Game 156: Astros 6 Pirates 2

Perhaps the best microcosm for this season can be found in the gamethreads here for the first and last home games of the 2008 season. For the home opener, I took the time to write up three paragraphs and find a rockin' Donny Iris YouTube video to embed. There were somewhere between 100 and 200 comments, and we angrily discussed the Brian Bixler/Jose Bautista failed "squeeze" play ad nauseum for like a week. Today, I tossed up two sentences ten minutes after the game started and there were 15 comments, all of which came after the game ended and most of which discuss the Steelers. This is despite the fact that the traffic here for September will probably be the same or higher than it was in April.

That's not an indictment of you or me or anyone except the Pirates. Today they played another boring game that was more or less decided early on when Nate "No Errors" McLouth (I know that's a low blow, but I'm sticking with it to prove a point about how stupid "errors" are) badly misplayed a fairly routine fly ball to deep center field by Lance Berkman into a two-run double. The Pirates never really got into the game after that and from what I could tell, the crowd really only seemed to care about Jack Wilson's pinch-hit single in what the Astros' announcers humorously called "Jack Wilson's last game at PNC Park for the third year running." I do have more thoughts about Jack and I will post them sometime tomorrow, but I don't have more thoughts about this game because what else is there to say, really?