After a long weekend against the Marlins in which the Pirates showed absolutely no signs of life at all, the Pirates’ offense suddenly sprung to life tonight with chance to dimish the Cardinals’ playoff hopes. I honestly sort of figured the game was pretty much over when Albert Pujols took Brad Lincoln deep to turn a 3-2 Pirate lead into a 4-3 deficit (Immediate thought as I saw McCutchen standing on the warning track and I realized it was a home run: I’ve seen this movie before. Like a million times.) in the sixth inning, but a wonderful combination of unexpected clutch hitting and Tony La Russa stubbornness put the Pirates back in the lead.
People occasionally ask why I openly disdain La Russa so much, and the bottom of the eighth inning is a great example of why. After Ryan Doumit doubled off of Mark Rzepczynski to tie the game up at four, the Pirates had Ryan Ludwick and Josh Harrison due up. Ludwick has shown precious little ability to do anything as a Pirate except reach base (he was hitting .244/.352/.321 with the Bucs coming into tonight) and Harrison has done pretty much nothing at all at the plate this year. La Russa decided to walk Ludwick anyway, even though that was basically best possible outcome that Pirate fans could’ve hoped for from Ludwick in that at-bat. If he didn’t walk, he probably would’ve made an out. Harrison struck out for the inning’s second out, but Rzepcynzki walked Jason Jaramillo and so Pedro Ciriaco came up with the game on the line and doubled in Doumit and Ludwick. Ludwick, the terrible hitter that was intentionally walked, ended up being the winning run for the Pirates in a game the Cardinals desperately needed to keep pace in the pennant race. Basically, La Russa took the ball out of his reliever’s hand when he demanded an intentional walk to a bad hitter, and the Cardinals lost an important game to a bad team. Had the roles been reversed and the Pirates lost a meaningless game tonight because Hurdle did the same thing, I’d be hugely pissed.
Enough about La Russa, though. Let’s talk about tonight’s hero, Pedro Ciriaco. This kid has been yanked all over the place this year as basically a roster-filler in Pittsburgh. As the guy that gets called up when someone has to but the Pirates don’t want better prospects lingering on the bench. He’s been invisible for weeks at a time, even when on the Pirate roster. At least once, he was told he was being demoted, drove to the airport, then got called back to sit in the dugout and not play for a double-header, after which he was demoted again. These sorts of things do happen, of course, and Ciriaco still gets to write “Professional Baseball Player” down as his occupation, so I’m not trying to drum up a huge amount of sympathy for the guy or anything. I’m just saying he’s had a pretty trying year by baseball player standards and it has to be hugely gratifying for him to come up so big in a huge situation tonight. This game might not have meant much on paper, but I doubt this is something Ciriaco is going to foget anytime soon.
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