RMJ 215 September 18
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 18 ● Pittsburgh, vs Pirates
If there is anything worth seeing in downtown Pittsburgh, it has somehow escaped me these 32 years.
This trip, I wasn’t looking for diversions anyway. Baseball is the only thing now, and the baseball was just as bad tonight as it was good last night. The way the Pirates have been mimicking us in the second half, I should have expected it.
Our first batter, Craig Biggio, struck out on three pitches. We went out 1-2-3. Their first batter, Tony Womack, fouled off four 3-2 pitches and finally walked. They went 1-2-3 too: three runs in the first inning off our ace pitcher, Darryl Kile. They beat Pedro Martinez a few days ago, showing no favoritism for one Cy Young candidate or the other.
Kile never recovered from the first inning. His Cy Young dream got a sudden wakeup call. I think it may help him if writers quit asking him about the award — which they won’t.
| Pitching | IP | H | R | ER | BB | SO | HR | ERA |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Darryl Kile, L (18-7) | 5 | 6 | 8 | 6 | 5 | 2 | 0 | 2.55 |
We finally got a hit off Francisco Cordova. With the nine no-hit innings he pitched after the All-Star break, and the first three innings of this game, he had a 12-inning hitless string going against us.
Bill Spiers touched him for a homer in the fourth. That made it 4-1, and the guys started chirping in the dugout. It was all bark and no bite, however. We lost the game 12-3.
I suppose you could look at the loss a couple of ways.
When we arrived in the Land of Three Rivers, our goal was to win one game. We achieved that goal and stayed on course, but we failed to deliver what could have been the knockout punch. Now we have to keep winning.
It all comes down to pitching; it always does.
Winning two of the four games in Cincinnati will probably be sufficient, if the Cardinals have any luck at all in Pittsburgh. But two of four may not be easy.
It all comes down to pitching; it always does. When we are stingy with runs, we play with confidence. But when we start giving it up, we panic: we try for the miracle throw or the perfect pitch. I guess it is because we know we don’t have the firepower to come back from a large deficit.
Whatever the reason, we played desperate baseball tonight. And that is no way to win a division, much less win a playoff series.
This could be a good thing for us, if it serves as a reality check — a gut check. The music and banter in the clubhouse before the game was riotous. Perhaps we were too confident. The Pittsburgh Gazette proclaimed the Pirates dead.
Take it from me: they have arisen.
One positive note: I talked with Biggio, Spiers, Ausmus, and Gutierrez before the game. Bill Virdon and Cubby were with me. We discussed the seventh inning last night, and how we shut down our running game. Everyone but Ausmus agreed that things got a little hairy in the ninth — that we could have used the extra two runs we could have scored by running full-out. Even Brad agreed that we should have run harder.
The meeting had a positive feel for me, mostly because I got support from Biggio. He has such a strong personality that he can be a tough guy to manage. Having him admit that we probably should have been running on the 3-2 count in the seventh inning told me that he is accepting criticism in the spirit that it is intended: not as an insult, but as food for thought.
Bill made a point that everyone agreed with.
“We’re not always going to be right,” he said. “Larry won’t. I won’t. You won’t, either. But we have to stay together — right or wrong. If we are together, we will overcome a lot of our mistakes. If we aren’t together, we’re not a team.”