Duke and Pettite

The progression of things is funny. On Thursday night, not only is the Pirate game on TV, but the post-game Skyblast was televised as well. Last night, only the game was on. Tonight, you have to find a radio or a computer to know what's going on with Zach Duke and Andy Pettite. As usual for Duke, the key to his success will probably be control. If Duke can manage to not walk a lot of people, the Bucs will probably stay in the game. Also, look for Willy Tavarez has already extended his hitting streak to something like 27 games, proving that you can be bad at baseball and still manage to get a hit in a whole bunch of games in a row (his line is .285/.334/.341, only 19 of his 124 hits have gone for extra bases this year). Jack Wilson is still fighting a virus, which means we get Randa at first, Nady in right, and Bautista at third tonight. Which I suppose is better than the alternative of playing Burnitz against a lefty.

Popular posts from this blog

WHYGAVS has moved

It's official. WHYGAVS now has a new official home. It's actually at WHYGAVS.com , which means that it's the same as the old home, but I'm off Blogger now, which means that this old link won't redirect. You'll have to subscribe to a new feed if that's how you read WHYGAVS, but beyond that things are going to be mostly the same.
Read more

Links

For reasons that will become shortly apparent, I've been working on cleaning/updating the sidebar links. That means that I've got some new links to add to the sidebar, as well as some other things for your general perusal. Cory Humes, Geeves, and Alan from Bucco Wire are all blogging again at MVN under the header Pirate Revolution . There's also The Green Weenie and The 'Burgh Blues , two blogs I should've added some time ago. Meanwhile, Dejan's series about the Pirates' presence in the Dominican is awesome. I'm sure most of you have been checking it out as it's been published, but if you haven't I can't recommend parts one , two , and three , Renee Gayo's list of the top 5 prospects yet to play in America , and everything else that DK's put on his blog on the subject enough. It's an awesome look in to the Bucs' international operation and how things have changed since Bob Nutting took the lack of Pirate presence in the reg...
Read more

The Pirates are talking to Mark Loretta

There are a couple of possible reactions when reading that the Pirates are talking to Mark Loretta . The easy reaction is, "Well, so long as he's replacing Chris Gomez, I'm fine with that." That's true. Loretta's a useful utility infielder that can still handle a bat fairly well and can play just about every position in the infield in a short-term capacity. In fact, he's probably a better hitter than Gomez and he can't really be a worse fielder. That may make him more the successor to Doug Mientkiewicz, which is fine by me as well. But then I started thinking. Aren't we trying to trade our shortstop away? Isn't "successor to Jack Wilson" a position that needs filled on the depth chart at the moment? I mean, I know Huntington's not looking at Loretta as a starting shortstop next year ... but what if he is? This is how the offseason drives people crazy. You can go months and months without hearing any rumors, then as soon as rumor...
Read more