MLB Pittsburgh

When I sat down tonight to watch the Pirates and Astros, I didn't really think I'd be seeing anything all that special. The Pirates and 'Stros are tied for last in the NL Central, after all, and both teams have been pretty frigid of late. When Phil Dumatrait picked up an RBI single in the first, the announcers mentioned it was his first career hit. Then i the in the fourth, Runelvys Hernandez laid down a bunt into noman's land and scored a run. Again, the announcers noted it was his first career hit. That seemed mildly more interesting. In the bottom of the fourth, Denny Bautista came to the plate. Yep, RBI single, first career hit. Now that's odd.

Now, I'm only a baseball historian on Sunday afternoons after three beers, but it strikes me as incredibly rare that three pitchers all managed to pick up their first career hits and have them all be RBI singles in the same game. I'm sure it's happened before, but probably not all that often. I guess it's not all that surprising that it happened in a game where the starters combined to give up 17 runs, but I'm still impressed.

In case you'd forgotten, Runelvys Hernandez is the guy that kicked off the whole Shawn Chacon saga by taking Chacon's spot in the Astros rotation. Tonight he managed to actually give up ten runs (including two RBI singles to pitchers that had no career hits coming into the night), which is pretty rare for a starter. I imagine Shawn Chacon's looking in a mirror somewhere and feeling pretty good about himself.

Maybe the All-Star Game is a meaningless to the players and just an excuse for Bud Selig to admire himself for a week. That doesn't mean that the selections should be stupid. Today, the MLB 'Haus gives you All-Star Grievances.

Grievance: Nate McLouth over Jason Bay- It's not that McLouth isn't a deserving All-Star, because he is. The problem is that he's mired in a terrible slump, putting up a .209/.258/.355 line with two homers over the last month or so (prior to today's game). There's a decent chance that by the end of the year, McLouth will have faded completely. Still, he made the team over Jason Bay, who's already a two-time All-Star and is slugging along like he has every year of his career besides an injury-filled 2007. It should take more than a flash in the pan to make an All-Star team.

Grievance: Miguel Tejada? Really?- After a down year in Baltimore last year, Tejada got off to a decent start this year. That's all quickly gone to hell, as he's hitting .198 since May 30th. Tejada's not an All-Star, he's a guy in the twilight of his career that Ed Wade is going to regret trading for by the end of the season.

Grievance: Adam Dunn isn't even a snub- I get that Dunn's only hitting .228. Aren't we to the point of enlightened fanhood that people can look beyond that and realize that his .895 OPS makes him a snub?

Grievance: Alfonso Soriano and Kosuke Fukudome are starters- Fan voting is stupid and unreliable. We say that every year. This year, these two are the reason.

Other snubs: Carlos Lee (unless he wins the final vote but let's be honest, dude's got no chance against David Wright).

It's the circle of baseball life: the Pittsburgh Pirates get a good pitching prospect, he has a great year, and then he disappears from the face of the planet, sometimes never to be seen again and sometimes reemerging with someone else. It's happened with Jason Schmidt, Kris Benson, Kip Wells, and Oliver Perez. This year the two new candidates are Ian Snell and Tom Gorzelanny. Snell just spent some time on the disabled list and maybe that will help him get back on track. Gorzo hasn't been so lucky.

All year, Pirate fans have speculated that there's something wrong with Gorzelanny's arm. Unfortunately, he just keeps taking the mound and getting shelled time after time. With the impending returns of Snell and Phil Dumatrait from the DL, the Pirates are finally taking action with Gorzelanny: he's being sent to AAA Indianapolis to iron out all of the issues he's had this year.

The final straw was apparently the Independence Day beating he absorbed at the hands of the Brewers yesterday, giving up 11 hits and seven earned runs (8 total) in four and two-thirds innings. It's definitely time for the Pirates to do something with Gorzelanny, even if I get the feeling that they have about the idea of what's wrong as you or I do.

