Pirates 5 Manatees 0

You know, there's absolutely no reason to spend a lot of time talking about this game seeing as it's meaningless and wasn't on TV or the radio, but I kind of have a hankering to write a recap, so we're rolling with it.

The Bucs clubbed Manatee County CC today in the 5-0, 3-hit fashion you'd expect a major league team to beat a community college (or, alternately, the way you'd expect a pirate to club a manatee and yes, I know their nickname is the Lancers and no, I don't particularly care). Doug Mientkiewicz had two hits and two RBIs on his path to justify his eventual inclusion on the big-league roster and Ryan Doumit chipped in with the same output in his quest to supplant Ronny Paulino or Xavier Nady or anyone to finally get some real playing time. The rest of the offense was pretty unremarkable, but hey, it's February 27th. We can yelp about it when it hasn't improved in two months, but I'll let it go today.

Really, there's maybe one or two aspects of this game that really are vaguely interesting to me. One of them is Yoslan Herrera. He really bombed out in AA last year and looked like yet another DL bust, but there was a bit of a silver lining to him in that he hadn't pitched for something like almost three years before 2007, which means that we can still hope against hope that he'll find some form in AAA this year and maybe turn himself into a useful pitcher. That means he's someone to keep an eye on this spring, especially velocity-wise since it was widely reported that he couldn't get his fastball above around 86 mph last year. If he can get some mustard on the ball, he might not be as lost as we all thought. The other interesting aspect of this one to me? OMFG DANNY MOSKOS DIDN'T STRIKE ANYONE OUT!!!!!11 HE SUCKS!!!!!!1111one

Real fake games start tomorrow.