One of my favorite post-game quotes of the season came from Rockies’ rookie starter Jon Gray last night:
“They were really aggressive … I didn’t expect that to happen. I tried to expand from there. I didn’t get much movement. I know it’s not going to break as much. Fastball’s not going to have as much sink or pop. I need to really change sights on where I start the pitch off.”
In other words: Whoa, that was a Big League lineup.
That was the best part of last night’s game for me: the Pirates are unlikely to improve their station in the NL playoff race at this point, but to have any chance at all to do it, they absolutely have to take care of business against the Rockies this week. We, as Pirate fans, spent 20 years in the position the Rockies and their fans are in right now, telling ourselves that the season is over but that it’d be cool to at least see the team put themselves together for three or four days and beat the crap out of someone to hurt their playoff chances (a bad baseball season is a long and draining experience that turns you into a pretty petty person; I won’t apologize for it). As I’m sure we all remember, they rarely accomplished that.
The Pirates need more of the same tonight and the rest of this week: first inning home runs, four-hit games, the works. It’s not personal to the Rockies, it’s just the way it needs to be for the Pirates.
Anyway, the Pirates win last night gives them a magic number of two, but it’s at two against both the Giants and Nationals, which means that a playoff clinch tonight isn’t necessarily likely as it will require a Pirate win, a Giant loss, and a National loss. And of course the Cardinals and Cubs both won their games against their bad opponents, so the Pirates didn’t pad their lead in the race for the wild card hosting gig, nor did they close the Cardinal lead down to three. Here’s the full list of the large number of baseball games that interests Pirate fans tonight:
- Orioles (Ubaldo Jiminez) at Nationals (Gio Gonzalez), 7:05
- Brewers (Tyler Cravy, who is apparently a real person) at Cubs (Arrieta), 8:05
- Reds (Keyvius Sampson) at Cardinals (John Lackey), 8:15
- Pirates (JA Happ) at Rockies (Chris Rusin), 8:40
- Giants (Chris Heston) at Padres (Tyson Ross), 10:10
The late Giants/Padres game means that we won’t know if the Pirates clinched until sometime early Wednesday morning, regardless of if they win and the Nationals lose. I think that JA Happ more or less has a playoff rotation spot sewn up at this point, but another strong start or two certainly won’t hurt his case. Rusin is in the middle of a not-very-good year. I will be disappointed by any result tonight that doesn’t resemble last night’s easy win.
Photo by Doug Pensinger/Getty Images
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