Sometimes, news isn't exactly surprising. After cruising to 15 straight saves to open the season, Matt Capps is only 2/7 since June 10th. If you think saves are a bad way to measure a pitcher (they are), his ERA is 5.91 in the same span, he's given up four homers in 10 and 2/3 innings, and his WHIP is 1.41. That's some pretty ugly stuff from a guy who's been one of baseball's better relievers over the past few years.

Accordingly, it was no real surprise today when the Pirates announced that Capps is headed to the DL with a shoulder problem. The team has been pretty vague about it, manager John Russell is calling it, "internal range of motion detriment," but they are saying he's going to be out for eight weeks, so it sounds pretty serious. For now it looks like he's going to Bradenton to rehab the injury, so it's not as bad as it could be unless a knife gets involved.

For the Pirates, this is pretty awful news. They've shuffled pitchers like mad in the past two weeks to deal with injuries in their rotation and crappiness in their bullpen and they've already traded two fringe prospects this year to pick up Tyler Yates and Denny Bautista. Losing Capps means that Damaso Marte is the only remotely reliable reliever left in their bullpen. No deficit will be insurmountable for the Pirates' opponents in the next few months.

For a long time now, most managers in the National League have been content to bat their pitchers in the nine slot of the batting order, making only the rare exception for guys like Micah Owings and Dontrelle Willis. Starting a couple years back, Tony La Russa began batting his pitcher eighth from time to time. This year, the trend grew when Ned Yost has been hitting Jason Kendall in the nine slot most of the time. Tonight a third convert emerged when the Pirates' John Russell moved Jack Wilson to the nine slot and hit Paul Maholm eighth.

I haven't seen an official explanation from Russell as to why he made the shuffle, but it's already been shown that batting the pitcher eighth and putting a real hitter in the nine slot, allowing for more of a chance to put runners on base when the best hitters at the top of the lineup comes up. Since Wilson has an OBP of .346 but only five extra base hits this year (all doubles), I'm going to give Russell the benefit of the doubt and assume that was his reasoning.

As for the actual result, Wilson did go 1-for-3, but he didn't score (maybe because Freddy Sanchez and Jason Michaels batted 1/2 and defeated the purpose). As they are wont to do, the Pirates lost the game, though not through any fault of John Russell's lineup shuffle ... Ken Griffey Jr. hit a two-run walkoff homer in the ninth to erase a one run deficit. Will the experiment continue tomorrow? Why do only NL Central teams seem willing to try this? I don't have the answers.

Last summer we were still making the transition to Fanhouse from our own site, and one of the last great stories of our G1 continuity was when the Brewers checked into a hotel in Pittsburgh and crossed paths with a furry convention. We covered the story on WordUpThome but like Barry Bonds in a Paula Abdul wig, what can you say?

Well, things got better.

This year Anthrocon 2008 proceeded as planned in Pittsburgh and, again, a visiting team happened to cross paths with them at the hotel. And (oh man) according to The LoHud Yankees Blog (oh man), A YANKEES BLOG BY JOURNAL NEWS BEAT WRITER PETER ABRAHAM (oh man), the furries crossed paths with the New York Yankees. Furries and baseball was funny enough already and it didn't involve the protagonist of our project.

Today's Dugout, thanks to the great Dugout bat signal, is after the jump (oh man).

I rail against interleague play and moan about it just as much as the next crotchety old man punk 23-year old blogger, but sometimes it does manage to provoke moments that just wouldn't be possible without it. Tonight's Pirates/Yankees game was a great example. The Pirates were swept by the Yankees in the Bronx in both 2005 and 2007, but the two teams haven't played in Pittsburgh since Bill Mazeroski's home run ended the 1960 World Series. When the tickets went on sale for 2008, the Pirates immediately sold out four games: the home opener and the three game series with the Yankees.

Mazeroski threw out the first pitch for the Pirates tonight, and from the start you could see the Pirates feeding off of the crowd's energy, scoring once in the first, and then again in every inning but the second and fifth on their way to an easy 12-5 win. Even with a 12-3 lead in the top of the ninth inning, the Pirate fans were standing and cheering the last out the way they would a playoff game.

