Sometimes you just carry a huge rock on your back and can’t get rid of it no matter what.  Witness Tom Gorzelanny against the Cubs - they simply own him.  One game it’s one player, the next game it’s another but in the end he just loses.  Bad.

I mentioned there would be a brisk wind in Chicago starting this series and, sure enough, Gorzy was beat by yard balls allowed - four of them. That surpassed his career high of three allowed against the Rangers last June.  Last year he pitched four games after that Texas massacre with a 3.29 ERA, went to the All-Star break and then the bottom has fallen out of his career - he has a 5.55 ERA ever since. 

More importantly, up until that Ranger game he had allowed just one yard ball every 3.4 MLB games and ever since that game he’s jumped to one every 1.2 games.  In the farm he allowed one every 7.2 games, so you can immediately see the end result of what I consider to be a tired/fatigued arm.

I still believe Gorzy needs to be shut down and allowed to rest his arm.  The Pirates aren’t going to do it because there is no medical reason to, so they can’t justify his shut down period to the owners.  But nothing is going to come of pushing him - we’re just running his confidence into the ground and probably fraying his labrum.

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You have to tip your hat to the Cubs - they came out swinging early and buried us.  Did I see Don Zimmer in attendence at the game?  I swear I turned around one minute and saw him in a suit but I didn’t think he even owned one.  Kidding aside, I wonder if the Rays are going to allow Zim to take a bench coach position with Lou?  Interesting.

And hey, the Cubs are white hot right now and anybody who faces them is going to get mauled.  Plain and simple.  Look at Duke Saturday - Vegas has the Pirates odds at 222 with Zambrano on the mound. 

That’s nuts, even though the Pirates have lost five of the last six games Duke started against the Cubs.  Buried in that is the fact the Cubs have lost five of the last seven games Zambrano started against us. 

If we hit everything in the air instead of the ground, or we get to his head early, we’ll beat him and at those odds you’ll take home a nice haul with just $20.  But, since we rarely play well on Saturday, you might as well take the wife out to dinner with the $20 instead.  Me?  I spent my $20 at Pinnacle.

You also have to give a hat tip to the Pirates - they didn’t give up.  True, it was pretty much all home runs but still.  In previous years we would have folded up and just tried to get the game over with as fast as possible.

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Guess which team has the 9th highest number of home runs last 30 days despite a team SLG under .400?  Yup, the Pirates.

And here’s an even more interesting tidbit - in the last 23 games (chart below), 30% of all our runs have come from yard balls.  Now considering we have something like a .715 OPS over those games with the 8th highest number of doubles in the game, that’s kind of amazing the rest of the OPS is generally in home runs (19th in walks and 23rd in hits).

Looking at all of McLouth’s solo shots quickly shows us one reason why he was moved down the order. 

Notice too that we’ve hit more than one per game on average - that’s high… very high for us.  We’re only allowing about .82 per game even after the four to the Cubs Friday which is still a bit high considering we’re playing half our games at PNC, but not so high in terms of our previous years stats.  We need to be in the .70 - .75 range consistently before it will make any real difference though.

Anyway, I think it was Pete Palmer who once said something to the effect that you either have to hit for extremely high average or you have to go yard a lot to remain in this game, all things being equal.  He was comparing RBI production in each case of course, but it’s a very important part of this game - getting runs plated.

Under Littlefield we noticed a shift from an OBP model to a SLG model about 2003.  The roster got slow, everyone from 1A up was told to swing a long bat, and we lived and died by how many we could plate via home runs.

Under Huntington, we’re seeing a continuation of the SLG model because he has no choice - it’s not easy to go in and retool swing mechanics after years of free-swinging.  But he’s added veteran higher contact bench help who have delivered in the clutch more often than we saw under Littlefield’s benches.

Unfortunately, we’re still slow.  If I remember right, in 2007 the Pirates went first to third on a single just 20% of the time which was dead last in the NL (league average was 25%).  Now don’t sweat that so much because, if I remember right, that -5% off league average amounted to just 20 fewer opportunities to have a man at third instead of second and the run value was -5 runs, or 1/2 a win.

But this year, while we’re still slow and continuing to stop at second at a high rate, our second to home on a single is higher than 59% we had last year, and that’s part of the reason for the additional runs we are netting.  Ok, we’re not talking a lot - maybe 11 total runs and 1 win, but it is one win and that’s a net of 1.5 wins over 2007 since we were 1/2 a win in the hole last year.  See the difference?

Now I mention all this because, again I’m pulling from memory here and hope I’m remembering this right, the Pirates were the third best NL team in plating runners from third last year and it’s a trend we’ve continued this year.  True under our SLG model, most of those runs plated last year were from too many sac flies but that’s changing this year - we’re driving runs in and keeping rallies going, not just giving up the out for the run.

That’s good stuff, and exactly what we need to do more of.

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Someone asked what I thought about the Jason Michaels addition and I think I’ve already explained that it was a puzzling move.  One, we didn’t need him because he’s really limited to left field (no RF arm, poor route running in center) and his bat says southpaws only.  Essentially it was a waste of money, time, and effort signing him, if for no other reason than to give Pearce the at bats who is sitting in Indy and projects out as a utility corner at best.  Strange signing, much less for us to trade for the guy.

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Lots and lots of mock drafts being run all over the baseball community and almost everyone has us taking Alvarez.  Considering this just isn’t a draft with a lot of talent at the top, I suspect we’ll pass on taking a pitcher and grab a bat.

I mentioned a day or two ago that it seemed Alvarez was the way the Pirates were leaning if for no other reason than a public relations stand point.  It’s hard to believe we’ll pay so much for what amounts to a #2 pick first baseman, but there you go. 

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Anybody else think this was funny: Lincoln is going to start his first game back Saturday in Rome, GA - the very place he toasted his arm under Lundquist’s command. 

What a ridiculous assignment.  Here’s hoping he just leaves that hole with his arm attached and never revisits it again.