runs somewhere between the 4th and 7th innings to take the lead and set the stage for a historic Trevor Hoffman save. Hoffman set the record tonight with save #479. Perhaps in tribute I will listen to "Hell's Bells" and drink beer while trying not to think about any type of football, except maybe Duquesne footbal, which is rarely thought about by anyone. Also, I'm sorry for making fun of Marty McLeary, he was very acceptable today. Juan Perez, however, continued to let everyone know why he was on the waiver wire by giving up a home run, beaning someone, and getting taken out ...

The Bucs and Padres close out their season series with the Pirates' last road game of 2006 (which can only be a good thing). The Padres have a chance to stretch their NL West lead and they'll send Clay Hensley to the mound. Hensley will be the second Clay to pitch for the Padres this weekend, though he's got the more normal spelling (opposed to Cla Meredith). The Pirates seem to be amenable to the Padres stretching that lead, as they'll send Marty McLeary to the mound. Bay is back in the lineup after missing last night with a stomach thing and Freddy will get the day off. Trevor Hoffman will go for the all-time save record if the Padres can manage to not be ahead by more than three in the ninth inning (which I wouldn't count on). Most of Pittsburgh is probably way too deep into a drunken Steelers depression to care about this one.

We got two hits early last night to jump out to a 1-0, but we only got four hits after that and didn't score any more runs, meaning that we still lost to Peavy and the Padres. Peavy was just as good as Chris Young was two nights ago, striking out 11 against 1 walk and only allowing 6 hits and 1 run over his 8 innings. Duke's surface line seems good, 6 and 1/3 with 2 runs on 1 hit, but his 5 walks last night were kind of alarming. As I've noted on several occasions , Duke does his best work when he keeps his walks to a minimum. Doing a Chacon / Youman impression is not a good outing for Duke. We also allowed Trevor Hoffman to come in for his record tying 477 th save. This seems appropriate, as I mentioned yesterday we tortured Lee Smith's soul during the early '90s. It seems like every time Smith came in for a save, Bonds was waiting for him to ruin his night. This is probably an apocryphal memory for me, Retrosheet tells me Bonds was 4-for-11 against Smith wit...

Interesting pitching matchup tonight with Duke and Peavy on the mound. Duke has been very good since the All-Star Break and nothing short of fantastic in his last three starts (23 innings, 2 earned runs, 2 wins) and Peavy has also been excellent since August 1st or so, with the only exception being one start in Colorado and his start in the Dodger's memorable homer barrage on Monday night. As has been the storyline in the last couple weeks, this game is much more important to the team the Pirates are playing than it is to the Pirates themselves. This doesn't seem to stop the Bucs from ruining clinching parties, division leads, or no-hitters. I'd sure love to see another great start from Duke tonight, and I'd also like to see some hits from the black and gold before the ninth inning, if we can at all make something like that happen. Again, I'm at home dogsitting, so I'll be able to catch most of this one. Correction: What I meant to say was that I'm at home d...

Charlie, author of the Bucs Dugout, is living in San Diego, thus he was able to attend his first Pirates' game of the year last night. As you've probably realized, it was quite a night to be there . Dejan's recap in the PG is full of fun facts about just how historical last night could've actually been , had Joe Randa not ruined things for Young. There's also the typical wire recap , Deadspin's got one line on it (but it's a good line that I fully agree with), and of course there's always Padres blogs . Last night after the game ended I said that the game had a chance to be a microcosm of the last 14 years and instead just turned out to be another boring loss. While that's true on some levels, I think it's also actually quite representative of the Pirates' plight. We were bad, but not quite bad enough to get noticed. Kind of like, say, having 14 consecutive losing seasons but only one of them being a 100 loss season. Before I forget, Charli...

Stupid Joe Randa. The Pirates were about to be avalanched in irony with the best possible reminder of the management's ineptitude, getting no-hit by a man they traded for absolutely nothing. It would've been a reminder to everyone why it's foolish to get excited about this team. A team that is run by a guy that once traded Chris Young for Matt Herges (while building a team around pitching), then cut Herges before he threw one pitch, has some serious obstacles to overcome before winning baseball can even be a possibility. Joe Randa hitting into a double play to end it would've been an amazing cap on everything. Now, this becomes a game that no one will remember, just another faceless late night loss on the West Coast in a season with so many losses. We couldn't even muster enough of a comeback to get Hoffman into the game for his record tying save, a fitting way for Lee Smith to lose his spot as the Save King, at the hand of the team that was the bane of his career. ...

