The Game

I tuned in the radio in the car at 11:00, after a gig in Greensburg, pleased that the game was in extra innings and that we would be able to listen to it in the car on the way home. It was a great one all right. Zeke is at Laurel for the weekend, and he missed the whole thing. That's a shame; with all that we fans have suffered this season, we deserved to be able to savor this one game. A few random thoughts:

• Jason Bay is a great, great ballplayer.
• Vogelsong was quietly putting together a nice season before this game. Now, it's not so quiet.
• Burnitz is a fine pinch hitter and should remain in that role now that we have discovered his strength. (Yeah, right. -ed) He's indicated during the past week or two that he may have something left and is not as awful as he had been during the first two months. But those first two months had expensive consequences to the team--so no matter what he does for the remainder of the season, bringing him here to replace Craig Wilson was still idiotic.
• When I got home from the gig, we put the game on and I fired up the laptop. That's when I saw that Craig Wilson had finally reached the breaking point. Good for him. The Pirates under Dave Littlefield have proven over the past five years that they can't spot a ballplayer when they see one.
• Another guy who is publicly and vocally irritated with management is Doumit. An interview with Doumit was shown on FSN Pittsburgh after the game, and he was less than enthusiastic about the first base experiment. "I'm a catcher," he said.
  
• That bomb from Castillo! What a moment that was. I'm just sorry that I missed the Burnitz and Bay homers.
  
• Bay probably shouldn't have tried to score on Bautista's shallow fly in the 18th. But in doing so, he created THE moment of the entire season.
  
• What a horrendous loss for the Astros. One of the beautiful things about baseball is the way it tends to even things out over the 162-game schedule and over time frames longer than single seasons. One game like last night's game perpetuates the addiction to the game just when a fan is beginning to think, "You know, I think I've had enough of this. I can really take it or leave it at this point..."