Get out your radar gun

Peavy and Maholm at 1:35 today. Given the way these two can work and the offenses at hand, we might have a really quick game this afternoon.

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82 wins

  This is how it starts: in 1989 in a living room in front of an old cathode-ray tube TV, the kind with the power button that pulls out into a little knob to adjust the volume and the individual buttons for channels running down the side, with a four-year old asking his dad a non-stop stream of questions about the Pirates/Phillies game on the TV. Or maybe this is how it starts: in a parking lot at Three Rivers Stadium where the same little boy is tailgating before his first-ever Pirate game, eating food out of the back of a car, then watching the Pirates dismantle the Expos 6-1 with his favorite player hitting a home run.  Or maybe it starts in the second floor hallway on the morning of October 15th, 1992. That's where he finds out that the Pirates blew the 1-0 lead they when he went to bed the night before in the most painful way possible and that, for the third season in a row they will not go to the World Series. The worst is yet to come, though, and no one has any i...
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80 wins

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With all of Snell's struggles this year there's been a lot of speculation about demoting him to AAA, especially since Tom Gorzelanny got sent down in early July. It was reported that he had no options left, but today's PG says that he does , in fact, have one left: It had been widely believed for nearly two years that starter Ian Snell was out of options, even by some in the organization, but that is not the case, a team official confirmed this weekend: He has one left. I don't think Snell's going anywhere for a couple of reasons. First off is that it seems incredibly unlikely that the people that are actually running the team and making those decisions now just learned that. Second is that Snell doesn't have anything to prove in AAA. His velocity's fine this year and his biggest problem is his inability to locate his pitches. John Van Benschoten's biggest problem is his inability to locate pitches and he puts up solid lines in AAA with stuff that's...
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