The Bucs play the Padres at Petco tonight as they try to continue their "Let's Go Phillies" tour of both east and west. Chris Young and Tom Gorzellany face off in this one, with Gorzo looking to build on his last start, which saw him pitch 4 decent innings against the Mets. I don't know exactly what his pitch count will be tonight, but I don't expect him to go much past the fifth. Most Pirate fans know about Young by now as the guy we traded away for one spring of Matt Herges, who we then cut. Young would look awfully nice in this rotation right now, especially since as Charlie points out , our pitching-rich franchise is currently featuring a rotation with Shawn Chacon, Shane Youman, and Marty McLeary all involved. I'm at home dogsitting, so I should be able to catch most of this one, unless it's really boring or something.

BBTF has a fantastic breakdown of Oliver Perez and his mechanics (thanks to reader Trey Beamon for the tip). Unfortunately, things are not stacking up well for the team that traded Ollie away (that would be us). As usual, there's some good stuff in Dejan's Q&A today. On the subject of trading Mike Gonzalez or Salomon Torres he says it would seem unlikely for either to go because they probably would not bring the " Lefty McThump " return that the Pirates are looking for this offseason, though he makes it clear that no one has been designated as "untouchable" which is very comforting, because no one on this team should be. He also closes the Q&A with this line: You are all insane for hanging with this team long enough to still be paying attention. In our defense, being insane is the only way we ended up Pirate fans in the first place. Paul Maholm will also miss his Sunday start , which will be taken by Marty McLeary. Set your TiVos accordingly. Jeffr...

I didn't see this one, but I can tell you that when Shane Youman is the offensive star of the game, things probably won't go well. In all seriousness, I figured that we would be lucky win win 2 games at all during this roadtrip, so this loss seemed more or less inevitable. I don't think anyone expected the Pirates to sweep the two best blue teams in the National League back to back, especially when Shane Youman and Shawn Chacon were making back to back starts. The best news of the night is that Freddy Sanchez went 2-for-4 raising his average to .347 and giving him a 9 point lead on Miguel Cabrera, who was again on the bench last night.

There's only one explanation for what's been happening: the Pittsburgh Pirates are huuuuge Philadelphia Phillie fans. Normally, I'd be hesitant about helping out our cross state rivals (and I'd never say this about the Eagles or Flyers), but you know what, screw it. I want to see as much Ryan Howard as possible. Let's go Bucs. Tonight Shane Youman (perhaps PB Youman since he's a mirror image of BP Chacon, the only real question is does he tilt his hat the other direction? This needs investigated...) takes the hill against Chad Billingsley. Billingsley did not pitch well in his last start and has a huge WHIP of 1.59 in his 15 starts this year. The Dodgers need this one bad, but the Pirates are playing like they need it too.

I had a post 90% finished about some stuff that I think is really important to keep in mind for next year, then Firefox crashed and for some reason Blogger hadn't auto-saved my draft like it usually does (and is supposed to). Because I think it's an important post, I'm going to have to painstakingly recreate it, at which point I probably won't post it until Monday, as readership drops on Fridays and weekends. None of this is specifically your problem, but it's just a heads up because I do realize that the amount of opinion posts and non-link, recap, or gamethread based posts has dropped of late. It's mostly because the end of the season is a boring time from the standpoint of writing about a next-to-last place team. It's too early to start into the season in review and offseason outlook stuff, but it's also too late in the season to get terribly excited about anything the Pirates end up doing. All I'm getting at here is that the I'm going to star...

It would be a shame to waste 7 hits from Freddy Sanchez and Jack Wilson, a laser homer from Jose Bautista, and another non-awful start from Shawn Chacon, but the Pirates nearly did that tonight, nearly giving everyone brave (read: stupid) enough to stay up for this one a heart attack in the process. Things started out innoncently enough with Freddy killing the ball all over the park and Bautista ripping a homer straight over center on such a straight beam that it could likely cut diamonds if they were put in the ball's trajectory to give the Bucs a 3-0 after the top of the fifth. A Bautista error in the bottom lead to 2 more LA runs and put them right back in the game, though. After the Bucs picked up three in the seventh, aided by a Dodger error, and hits by Duffy, Wilson, and Sanchez as well as an RBI double by Weapon X, the Dodgers came right back with two and they almost had more as Chacon ran out of gas and John Grabow couldn't get the one guy out he needed to. Matt Capps ...

