Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008 by Adam Wagner
Pirates don’t lose
The Pirates managed to do something new on Tuesday night, win a game, even as Nate McLouth failed to get a hit despite a successful offensive night. Pittsburgh was able to put together a good start, and a halfway decent offensive night at the same time in order to come out victorious by a score of 3-2 over a Marlin team that had been playing well above its head for the last week or so.
Paul Maholm took the ball and had a very good start, showing the stuff that had the Pittsburgh media saying that his performance would be the pivot for the starting rotation. After posting a terrible start his last time out, Maholm allowed only four hits and one run in his six innings of work tonight, leaving the game with a 3-1 lead. The night did not begin with promise, as Maholm surrendered a quick run to the Marlins by giving up a double to SS Hanley Ramirez and then a single to 3B Jorge Cantu.
Maholm, however, settled down and was borderline dominant for the rest of the night. On another important note, his offense backed him up even though for five innings it seemed like the night would just result in more Pirate misery as the Bucs were only able to get one hit off of Ricky Nolasco over the first five innings.
Now, Nolasco is one of Florida’s semi-decent young pitchers, but he is not one hit good and the Pirates clearly demonstrated that in the sixth inning, by getting four two-out hits off of him in order to take a 3-1 lead.
The catalyst for the inning seemed to be the questionable call at second on an attempted McLouth steal in which the runner was called out. Replays showed him to be clearly safe and John Russell came out to argue, ineffectively, of course. The argument was, however, promptly followed by a Freddy Sanchez single, a Jason Bay single, a Ryan Doumit double and a Xavier Nady two-run single. Hopefully, the Pirates are able to take the idea that they, particularly the middle of their order, can put something together from this game and apply it to their near future as confidence can come from pretty much anywhere.
Tyler Yates’ struggles continued as the pitcher gave up a home run in the seventh and then had to work his way out of a self-inflicted jam in the seventh inning. The team needs Yates to return to the consistent power arm that he was even 10 days ago if they hope to be successful, so hopefully he can work through his recent struggles.
The story of the night, though, even outside of the team’s winning was the end of McLouth’s 19 game hitting streak. The fact that it ended isn’t so remarkable, it’s more so the fact that he had two walks and the hitting streak also ended, showing that he is actually willing to sacrifice his statistics for the team and hopefully demonstrating to the rest of the club that getting on base in any way possible is more important than hitting a home run. I hope Jose Bautista got the message.
One good win does not make up for a string of four terrible games in a row, but at least it kept the magic number at 70 heading into a series against a surprisingly decent St. Louis Cardinals team.
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