I don't have much time right now, but I realized there won't be much time to reflect on tonight's game tomorrow since it's an early start, so I just wanted to say a few things quickly.
Tonight was a great win for the Pirates. We got a solid outing from Paul Maholm, some good early hitting from Andrew McCutchen, Garrett Jones, and Akinori Iwamura, some great bullpen work from Evan Meek and Brendan Donnelly, some fantastic late hitting to add the 2 insurance runs that proved to win us the game by Andy LaRoche and Ryan Church, and then just enough from Octavio Dotel to get out of there with a victory.
I can't stress enough the importance of LaRoche's 9th inning blast. Andy has been terrible thus far, and it was extremely good to see him hit a ball hard, and he hit that one extra hard. Seeing Andy crush a ball gave Ryan Church all the more confidence to go up there swinging, and he drove one to right center and wound up with a triple, then eventually scored the game-winning run. While you can't say that those 2 runs were the difference between a win and a loss, because Dotel might have pitched differently if they were only up by 1, it sure was huge tonight.
The Pirates hit the ball early, got some runs on the board, and then completely shut down through the middle part of the game, but were able to bounce back and score again late, which we haven't seen a lot of this year. The Pirates have been a very streaky and inconsistent offensive team so far, and tonight was a very positive outing for the team.
Tomorrow the Pirates take on the Giants in the rubber match of the series at 3:30, the matchup is Charlie Morton vs. Jonathan Sanchez.
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