As John Franco (we can only hope it's that John Franco) put it in a recent comment thread : The Pirates just don't seem to want anyone to make the playoffs. A win tonight clinches the LA series, something I never thought would happen in a million years. Our work is certainly cut out for us tonight, however, as BP Chacon will face off against Greg Maddux. Maddux has been phenominal since he arrived in LA (4-2, 3.07 ERA) while Chacon has been mediocre at best since arriving in Pittsburgh at the same time. Chacon is in fact coming off of his two longest starts of the year in black and gold and it seems that Jim Colborn is doing some decent work getting him turned around . The Bucs will also be facing a different Dodger team than last night. The team they played yesterday was still in shock from their amazing win the night before, the team they're playing tonight is embarassed that they lost their spot in first place by losing to the Pirates. Still, the young Buccos certainly ...

It's Wednesday, which means it's time for a new poll. Inspired by all of the recent talk, the question is easy, .500 or no? Sure, it's early too say anything for sure, but we're not talking science here, it's a blog for chrissake. As usual, feel free to discuss your opinion in the comments. Don't feel like you have to agree with me on this one, I'm not here to browbeat people into agreeing with me. Last week's results where overwhelming: Given the right offer, would you trade one of the Pirates four young starters (Duke, Snell, Maholm, Gorzellany)? Yes 91% (116 votes) No 9% (12 votes)

I missed this yesterday, but there was an interesting Stats Geek chat to go along with his column. The talk continued on with the young pitchers and I found this passage the Geek dug up to be interesting: Crunching some numbers from Baseball Prospectus, using their Value Over Replacement Player system, Duke is rated the 29th best starter among the 64 with at least 100 innings in the NL, and all but the Washington Nationals have at least one better pitcher. But Snell and Maholm are ranked 34th and 35th and Gorzelanny, who doesn't have the innings, has been better than all three so far. So it's deceptively good staff by being more or less average across the board. A lot of teams have two pitchers better, but the Pirates are deeper at three and four. If they could add a fifth pitcher, they might do something in this weak division next year. That goes along with an earlier comment from the chat: Many in the blogosphere think the Pirates are still pretty far from even a .500 team....

Ian Snell gave up a home run to Rafael Furcal on the first pitch tonight and I figured we were in for a long night. I was rather mistaken, as instead the Pirates offense proceeded to get to Kuo in the fifth, which lead to Grady Little bringing in Elmer Dessens with the bases loaded to face Ronnie Paulino and Jose Bautista. The Paulino part when all right, but the Bautista part didn't, and Jose lifted a homer just barely out of the reach of Marlon Anderson in left field, who went head first over the fence and nearly caught a ball that landed at least 2 and maybe three rows deep. From there the Dodgers got sloppy and gave the Bucs three unearned runs in the 8th for a 10-3 lead, which Matt Capps nearly gave back in the bottom of the inning. Beyond the Marte and Capps debacle (5 runs in 2 innings) it was a great night for the Bucs. Snell recovered from the first pitch homer to only give up four more hits and no more runs over six innings to pick up win #14 on the season. Freddy got two...

The Bucs and Dodgers face off in LA tonight, with Ian Snell and Hong-Chih Kuo taking the mound. The Dodgers are in the thick of the NL West/Wild Card race being 1/2 game up on the Padres in the West (with the Pads having 1.5 on the Phillies in the Wild Card race). They got that lead in most improbable fashion, as I'm sure you know by know. Down by four in the bottom of the 9th last night, the Dodgers hit four consecutive solo homers to tie the game up , then got a walkoff from Nomar Garciaparra to win in the bottom of the 10th. That's just plain crazy.

Syd Thrift, the architect of the only three good Pirate teams I've ever seen in my life as well as the man that executed the trade that brought the namesake of this blog to Pittsburgh, has died at the age of 77 . He never matched the success he had here in Pittsburgh anywhere else, but Larry Doherty , Ted Simmons, Cam Bonifay , and Dave Littlefield have all miserably failed to live up to the job that Syd did in the 80s.

