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Just a short note to try and get this blog going.. David Price is looking good through 5.. his velocity still isn’t back but he’s starting to get better feel for his slider. I’m guessing he’s working through arm fatigue and has been for a month or two now and you have to wonder if the Rays need to back off on him some? More later.. maybe Saturday.. as I need to continue to work on cleaning the Pirates rot off this place as well as to upgrade the blog’s software.
Get the hell out of the way, I’m dusting off the Bucco Blog typset.. obviously the mission isn’t over. And, how the heck does Bud Selig even allow this deal to go through? (edit 7/30/09 at 7:00 PM: I was happy with the Wilson/Sanchez deals to free up some money to the Bucs but to dump a pitcher not yet in arb off (Gorzelanny) for a bunch of crap like we just did pisses me off more than anything. Obviously what I thought was a rebirth, was actually the afterbirth. Bucco Blog lives.) Bucco Blog’s original mission statement as posted in January 2006:
Over the years I did my best as a fan to impact change instead of sitting around whining in discussion forums. My goal was simple – to help to build an educated fan base while seeking change. Today’s trades pretty much signals an end to our current two-year rebuilding process which, although not perfect by any means, at least allowed this historically rich organization to give their quality stock away have a chance of competing again one day soon. I call it the rebirth afterbirth of the Pittsburgh Pirates organization. We still have a lot of hard work to do and we still have a lot of question marks in our short and long-term plans, but we can wake up tomorrow knowing that, finally, this ship has started to rise from the bottom of the ocean floor and is now crumbling at our feet. Competitive play is right around the corner. That being said, this will be my last post at Bucco Blog since my mission is complete. Starting August 1st I’ll be opening a new blog which won’t be an agenda ridden rag like Bucco has been all these years. Instead, since I’ll be back riding the circuit starting this winter snitching out our brass and able to concentrate more on our players in the system for you. It will be a lot more fun since it now has meaning with our new direction. I’ll link to the new blog from here once it’s up. Until August 1st, peace! – For those wondering about my take on the Sanchez/Wilson trades, I think Alderson and Clement are the two main pieces and the rest are guys I hope that can contribute down the road. Huntington did a good job in those two deals. No looking back now – let’s look forward.
Finally, an end to the “spoiled rotten brat era” in Pittsburgh! I’m so happy I could cry. Really, I mean that. I don’t care if we go -50 runs defensively at middle defense, I don’t care if we lose 150 games - some things just have to be done and getting rid of the stink known as Jack Wilson was one of those things. The game is tied 1-1 in the 6th and I’m bailing since I have to get up early. We’ve had a lot of opportunities to score some runs but just haven’t popped off a clutch hit (or bunt.. Morton up two times to sacrifice runners over and six attempts could put the bat on the ball. His body language says he needs to be swinging away because he’s scared to death.) Morton’s doing a better job keeping the ball in the zone this outing. He looked like he was losing his arm slot in the 5th but got out of it so it will be interesting to see in the morning how much farther he goes. In previous outings when he started to get fatigued he lost the plate more, lost his focus, then got hit harder. – The chatter is picking up on several players as Dejan has been reporting. I don’t have a handle on these deals other than what I heard a few days ago.. there was a club interested in expanding a simple trade to a three-team deal with several of our guys going out the door but that seemed to die a slow death in the circuit. Regardless, what has had me stumped is that I thought both Sanchez and Wilson were done deals last weekend but then we went into wait mode for some reason (I assumed it was for MLB approval). We’ve just endured being shutout nineteen straight innings, managing just thirteen hits and sixteen strike outs along the way. That’s what I call being totally dominated. Weird, neither of the pitchers we faced over the weekend were throwing dominating stuff. Davis was all over the place and hanging off speed stuff like new pictures on his wall, and Scherzer was throwing straight heat right down the pike and mixing a change up here and there. Both pitchers seemed to be more than hittable but starting Saturday we had collectively lost the edge.. the intensity.. the will. Funny thing, that’s when Wilson came back. Sure it’s a coincidence, but I’d lie to you if I didn’t say it’s hard to honestly believe that considering every aspect of our game all of a sudden shut down. Poor approaches at the plate, pitiful defense, stupid game management, bizarre in-game management decisions, sloppy coaching.. nothing was working. Nothing. I mean, no excuses, we were just handed an old fashion butt whipping. Let’s move on. wow – wow – wow. It started becoming evident in the Brewers series and continued forward in the D’backs series – Ryan Doumit is a horrible game caller. Horrible. It was nice to see that he had worked on his blocking skills while on the DL, but what Kerrigan – trade ‘em both Neal – should have been doing with the young man is schooling him on batter mechanics, pitch counts, and body language of batters in the box. I was so sick of watching doubled up pitches in Friday night’s game I was hoping Kerrigan took him aside and straightened him out, but obviously that didn’t happen. I also didn’t like Doumit yanking his glove from the zone after receiving front-door breaking balls against left handers by Duke. Clearly some where on the black but every time Doumit shot out of his squat removing the potential call from Duke. Saturday night was much the same thing – just worse. You would have thought Doumit learned what batters like by watching them in Friday’s game but he kept calling for pitches opposing batters feed off (ie: fastballs to youngins), he kept asking for poor location which aided batters (ie: wanting low and away two-seamers to left hand batters), and he kept doubling and tripling up on pitches so much my head swam. Continue reading » Pull the triggers Neal.. no extensions; Ugly loss Notice that new swagger our young Bucs are playing with? There’s a reason why. Let me use someone elses words to describe the feeling:
It is imperative that Neal Huntington continue scraping off the cultural rot holding this ship back if we ever want to see her gain speed again. Imperative. We have to deal Wilson, have to deal Sanchez, and have to deal Snell. It was a nice game Saturday night. The D’backs scored their first run on our defense in the second when, with two outs, Moss left his feet on a Tracy fly ball that was dropping fast. It was an agressive play by Moss that normally I wouldn’t mind so much but Moss was ten feet from the ball even with the dive so he simply made a poor decision. |
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