Posts Tagged ‘Astros’

1/2 over.

Monday, July 5th, 2010

I remember a few weeks ago thinking there was over 100 games left to the season. I couldn’t believe that there was so much left. Now that it’s past the half way point it seems like it’s time to get ready for 2011.

So how’s everything going? I’d have to say worse than I expected. Although the past week was pretty good, the Pirates were playing the Cubs and Phillies, two teams in huge declines. Then the rest of this month there are a lot of games against the Astros and Brewers, so the next few weeks shouldn’t be too terrible. After a very rough start for Pedro, he’s started to turn things around the last week. Milledge has picked things up, although he still lacks power. Tabata is doing as well as can be expected for a 21 year old and both McCutchen and Jones continue to do well. What’s really killed the team this year is the starting rotation. The team is getting killed by the 5th inning a lot and then they’re wearing down the bullpen. So clearly, pitching is a problem that needs to be addressed by the start of next season.

I think that JR actually made a good point last week. The Pirates are making a lot of mistakes due to youth and inexperience. If they can avoid that, then maybe they can have a decent second half.

Meanwhile, like I predicted before the season, the Reds and Cardinals are leading the division, although both the Brewers and Cubs aren’t doing as well as I thought they would and the Astros are doing better than I thought they would.

The big problem with the Cubs is that they’re old. Looking at their starting 8, only two are under 30 right now, Geovanny Soto and Starlin Castro. Besides Castro, they are an aging team that’s only going to get worse as they get older. And even worse, they aren’t going to be able to trade most of the guys on the team as a lot of them have huge contracts that last a long time. The Cubs went all in for 2007 and 2008 and now they’re reaping the consequences of not planning long term past 2008. Also Carlos Zambrano is being a bit of a jack ass, which doesn’t help anything. However they did get lucky with Carlos Silva, but that isn’t going to last forever either.

Overall, right now, I think the Pirates have a much brighter future than the Cubs do at this point.

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Mets already in Mid-Season sucking form?

Wednesday, April 14th, 2010

Some thoughts from the first week in baseball. Of course it’s early and there’s something about small sample size that can fool you, but I think one week can tell you a lot about the coming season.

1. The Mets suck. Even though they threw money away on Jason Bay, they still suck. Dur.

2. The Astros are the worst team in baseball this year. I think the fight to stay out of last place in the NL Central will be a dog fight and it’ll be one the Pirates win and the Astros lose. The Astros are terrible. They’re without Lance Berkman and their pitching has been terrible. The only guy so far who’s actually carrying his weight with the bat is Michael Bourn (not good). They’ve walked a total of 5 times and have struck out 50 times. They’ve hit a total of 2 home runs (Garrett Jones has more than that). Meanwhile, Roy Oswalt is the only starter who’s performing. Otherwise, they’ve given up 42 runs in 62 innings. The Pirates might be bad, but I think the Astros are worse.

3. The Atlanta Braves are good, but probably not good enough to be a playoff team. Likewise, Jason Heyward is probably gonna live up to the hype.

4. I still think that the Reds are this year’s sleeper team. I think they’re gonna contend to get in to the playoffs if not make it. They’re certainly better than the Cubs.

5. As for the Pirates, they could be a good team if their top 4 starters can get it together and all pitch deep in to games with low pitch counts. I think the hitting is gonna be good enough to be National League average. And while some of the pitching suckiness can be blamed on “The Mustache of Sadness” and not having a true fifth starter since Kevin Hart can barely muster pitching a AAA game at this point, I think the Pirates are going to have a tough season scoring enough to make up for their obvious pitching deficiencies. As much as Smizik and others have focused a lot of time and complaining on hitting, it’s the pitching that’s probably gonna make the 2010 season another long season.

Also, watching the Judge Judy from yesterday made me glad that when I rented a limo for Sean’s wedding that I rented from a real company that had more than 1 limo and the driver wasn’t an old man who didn’t know where the spare tire was and all that. Although, getting the trolly stuck at Eric’s wedding was pretty fun. Although, looking back, I wonder if it was a good idea to pay them all in advance, it doesn’t sound like SOP.

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Week 1 and the Pirates win!

Monday, September 14th, 2009

The Lions march on with another loss and they are now at 18 games in a row and are 1-24 since that mirage of a 6-2 start in 2007. Magic numbers, 8 more to tie the record and 9 more to get the record.

The Steelers won on Thursday. That’s very redundant. :-)

The Packers prove that the Bears really got nothing in Jay Cutler. Talk about pissing draft picks away on that guy. There’s still a lot of season left, but I have a feeling that the Bears fans won’t be raising any beers to Jay Cutler in the years to come.

The Vikings won, but the real story there wasn’t Brett Favre, it was Adrian Peterson. The Vikings are clearly the early favorite to win the NFC North, but I doubt Brett Favre will be as big of a help as the Vikings would like to think he will be. The Vikings already had a good team when Favre showed up. And the Browns lost. Brownies being Brownies.

And the big story from yesterday, the Bungles were up 7-6 against the Broncos with about 25 seconds left. The Broncos had the ball with 87 yards to get a TD, not much of a chance for the Broncos at that point. Kyle Orton, the QB the Broncos got from the Bears threw a pass that essentially hit a group of Bengals and a Bronco, bounced up in the air and looked like it’d fall incomplete when the Broncos Brandon Stockley caught it and ran untouched for the TD and the win. Bungles being Bungles. Damn shame the Ravens won.

Mr. September, Tony Romo, helped the Cowboys win. The 49er’s dropped the Super Bowl Cardinals. The Rams will go in to week 2 looking for their first points of the season. And the Astros announcers didn’t say who scored first yesterday, the Astros or Texans, as the Texans took until the 4th quarter to get their first TD.

As for the Pirates, who were 1-14 and had lost 13 straight road games, they pulled off a nice win yesterday. McCutchen got the first run in the first inning and later on Doumit came up big time with a solo shot that put the Pirates up 2-0. Maholm had a very nice game as well. John Russell continues to go “by the book” with Matt Capps and put him in save situations. I’m not sure who else he could go with, but Capps hasn’t been that strong this year with the closing job. Sure, he’s 24 for 28, but he’s lost some big games this year. So, Capps gave up a solo shot to Lance Berkman (big surprise). A few minutes later, he had one on, one out when Hunter Pence hit a ball right at Capps who started the double play. Lucky they got that as Hunter Pence was probably safe at 1st. Umpires being umpires. Oh well, on to Mannywood and the Dodgers. If the Pirates keep it up, they’ll give the Dodgers some breathing room against the Rockies.

The Cardinals dropped a series against the Braves. Not good, their magic number is 11 at this point, which is the lowest in baseball still. Hopefully, they’ll be able to take some games from the Marlins and the Cubs won’t get anywhere with the Brewers this week.

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