Today the Stats Geek and the Bucs Dugout both tackle the task of trying to figure out just what our 33-27 record since the All-Star Break means. I talked briefly about it at the end of August , and the conclusions are still the same. The Pirates offense has been downright awful since the break and they've still been outscored by 30 runs in games since then. The pitching has been better and the four young guys may get better next year, but the offense isn't good enough for that to mean anything. In fact, without any upgrades it will likely get worse. The 2007 Freddy is much more likely to be around his second half .766 OPS next year than the .850 number he has on the season. There's very little in Ronnie Paulino's minor league record to suggest that he'll bat .320 again (and it's always dangerous to hedge your bets on anyone who has a large part of their OBP tied up in batting average), guys like Castillo and Doumit provide more questions than answers and if th...

It's really a rhetorical question. The Brewers are 4.5 up on us with 12 to go (13 for them). Assuming they lose the game in hand they have on us, at the very least we'd have to go 8-4 against their 4-9 to make up the difference. With six games out west against the Padres and Dodgers, who MUST win these games to stay in the pennant race, us winning 8 of our last 12 seems kind of unlikely. The Brewers (who have had an strangely similar season the Buccos, they're 10 over at home and 25 under on the road) get St. Louis and San Fran at home for 7 games before going on the road to finish up in Chicago and St. Louis. They've been bad of late, but the only team they play with anything left to play for will be the Giants (St. Louis pretty much has the Central locked up) and they get them at home. I just don't see them losing 9 of those games, not with the Derrick Lee-less Cubs involved. The real question is whether or not our almost catching them in the standings renders th...

More on Pittsburgh Deadspin night from legendary commenter Sarcastro. Also, there are pictures .

Since most of you know that I go to Duquesne and most of you are probably wondering just what happened here this weekend, I'll direct you towards the school newspaper, the Duquesne Duke, which done an amazing job of covering this thing. They cranked out a special edition for today and managed to have two witnesses to the whole thing at the scene. Most of the AP stuff coming out about the shootings are based on their accounts. The main story from today's edition is here , and you can find PDFs of the entire paper from today right at the top of this page , under the September 18th special edition header.

The sweep is complete. Zach Duke was the star today, throwing up 8 zeroes in a row, making the 2 runs the Bucs scored in the first inning more than enough to keep the Mets from clinching for the third day in a row. Perhaps most importantly, Duke made his third really good start in a row, giving all of us Bucco fans flashes back to his fantastic rookie year last year. The win was also our 63rd of the year, meaning that somehow this baseball team that was swept by the Royals in June won't lose 100 games this year. Freddy Sanchez and Chris Duffy provided a good bit of today's offense with Duffy getting two hits and scoring twice and Freddy getting two hits (to regain the lead in the batting race) and knocking Duffy in both times. Today's win also assured the Pirates will finish .500 at home this year. They're now 41-34 at PNC, which is a pretty stunning fact, all things considered.

The Bucs try to break out the brooms at PNC today against the best team in the National League (recordwise). The Mets magic number is still at 1 with some 15 odd games to play and logic dictates that either they will win or the Phillies will lose at some point, but I'd still rather that the Mets take their celebration somewhere else. John Maine and Zach Duke will face off today, with the interesting stories being whether Duke can churn out another good start (he went 8 strong in his last one), whether Duffy can keep his 10 game hitting streak going, and of course Freddy and the batting race (he and Cabrera enter today tied at .340). Carlos Maldonado is catching for the Bucs, giving Ronnie Paulino a much needed day off and causing people to wonder just why we're keeping 'Berto Cota around if he's never going to see the light of day.

Update: Welcome, Deadspin readers. More on the game is here and pictures are here . Ohhhh, Deadspin. Prior to the start of the game, my friend and I were walking down Federal Street trying to find the bar designated as the meeting place. Being a poor college student who can't afford the likes of Hi-Tops, Firewaters, etc. regularly we didn't really know what we were looking for. Then we saw the 222 Bar, shitty as can be with a cracked plastic sign. We knew we were at the right place. Once we get in and figured out who the Deadspinners were, things started slowly, as we were a group of people who only know each other by internet handles. As expected, however, the beer starting flowing, a picture of Will on a popsicle stick was unveiled, and at 7:05 we decided we should probably have one more round before heading over to the ballpark (though we all acknowledged that by doing so, we were risking seeing the Tom Gorzellany injury that seemed inevitable but never came). As we made ou...

