Sweep.

The Pirates beat the Reds for the 3rd straight day, this time by the tune of a 5-3 victory.

Paul Maholm pitched a great game today, going 6.2 innings and giving up only 2 earned runs on 4 hits; he also struck out 5. At the beginning of the game he was only half of the great pitching story, as Bronson Arroyo put up three 1-2-3 innings to start the game. However, in the 4th inning the Pirates got to him and put a 5-spot on the board thanks to an RBI single from Ryan Church and a 3 RBI double from Jason Jaramillo. It's great to see those guys that are normally on the bench contributing when they get their chance. Joel Hanrahan and Brendan Donnelly teamed up to pitch a scoreless 8th and then Octavio Dotel closed it out and got his 3rd save of the season, despite serving up Jay Bruce's 2nd solo home run of the night.

The Pirates weren't amazingly impressive in this series, but they did well enough to take advantage of some sloppy play by the slumping Reds and win all 3 ballgames. The offense did not perform as well as we would have liked, but that will happen when you are getting next to nothing from your 4 and 5 hitters. Garrett Jones went 1 for 12 this series, although he did drive in 2 runs, while Ryan Doumit had only 1 hit in his 8 at bats. Jones is hitting .209 this year, Doumit is at .216, and they have only 1 extra base hit between them since the first series against the Dodgers. While there's no way to be sure they are going to bounce back and have above-average power numbers this year, they are surely not going to be this dismal for very long. That is good news. Usually when a team's top 2 power hitters go on power outages team struggle mightily, but the Pirates have been doing just fine with their record of 7-5, and they are 5-4 in this long power drought from Jones and Doumit.

A lot of the same is true for the pitching, while it has been good enough to win us 7 ballgames, by no means has it been as good as it can be. Zach Duke has been very solid so far, but everyone else has struggled (with the exception of Maholm today). We don't know what we're going to get out of Daniel McCutchen or whoever else makes starts in the 5 spot, but the other 4 guys in the rotation are certain to be better than they have been together so far.

Things are looking up for the Pirates right now. They haven't played their best baseball, but they are still looking at a nice 7-5 record right now.

The Buccos are off tomorrow, but then start a 3-game set with the hated Milwaukee Brewers at PNC Tuesday night. Probables are as follows:

Tuesday: Dave Bush (0-0, 3.86) vs. Charlie Morton (0-2, 13.50)
Wednesday: Yovani Gallardo (0-2, 5.50) vs. Zach Duke (2-0, 2.37)
Thursday: Randy Wolf (1-1, 4.91) vs. Daniel McCutchen (0-1, 14.73)

I'll be back with more on this series tomorrow. Let's Go Bucs.