Game 33: Pirates 3 Giants 1

First things first: tonight was Phil Dumatrait's first win after a rather long journey to get there. I'm happy for him (shameless FanHouse link).

All in all, it's nice to see the Pirates struggling pitching staff take advantage of the Giants awful offense. Dumatrait and the pen were very good tonight, limiting the Giants to just five hits before Matt Capps came in to do his Jose Mesa impression and give up three straight hits before getting a flyout and giving us the familiar site of Jose Castillo bouncing into a double play. Yates and Marte (especially Marte, who struck out 3 hitters on 13 pitches) did a nice job of getting the ball from Dumatrait to him, though.

What was rather disappointing was the offense against Zito. I didn't see anything that made me think he's regained any of what he lost, but besides Xavier Nady's home run in the fourth we didn't really get to him at all tonight, despite Bob Walk and Greg Brown discussing at length the fact that if his velocity was gone he might be screwed forever. Of course Walk and Brown also made really lame superhero jokes about Xavier Nady that were nowhere near nerdy enough for my taste and may have gotten in an actual fight in the booth over the AFLAC trivia question (Brown claimed they were joking around, though I'm not certain, the answer to the question was Bob Miller). On the bright side, we now have a better record than the Giants and would be in third place in the NL West, if we were actually located in the west.