If you’re in a Pirate-related funk today (and if you’re a Pirate fan, you are), then perhaps you’ll enjoy Chris Jaffe’s look back on the career of Matt Stairs, one of my favorite three true outcomes players of all time, for the Hardball Times. Well, except the Pirate portion of his career isn’t terribly cheery:
Aug. 20, 2003: For the second time in his career, Stairs’ team belts four homers in one inning. In the top of the fifth, Jason Kendall, Brian Giles and Reggie Sanders begin the frame with consecutive homers, and later on Sanders goes deep again, making it a 10-run inning. Stairs bats immediately after Sanders both times, and makes two of the team’s three outs: a line out and a ground out.
Also, while I’m giving out enjoyable links, Joe Sheehan has a great look at why six-man rotations are a pretty bad idea at Sports Illustrated. I do think the Pirates need to find a way to give their starters a break, but Sheehan’s right in that just plugging a sixth starter into the mix is a bad idea in the long-term. It’s an interesting topic and it’s something that I wonder why teams don’t put more critical thought into when it comes to juggling fourth and fifth starters (who are generally not good and not terribly durable) with a sixth starter instead of just trotting bad pitchers out there every five days and using a long reliever to replace them when they get shelled. Maybe I’ll do a longer post about this in the near future.
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