Winning Streak

The Pirates played a good baseball game today and bested the Cleveland Indians for the 2nd consecutive night, this time by the score of 5-3. The offense came from a lot of different places. Garrett Jones and Bobby Crosby were the only Pirates to record more than 1 hit, while Lastings Milledge and Pedro Alvarez were the only Pirates to not record one. Alvarez did have a key sacrifice fly in the 8th inning that put the Pirates up for good.

Brad Lincoln started today's game and was pretty mediocre, despite getting his first career quality start. Lincoln got hit hard and often, giving up 8 hits in his 6 innings. The hits were pretty scattered and a couple of key defensive plays helped his day look better in the stat sheet than it actually was. Like I said, there were numerous balls hit very hard off Lincoln, including 3 from Indians new phenom catcher Carlos Santana. Lincoln struck out only 2 batters but walked only 1. His fastball is straight as an arrow and doesn't get much harder than 93 mph, it's gonna be hard to be effective with that pitch if it doesn't start moving more or traveling a little bit faster. The velocity isn't something that it easy (or sometimes possible at all) to increase, so maybe Kerrigan could work with Brad on getting a little more movement on the fastball, even though most of that is just natural so it might be tough. If Lincoln is going to succeed in the big leagues he is going to have to locate that pitch extremely well and be able to execute his changeup when he needs to. The curveball is good he just really needs to learn when to use it and how to set it up. All-in-all, there were some encouraging signs from Lincoln and I'm looking forward to hit next start (which should be next Saturday against the Oakland Athletics).

The offensive production has jumped by nearly a half of a run since Wednesday, when Pedro Alvarez made his debut, and even though he hasn't directly had an impact on that run production, his presence seems to be helping the team score. Having Neil Walker and Garrett Jones hit like they have been hitting helps too. Once Pedro gets going, look out, the Pirates are going to be a ton of fun to watch. So here goes the fourth PIRATES WITH PEDRO OFFENSIVE IMPROVEMENT REPORT: