The Pirates beat the Brewers.
Runs outside.
Checks for locusts.
Runs back inside.
Turns on bathwater to ensure it hasn’t turned to blood.
Panics as frog chirps outside.
Wait, that’s just a cricket.
So it’s real. The Pirates beat the Brewers, and near as I can tell plagues have not overwhelmed the earth. So this is probably for real.
After Ross Ohlendorf’s rough first inning tonight, in which he was probably lucky to escape with only one run allowed, I thought it was huge that Andrew McCutchen lead off the bottom of the first with a double into the corner. Of course, he did have three hits tonight and I’ve been impressed with just about everything he’s done since pulling on a Pirate uniform, but getting a man immediately in scoring position against the Brewers after they’d taken a lead was a big deal tonight. From there, Delwyn Young hit a big homer and the offense did plenty against Mike Burns to put the Pirates comfortably ahead early on (6-1 after two innings).
Ohlendorf wasn’t really great tonight. The Brewers weren’t really hitting the ball hard, but I thought he mostly teetered on the edge of disaster through his five innings. Maybe the long pre-game rain delay messed him up, but it really wasn’t a great start for him and I wasn’t really upset to see him pinch-hit for in the fifth inning, even though he’d only thrown 74 pitches. Jeff Karstens did a nice job out of the bullpen before he was beaned in the bottom of the eighth as retribution for the ridiculous Ryan Braun situation that bubbled up back in April, and that beaning nearly sparked a brawl tonight. The umps are going to be on edge for the rest of this series.
None of that really matters, though, because the Pirates really, really needed a win against the Brewers after seventeen straight losses, and they got one tonight. That’s good enough for now.
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