Wednesday, May 28th, 2008 by Adam Wagner
Snell fails again
Ian Snell was supposed to be the cornerstone of the Pirates’ rotation this year. Snell had his sixth bad start out of his last seven and could be in for a rocky year, as Adam Dunn and Jay Bruce came together to beat up the Pirates and Snell, 9-6, en route to dropping the Pirates back to three games below .500.
Snell’s failure again demonstrated the Pirates’ issues with starting pitching, as they simply can’t get any consistency out of the starting rotation. In order for the team to become a contender, this season or in the future, the starting pitching just needs to develop some type of consistency. Snell seemed to be the player who did this last year, as he was routinely the team’s stopper. This year, however, he is routinely putting his team in a hole and is, undoubtedly, more upset about it than any Pirate fans are.
Snell is a highly emotional pitcher who will hopefully make the small adjustments necessary to come around, but the strange part about tonight’s outing was that the Pirates had a 3-0 lead going into the bottom of the fifth inning. Unfortunately, he promptly collapsed, surrendering four runs in that frame and then giving up three more earned runs in the sixth inning, where he didn’t record an out. Snell’s newfound habit of wearing down has become painful to the bullpen as well, as the Pirates needed to call on Damaso Marte, Marino Salas and Sean Burnett to pitch tonight.
If there were any positives from tonight’s game, the offense continued to look solid as they managed to score six runs off of the Reds’ pitching. Ronny Paulino and Adam LaRoche both contributed very solidly as Paulino managed to get two RBIs and a home run tonight, while LaRoche launched a two run home run and hit another sacrifice fly to get three RBIs. The offense has been producing all season long, but it has been consistently let down by the starting pitching.
The offense needs to continue to produce and the starters need to figure out how to have consistent success. Until then, the Pirates aren’t going to be a threat for .500 and the magic number, currently at 55, will continue to slide.
Leave a Reply