The Rays series

Being mostly out of commission, internet-wise, the past few days means that I'm just going to do one large recap of the entire Tampa Bay series in order to save space and because I don't have a whole lot to say about it, being distracted through Friday's game, completely missing last night's thriller, and splitting time between today's game and the Euro final.

On Friday, Jimmy Barthmaier looked kind of what I expected him to look like. I think the guy's a decent prospect, but before Friday he only had a handful of starts beyond AA. He had some decent stuff, but he got lit up by the Rays, who are probably the second best team in the AL right now. The trouble with the rotation necessitated the start, but he's definitely not ready. The 7-0 hole he put us in just proved to be too big for the Pirates against Kazmir and the Rays pen, as Sean Burnett (who actually pitched OK for most of the night) and Grabow gave them three more runs. Of course, I was paying so much attention to this game that it took three innings to realize Chris Gomez was starting at first base and five innings to realize Carlos Pena was playing for the Rays.

Saturday's game was another marathon event ended on a Jason Bay walk-off home run. I always find it interesting when a guy goes 0/5 on the night, then launches the winning homer in his sixth at-bat. After spending all of his career prior to this year without recording a walk-off hit, Bay's now got three in the past couple months. Will it be his last hurrah in a Pirate uniform? I guess we'll see. The other thing to note was that Ty Taubenheim had a pretty solid Pirate debut and the bullpen turned in seven awesome innings, including two from TJ Beam and one from JVB, to set Bay up for the win. Funny how good pitching tends to equal wins, isn't it?

Today's game saw a rather disappointing loss, but it did see Tom Gorzelanny make his second straight solid start, striking out eight in six innings today. He might be turning a corner, but I don't want to get my hopes up. His start wasn't enough for the win today as Tyler Yates got knocked around for two runs, which were helped by Xavier Nady's ugly throwing error.

INTERLEAGUE PLAY IS (mostly) OVER! IT'S TIME TO CELEBRATE!!!