Tonight we get another return, though Tom Gorzellany's is much less anticipated than Pedro Martinez's was last night. Actually, Gorzo's return tonight kind of scares me. Francisco Liriano just had his season ended after trying to come back from some elbow discomfort and Jonathon Papelbon has been shut down for the year rather than risking further injury upon return. Still, Gorzellany's MRI came back negative, so I suppose I shouldn't be too scared. He's also on a very tight leash tonight of about 60 pitches, to be followed out of the pen by Shane Youman. They'll face El Duque, who very well may be older than both of them combined. His 80 mph fastball has bedaffled the Pirates all year, both with the Mets and D-Backs, so this game may be the Mets best shot at clinching on the field at PNC (well, him or Tom Glavine tomorrow, so we'll say the odds are even). I'll be there as part of the Deadspin Pittsburgh Night , so if you see a bunch of rowdy drunks o...

Ladies and gentlemen, the left-handed, formerly good, incredibly overpaid right fielder for your 2007 Pittsburgh Pirates, Luis Gonzalez .

I didn't see any of last night's game because I was at Penn Brewery's Oktoberfest (certainly a much better way to spend an evening than watching the Pirates). Still, it's nice to see 3 ribbies for Bay, a good start for Maholm, and us beating up Pedro on his rehab start. If we could manage to keep the Mets from celebrating on our field this weekend, it would be nice to see.

The Pirates get to break out the late-season doldrums by getting to face Pedro Martinez in his first start in about a month tonight. Paul Maholm will take the mound for the Pirates to try and not only beat Pedro, but keep the Mets from celebrating winning the NL East title on the field at PNC (their magic number is 1). Apparently Pedro hasn't made any rehab starts, so the Mets are probably considering this to be his rehab start (though I know there's not really any teams for him to rehab with at this point) which is kind of insulting, I guess. It's always fun to watch Pedro pitch, though I would assume most people have something better to do on Friday night.

Dejan has a great recap of the minor league season in today's Post Gazette. I don't follow the minors or chronicle them on this site maybe as much as I should, so this is really a rather informative article for people like me. Everyone knows about Walker and McCutchen, who may both open next year at Altoona (McCutchen is still kind of a question mark I guess because of his age, but he's certainly performed there this year). It's also very obvious that the organization thinks very highly of Brad Lincoln, despite his season ending injury, as Brian Graham places him on a level with Walker and McCutchen. Next year is the year we'll start to find more out about Lincoln, but it seems to me that they think he's going to climb pretty quickly. There's also a ton of stuff about middle infielders (of course) as Brent Lillibridge and Brian Bixler have kind of made themselves into prospects this year (they really weren't when the year started) and of course lots of ...

Time for a big ol' collection of things I find interesting: Tom Gorzellany will start on Saturday . I don't know how the Francisco Liriano situation changes this, and I know that tests showed no ligament damage to Gorzy's arm, but this makes me very nervous. Ian Snell may have a message for me : His strong performance against the Brewers seemingly erased any doubt as to whether he had enough left in the tank to pitch effectively the rest of the way. "People think you don't read what they (write), but you do," said Snell. "They can just shut their mouths. I can still throw 95 or 96." Take shit from bloggers? Snell doesn't do that. Ian seems to pitch better when he's angry, perhaps I should make it a point to insult him before every start (PS- Ian, on the slim chance that you are reading, please don't kill me, I just didn't want to see you get hurt for next year). From Dejan's recap of yesterday's double header : "This wa...

Today was the tale of two pitchers, Ian Snell and Ben Sheets. Snell dominated the first game today (as apk suggests in the comments , he probably took it personally that Duke beat him by one single vote in the last poll ) with 10 strikeouts in 7 innings to pick up his 13th win of the year. The offense was sparked by the top of the order, with Duffy scoring twice (with two hits), Freddy driving in two with three hits, Bay scoring twice, and Ronnie Paulino driving in 3 runs from the 5 slot. With the series win wrapped up, Tracy went to his punchless lineup (aka the one without Jason Bay) to back Shawn Chacon, and a predictable outcome ensued, the Pirates lost. In a pleasant surprise, however, we didn't lose because of Shawn Chacon. Chacon turned in what had to be his finest outing of the season, going seven strong innings and allowing only 5 hits and 2 runs (both solo homers). For the second straight start, he struck out more than he walked (!) and threw an impressive 68 out of 104 p...

