Game 48: Pirates 9 Reds 5

Shawn Chacon replaced Tony Armas in the rotation tonight because Armas was struggling with the strike zone and not pitching far into games. Somehow, the team wanted fans to believe that Chacon, with an almost identical K/BB ratio as Armas, would stabilize the gaping hole in the rotation created by Armas and give the Pirates a solid start. Instead, Chacon did just what he always does, throw lots of balls, walk lots of batters, and scare the crap out of me. He only lasted 3 and 2/3 tonight and walked five batters in that stretch, exiting with a 6-1 lead and the bases loaded and John Grabow in to clean up his mess.

But you know what? We won tonight. That means writing an entire post bitching about Chacon is kind of unfair to everyone else. The offense brought the bats out again tonight, and smacked Bronson Arroyo all over the park tonight, bringing a smile to just about everyone's face. Xavier Nady hit a big three run homer in the first and Jason Bay and Adam LaRoche did a lot of the damage from there on out as the Pirates did a nice job keeping the Reds at arms-length all night, despite the crappy performance by just about every pitcher to take the mound for us not named Salomon Torres.

We walked nine guys tonight and the bullpen served up three home runs. Know how many games were going to win doing that? Not very many, that's for sure. Sure, two of those homers came from Brian Rogers watermelons, but still, it happened. Then again, Greg Brown and John Wehner agreed that those homers were better than walks would've been (coincidentally, I'm thinking about watching the games on mute at this point). Still, we won two games in a row and the pitching matchups were Aaron Harang vs. Paul Maholm and Bronson Arroyo vs. Shawn Chacon. Arroyo and Harang haven't been great lately, but that's a pretty nice accomplishment given how bad our offense has been this year.