Perhaps the best and worst part of early-season baseball is the exact same thing; the way a small number of games can wildly shift how you, as a fan, views a team. After the ugly 2-4 road trip, I felt pretty terrible about the Pirates. After the sweep of the Reds, things perked up a bit. After being outscored 16-1 over two games by the Brewers, I’m kind of curious if the Pirates will ever win again.
Today’s Earth Day matinee feature doesn’t seem to bode well for turning things around. Daniel McCutchen gets the start against Randy Wolf, who’s been pretty good so far for the Brewers this year. And JR will surely go with an “afternoon game lineup,” (note: I’m writing this up late Wednesday night because I have lab meeting Thursday morning and I’m not sure when I’ll get to the computer) and even though the Pirates literally just won with one of these against Cincinnati on Sunday, I never feel good about the team’s chances with the afternoon lineup in place.
First pitch is 12:35, Clemente/Cangelosi is after the jump.
Not sure what this is? Check here and here. Short version: in the comments pick the Pirates you think will be most and least valuable in today’s game. If you haven’t jumped aboard yet, it’s been a lot of fun through so far and now’s as good a time as any to join in.
Not much time to write this up with the 12:35 start, but Jones and McCutchen were Clementes and Duke and Delwyn were Cangelosis. Duke had the second highest WPA as a hitter, but was still the worst on the team even when that was added to his pitching total, and so for pitcher’s we’re going to go with combined offensive and defensive WPA. I think we can all agree that Zach Duke doesn’t deserve Clemente points after that performance last night.
Today’s standings:
- Woodward: 18
- dafletch: 12
- hwtrine:8: 10
- hisjazziness: 8
- Wizard of Woz, UtesFan89, brian2: 7
- North Shore Ryan, Carnegie Chip,
whygavs: 5
- IndianaJohns04, dboz, appeal2smail: 4
- TomKaikis, Joek, tylerrcurtis, bwzimmerman,
TheJewelryMan!: 3
- PatrickHealy, Garrett22, edgeman2k, apk, Don_Madden: 2
- FSU Bucs, Christy, MattB, appeal2smail, fruitbat, SeanGentile, shsteimer, TheHulk: 1
- Everyone else: 0
- NSN, CoryR, Mosca, wk kortas, danatural, J Latrobe, Teflon: -1
- ndbrian: -2
Add The Sports Daily to your Google News Feed!