Based on this post yesterday, there's a new poll up. As usual, feel free to vote and discuss in the comments. The results of the last poll (which young pitcher do you find most promising) were: Zach Duke 34% (59 votes) Ian Snell 34% (58 vote) Tom Gorzellany 28% Paul Maholm 2% Other 1% I was surprised to see Duke get such a high number of votes, but then again he is the only member of the staff to consistently look like an ace at the highest level. The Snell votes are obvious, he's been our best pitcher this year. I personally voted for Gorzellany, I thought his stuff looked just plain nasty in the three or four starts he made while healthy in Pittsburgh after he settled down.

The Pirates and Brewers will face off twice today, once at 12:35 and once at shortly after the first one ends. The first game features Ian Snell and Pirate-hater Chris Capuano, the second one will be Ben Sheets and Shawn Chacon. So what I'm saying is, if the Pirates are going to win the series, they're going to have to win the first game. Today will be the first day in a new baseball world. Unfortunately for the Brewers and Pirates, it's not one in which they're good, it's simply one in which the Braves are bad for the first time since I was in kindergarten . I don't even want to try and wrap my mind around the fact that the Braves have won every division title during our 14 year slide and yet won less World Series than the Marlins, who didn't even come into existence until after the Braves third division championship. The more I think about it, the more everyone should hate the Marlins.

Two things have my wheels churning about the offseason a little bit, Dejan's online chat yesterday and the Bucs Dugout relaying of Ken Rosenthal's suggestion that the Pirates trade for Nick Johnson . The first thing that struck me about Dejan's chat was one of the same things that Charlie noticed in his post about it yesterday, that the Pirates aren't willing to trade Mike Gonzalez because his ceiling is so high, but they are willing to trade Jose Castillo for that very reason. It is true that I've said in the past that trading Castillo wouldn't be a bad idea, I do think it's something the Pirates should look into, but not even considering trading Gonzalez is typical Pirates. Gonzalez is older, he plays a position that is traditionally more easily filled than Castillo's (especially on this most current incarnation of the Pirates, which is chock full of relievers), and he's having a great year that pretty much will have maximized his value. Not on...

I had a post typed up like 2 hours ago, but the Duquesne internet ate it whole. Let me summarize, Duke- very good. Duffy and Wilson- also good. Freddy falling behind in the batting race- bad.

Finally, the Pirates and Brewers games are worthless again. Dale Davis and Zach Duke face off at PNC tonight. The Brewers are a terrible road team, the Pirates are a fairly good home team. Duke has pitched fairly well lately, but hasn't won a game since his complete game against the Cards way back when I was on vacation. Duke doesn't have particularly good career numbers against the Brewers, but he has been improved since the All-Star Break (his post break ERA is down a full run from his pre break ERA and his WHIP is down from 1.57 to 1.41 since), so hopefully he can pull things together toinght.

The Irate Fans are gathering again, this time on Wednesday, September 27th for the game against the Astros. They have a small amount of tickets to give out, beyond that you're on your own. If you're interested, head on over to the Irate Fans page and check out all the details.

Maybe I should finally get together a recap of a game that finished like 8 hours ago. Shane Youman wasn't really as bad as I expected, and he pitched 5 shutout innings before the Reds got to him in the sixth. He put up a very Chacon-like line of 1 K and 4 BBs in his 5 and 1/3rd innings, but I suppose we can forgive it since it's his debut and all. I mean, I'd rather watch him walk 4 and strikeout 1 than Chacon or Santos, so what the hell, go for it. None of it really mattered because we were absolutely shut down by Bronson Arroyo over 8 innings. He limited us to 4 hits, 7 Ks and only 2 runs over his 8 innings. Mostly it was probably a good thing that this one wasn't on TV as if it was I would've sat around swearing at the TV while watching Arroyo dominate us.

27 year old non-prospect Shane Youman will take the mound for his Major League debut this afternoon at 1:15 against Bronson Arroyo. I've said a couple times that I'd like to see the Reds win the Wild Card (however unlikely that may be), but I hope we stomp the shit out of Bronson Arroyo today. The whole ex-Pirate thing aside, he just really gets on my nerves. Along with Youman, Carlos Maldando will get his first major league start behind the plate today, after singling in his first pinch hit at bat the other day. This one isn't on TV, which could alternately be a bad thing or a great thing for Youman in his debut. As usual, I hope the guy the best but certainly do not have my hopes up.

