Game 69: Pirates 8 White Sox 7

Nothing is easy for this club, is it? Today's win certainly could (and probably should) have been an easy one. Afterall, we've said again and again that if the bullpen could just bridge things from the starter to Capps, we'd have it made. And if Duke could give ups some good starts, we'd really have things going for us.

Well, Duke gave us a good start... except for that one inning where he gave up five runs and almost blew the game for us. And the pen was great, except for that part where Capps gave up two runs and almost gave it back to the White Sox. And yeah, you can talk about Castillo's error that hurt Capps, but then I'm taking away Bay's homer saving catch that kept Thome from tying things up for the White Sox.

Still, a win is a win and we've got four of these things in the "W" column this week, which isn't a bad week, even with the opponents taken into account. There were certainly good things today. Jose Bautista is killing the ball right now. Nate McLouth actually got a couple nicely timed hits today and drove in four runs, to go with the two he had coming into today. And finally, in the seventh inning, with Bay on first and two outs and LaRoche at the plate and all of the Pirate world thinking to themselves, "let's get a couple hits here," LaRoche hit a ground rule double and Nady singled up the middle to score both of them. I thought it would be enough to win right there, but we added one more on later and it turned out to be a good thing.

Get this- the Pittsburgh Pirates are 4-5 through nine interleague games. I know that's not great, but compared to what we're used too, it's pretty damn decent.