Moments like that make me think that sometimes, interleague play works. I mean, we have to slog through endless Yankees/Mets and White Sox/Cubs hype along with those oh so classic Marlins/Devil Rays clashes before Little League crowds on steamy South Florida days, but sometimes the Yankees go to Pittsburgh and an entire city remembers what it's like to love baseball, even if it's only for three hours.

It would be a pretty staggering blow for just about any Major League team to lose two pitchers from the starting rotation at the same time. It would be particularly crippling for the Pirates, who really only have five even remotely capable starters in the entire organization. That's the situation they faced yesterday after putting Phil Dumatrait on the disabled list with a shoulder problem, then watching Ian Snell leave his start early with elbow discomfort.

Today both starters went into the hospital for exams (Snell an arthogram, Dumatrait an MRI) and the Pirates got some good news; neither pitcher has any structural damage in their pitching arms. Snell has "golfer's elbow" and might miss a start, while Dumatrait has bursitis, but no real damage to his rotator cuff. He should be ready to go when his DL stint is up on July 5th.

Of course, this is only middling good news for the Pirates. Snell has been flat out terrible this year and a little bit of golfer's elbow doesn't seem to be enough of an injury to explain his struggles. Dumatrait and his 4.66 ERA is probably the most pleasant surprise on the Pirates' staff, which is more than depressing. Still, both of them being reasonably healthy means that John Van Benschoten won't be getting a ton of starts in the near future. Let's be thankful for small favors.

Ian Snell has been having a very bad year this year. We've already hit on this once recently, so I won't go into details, but today he made his second straight four inning start and the short start was a prime reason for the Pirates' 8-4 loss to the Blue Jays today. After the game ended, the Pirates shed some light on Snell's struggles by saying he's going to have his pitching elbow examined tomorrow after some pain during today's game. For his part, Snell wants you to know that whether he's got a serious injury or not, he's been out there trying:

"You've got to show your team you want to be there," Snell said. "It doesn't matter if you're sore or not. I wanted to show my team that I wanted to be out there. Obviously, I didn't have it, and I was still trying to be out there."

He raised his voice slightly.

"I never give up. I don't care if people boo me, tell me I [stink], whatever. You're not going to take my manhood from me or my competitiveness from me. Nobody will ever do that! Ever! Until the day I die, then you take it from me."

Uh, that's a bit of an overreaction to fans booing you for a bad start, is it not? Regardless of whether or not people are trying to take his manhood from him, the Pirates are indicating that Snell's injury is minor, even though he's been battling control issues all year and his velocity seemed to be down today. If Snell is hurt, it would be a pretty big blow to an already awful rotation, as the Bucs just put Phil Dumatrait on the DL today with shoulder issues. Replacing 40% of your rotation in a week is never good news.

With the Pirates still unexpectedly hanging around .500, any hopes of the team staying their probably rests on their outfield of Jason Bay, Xavier Nady, and Nate McLouth. If they decide to ignore their run at .500 and tear things down in favor of the future, Bay and Nady continuing to perform is still important for the Bucs. Because of that, Pirate fans were more than a little nervous after hearing that Nady needed an MRI on the shoulder he hurt after banging into the stands at Camden Yards on Saturday night.

The news from the MRI was pretty good for the Pirates. The oft-injured Nady has a sprained shoulder with no damage to the important parts of the shoulder (rotator cuff, labrum, etc.). Still, the story reads like the team thought about putting him on the disabled list, so the injury is probably nothing to sneeze at.

As mentioned above, the timing of this injury is pretty bad for the Pirates, depending on how serious the sprain is. With Nady facing free agency after 2009, Scott Boras for an agent, and playing a position the Pirates actually have prospects at means he's probably the most likely Bucco to be dealt before July 31st. If he misses a significant amount of time in the next six weeks, his value is going to nosedive.