One of my favorite parts of baseball is watching players make their Major League debuts. I guess we get that chance pretty regularly as Pirate fans, but I always thrill out of watching young players get rewarded for all of their hard work and seeing them realize their dreams. It’s even more fun watching them develop into good players, which doesn’t always happen, but tonight I’m really happy for Josh Harrison, who is going to make his debut at third base and bat second for the Pirates against RA Dickey.
On the whole, though, I’m pretty worried about how the Pirates as a whole will fare against Dickey’s knuckleball. He hasn’t been that great this year, but for some reason I have it in my head that a knuckler will be the sort of gimmick that the Pirates’ young offense will struggle with. Hopefully, they’ll be able to show the sort of patience they did against Doug Davis last week (though it should be noted that Dickey doesn’t really walk a ton of people and more relies on softly hit balls than swings and misses) and take advantage of the knuckler instead of flailing around wildly, hitting groudballs to shortstop and second base.
James McDonald goes for the Bucs and as per my post from earlier today, I think he’s well-suited to pitch in a big park like CitiField, where it’s a chore to hit a home run. I’m probably jinxing him now. Hopefully, though, he’ll give the Bucs a strong start because a three-game losing streak against the Cubs and Mets would be awfully hard to swallow. First pitch tonight is at 7:10.
Add The Sports Daily to your Google News Feed!