There is an awful lot being made of the comments made by Ian Snell after his start in the 9-1 shellacking by the Reds on Thursday. Essentially, Snell said that the fact that Jim Colborn came out to the mound to talk to him at all really pissed him off. He seemed especially pissed because the three homers he gave up in that start were "joke" home runs (they probably since it's Great American and they were hit by Ryan Freel and Javier Valentin). Today, Jim Tracy declined to comment on Snell's comments, which I think is a good thing. Should Snell have said what he said? Probably not in public like that. But the truth is, part of what makes Snell a promising pitcher is because of how competitive he can get. Early in the year he got off to a terrible start, then made up some reason to be pissed off at the Phillies and delievered a gem. Last offseason he backed out of both the Arizona Fall League, criticized the Pirates a whole bunch, and became their top starter this yea...

There were lots of good things happening last night. First off, the Pirates won and padded their fifth place lead to 1.5 games. Maholm gave the Buccos a strong start, Doumit homered for the second straight night, Bay homered and knocked in two more runs to give him 101 on the year (though knocking 100 two years in a row as a right handed batter doesn't put him in nearly as elite company as hitting 30 bombs from the right side two years in a row, instead of joining Ralph Kiner as the last Bucco to do it, this time Jay Bay joins Kevin Young), Paulino came up with a key RBI single in the eighth, and the Bucs knocked the Reds back to third in the central. The Bucs are now 3 over since the break, 27 under overall, and 30 under on the road. Damn those road games.

Paul Maholm and Aaron Harang take the mound today for an oddly timed 6:10 game, if there's anyone out there not watching college football. Then again, you couldn't watch this one either because Duquesne and Robert Morris are playing on FSP tonight. Me? I'm going to go back to thinking things like "I've never seen a team come into a big game less prepared or more terribly coached than Penn State today," and "Wait, Derrick Williams used to be fast and able to catch footballs, what happened?"

Since I imagine that most people are more concerned with college football this afternoon, we'll keep this brief. As pointed out by apk in the comments thread directly below, Chris Duffy hasn't sucked that much in the last month . His power is still terribly lacking, but the stolen bases can help cover for that. Impressively, he's cut down on the strikeouts quite a bit with Nady as the only Pirate with 100 ABs in the last month striking out less (though that's a mostly strikeout prone group he's compared to there). I don't think Duffster has earned the job for next year yet, but he's probably at least earned the right to compete for it in the spring. I still don't think he's a leadoff hitter, though. Also, today's PG Notebook reports on a sad turn of events with Pirate broadcasting, as the Pirates and KDKA will end their 51 year relationshipi and Clear Channel's 104.7 WPGB will take over as the flagship for next season. After the Cards moved...

Now that was a beating. Ian Snell is continuing to run out of gas right before our eyes. Last night he went six and walked three with only 5 Ks, giving up 4 runs on all homers, with two coming to Javier Valentin. Then, the nightmarish 7th inning happened with Adam Dunn greeting Brian Rogers and Juan Perez showing us why it's never a good idea to be excited about 27 year old middle relievers. Josh Sharpless eventually put the fire out, but by then it was 9-1. Even more disturbing than the giving up 9 runs was the scoring of one against Kyle freaking Lohse. Lohse struck out 6 guys in his 7 innings and our only homer came on a Doumit homer (which tied the game at 1 and was nice to see). Last night also brought us the Major League debut of Carlos Maldanado, who singled in his first ever at-bat. Yipee?

Ian Snell and Kyle Lohse face off tonight in Cincy in what will likely be the second most interesting Pittsburgh/Cincinnati sports matchup to most Pittsburghers in the Queen City tonight. The wheels have completely fallen off of the Reds playoff bandwagon in the past couple weeks, but they can probably get back into the thick of the Wild Card race with a sweep this weekend, but not much else can help them. The Pirates will meanwhile attempt to remain in fifth place for longer than they did last time they were there.

The Bucs Dugout continues along with the current Rob Rossi and Florida Marlins memes , wondering what exactly drives Rossi to write some of the things he does and why no comparisons to the Marlins are really all that valid at this point. All I'm going to say is that I've never seen Ed Eagle and Rob Rossi in the same room, and I'll leave it at that. Friday is Dejan's Q&A Day, so check it out . There is some particularly interesting stuff on how the infield situation will be handled next year. Jose Castillo is the most obvious choice as odd man out, and he undoubtedly has frustrated management no end. Just seeing again his raging inconsistency on this road trip provides a reminder. To be sure, there are those in the organization who would welcome moving him, taking Freddy Sanchez to second base and using Bautista at third. (Or someone else at third and Bautista in right field, but that is another conversation for another day.) At the same time, there are those who t...

