Blew Another One | Cubs 7 Pirates 6

All the talk tonight has been about Clint Hurdle and his poor game management. It's hard not to agree with the criticism when Hurdle brings in Daniel McCutchen to pitch the 8th with a 2-run lead, and then watches him load the bases only to bring in Joe Beimel and Jason Grilli, who blow the lead. After that, Hurdle brings in Jose Veras, who gets 3 straight outs, and Joel Hanrahan throws a scoreless 9th and the Pirates don't score again and lose their 7th straight. Ouch.

I'm not going to sit here and trash Hurdle, I kind of did that last night in my bunts post. This is tough right now, there's no doubt about it. Nothing is going right, and right when you think the Pirates are going to bust out of it, they find a way to lose. It really stinks when your manager doesn't make the logical decisions and those are the things that cost you the win.

There's no way of saying what would happen if one variable is changed, so let's not dwell on that stuff for now.

The Pirates got all 6 of their runs in a 6-hit 4th inning. James McDonald led the charge with a 3-RBI double that cleared the bases. He also pitched very well, except for 3 pitches, which all left the yard (alright, he probably made more than 3 bad pitches, but all the damage was done on those ones).

The good news was that Garrett Jones and Ryan Doumit both collected 2 hits, Ryan Ludwick got his first hit as a Pirate, and Pedro Alvarez continued his hitting streak with a 1/4 night (he also did not strike out).

It was really unfortunate that McDonald gave up those 3 home runs, because he seriously pitched pretty well besides that fact. He went 7 innings and threw just 99 pitches without walking a batter. He struck out only 3, which was a factor of attacking the strike zone more often. Outings like this are encouraging despite the 4 runs he gave up. Let's just hope that the home runs don't stick in his head and keep him from attacking the strike zone like he did tonight. It's good to see him go deep into a game and I'm still expecting really good things from him the rest of the way out.

So two consecutive nights with starting pitching good enough to win you a ballgame, and the offense and bullpen don't back it up. This is just the kind of stuff that happens on a 7-game losing streak.

The Pirates pretty much have to roll off a big winning streak soon if they want to stay anywhere near this NL Central race. Even if they don't, however, this season has already been a success in my book. It would be excellent to finish above .500 and end this stupid streak and then take even more steps closer to the playoffs next year. I'm not writing this team off by any means this year, but I just don't see how people can be so negative. The fact that you even have emotions over a baseball team in Pittsburgh at this point in the year shows that you should be happy about what has happened this summer.

There's another game tomorrow, let's hope we win it.