Here’s what you need to know about this first road trip of the season: the Pirates went 40-41 at PNC Park last year and 22-58 away from it. I have no idea why this is. Maybe it’s because things like the Gary Varsho outfield shift have a better effect at home (maybe a factor, but not the only one), or because the lineup is built to take advantage of PNC (true for some guys, not for others), or because the rotation is (true for Duke and Maholm, potentially), or some kind of combination of all these things with even more factors combined, or maybe it’s all just dumb luck. Whatever the case, this is a two-year trend (the Pirates were 39-42 at PNC at 28-53 away from it in 2008) and it’s one of the many things that will have to change before the Pirates can move towards respectability.
Charlie Morton gets his first start of the season tonight Rodrigo Lopez. Lopez is 34 and spent most of last season with the Lehigh Valley Iron Pigs, the Phillies Triple-A affiliate, which should tell you most of what you need to know about him. He is one of the proverbial “guys we should beat.” Morton is probably the best bet for a breakout in the starting rotation this year. The things to keep in mind with him are his high ground ball rate, his control, and strikeouts. He kept the ball on the ground last year and had better control than he’d had in his prior big league stint with the Braves, but his Ks didn’t match his Triple-A numbers. If he can bring them up, we’re going to be in for good things from him this year. So let’s start the first road trip of the year out right. First pitch is at 9:40
Clemente or Cangelosi update is again 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.
Thursday’s game gave us our first double-hits of the season as IndianaJohns04 and dboz both nailed their picks with Delwyn Young (who reached base four times) as the Clemente and Paul Maholm (who didn’t pitch well and was atrocious at the plate) as the Cangelosi. Quite a few of us got docked point by having DY as Cangelosi or Maholm as Clemente, but no one went 0-for-2. A few others picked up a point from Garrett Jones having the second best WPA on the team, but no one had ‘Cutch as Cangelosi for having the second worst.
Here are the updated standings through three games — if you have any complaints about the scoring, let me know. I need to set up a spreadsheet to make things easier, but haven’t done it quite yet. That means things are still a lot more manual than I’d like at the moment.
- IndianaJohns04, dboz – 4
- Woodward, TomKaikis – 3
- PatrickHealy, Wizard of Woz, LRNeub – 2
- brian2, UtesFan89, FSU Bucs, Nate – 1
- Everyone else – 0
- ndbrian, bwzimmerman, MattB, NSN, Mr. Ando, CoryR – (-1)
- WHYGAVS (me) – (-2)
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