This isn't a football blog or anything, but there is a game tonight so I thought I'd share the Steelers Preview that I wrote for the Duquesne Duke today and provide an open thread if anyone wants to talk about the game. Because I have a feeling there are some Steeler fans out there.

As previously mentioned, I saw none of this game. I hope you'll understand that that fact causes me to doubt its existence. Consider that all of the following supposedly took place: Chris Duffy hit not one, not three, but two homers. BP Chacon hit an RBI double Scott Moore and Carlos Marmol both hit homers (career at-bats before today: 24 combined with only 5 career hits between the two of them). Get ready for this one, BP Chacon, 5 Ks, 2 walks. Also, six innings pitched, the longest start of his Pirate career. So it's not quite an Oliver Perez shutout, but it's better than what we've seen from BP so far. Did I mention Chris Duffy and two home runs? That's so amazing that I just accidentally typed "Christ" Duffy. Before today he had 1 career homer in 352 ABs. Today he had 2 in four. We got another strong bullpen outing today, with Juan Perez making his first appearence a successful 1/3 of an inning, and he, Sharpless, Marte, Bayliss, and Torres combined to...

The Bucs and Cubs will play for the last time this year at 2:20 this afternoon with the fitting pitching matchup being Sean Marshall and Shawn Chacon. Again, the coveted 5th place slot in the NL Central is on the line. It's probably on WGN if you don't have anything better to do, but I hope for your sake that you do. I will be in the chemistry student torture known as "Integrated Lab" all afternoon so I'll miss this one, but I can't really say I'm sorry.

As all of you know by now, the Marlins Anibal Sanchez threw the first no-hitter since May of 2004 last night. He upped the Marlins record to 70-69 (you'll recall they're the first team in history to go above .500 in a season in which they were also 20 games below) and kept them within 2.5 games of the Padres in the NL Wildcard race. What you may not know is that Henry Cabrera and Olivo Astacio of the Williamsport Crosscutters (the Pirates' absolutely godawful New York Penn League affiliate ) no-hit the Batavia Muckdogs last night . The reason it's so depressing? Birthdays. Anibal Sanchez 2/27/84 Henry Cabrera 12/17/83 Olivo Astacio 7/28/84 This is why it's impossible to be excited about anything the Pirates do. For more on the Marlins run at the playoffs and how it applies to the Buccos , head over to Bucs Dugout (who also tipped me off to the Cutters' no-no).

Back to the post about Weapon X that was briefly posted yesterday (all of the stats I quote are before yesterday's games, so sue me). The purpose is to try and quantify what Nady has done since arrival based on something more than "When he hit ball bat go boom." Instead, I figured it might be good to compare him to Ryan Shealy, the guy of nearly the same age (Nady is about 9 months older than Shealy) that we chose X over. Again using the Baseball Musings Day by Day Database (you can tell this is becoming one of my favorite tools) we get the stats for Shealy and Nady following the trade deadline. Both are hitting quite well since their respective trades. Shealy is hitting .311/.364/.447 (OPS of .811) and Nady is hitting .342/.406/.450 (OPS of .856). Shealy has walked a little more than Nady, but not much more. He's outhomered him (which is probably to be expected given the dimensions at PNC), but Nady made up for the gap in SLG with tons of doubles. Nady has also s...

It's hard to be upset about losing this one because we did nothing to win it in the first place. I mean, I assumed that we were going to win after Rich Hill hit Jack Wilson with a throw to first base and Ronny Cedeno made his millionth error of the season trying to throw Jack Wilson out at the plate because that's how the Bucs/Cubs games have gone lately. Instead, Dave Littlefield's worst nightmare came through tonight. His precious bullpen absolutely melted down. Actually, that isn't entirely accurate. Jose Castillo didn't cover first on a bunt, Matt Capps tripped while covering a bunt, Freddy Sanchez dropped an easy grounder, and Ronnie Paulino halfheartedly shrugged as if to say "Eh, who cares" after failing to throw a Cub out at second. That and Capps' predilection towards throwing strikes lead to a grooved pitch that Derek Lee hit into the bleachers with the bases loaded. Zach Duke pitched very effectively tonight, going seven innings and only all...