Astros 7-11 over last three weeks

How have the Astros gone 7-11 over the last three weeks?

Lance Berkman and Jeff Kent have been top notch. Both these guys have been crushing the ball.

Adam Everett has been average at the plate, which is good for him; they'll take his recent 0.292 / 0.338 / 0.444 performance and like it. Morgan Ensberg is hitting a lot of singles (0.309 / 0.339 / 0.364). Brad Ausmus has been Brad Ausmus.

Craig Biggio and Jeff Bagwell have been pretty awful. Biggio is going 0.238 / 0.256 / 0.350 over his last 80 plate appearances - basically, dating back to his 2,500th hit on May 9th. He has cooled off after a hot start, and he'll probably cool off some more given his age and overall level of performance the past few years. Bagwell is suffering at the plate, hitting an uncharacteristic 0.254 / 0.346 / 0.403 over his last 76 plate appearances. No word that he's injured so I guess he's just plain scuffling.

Richard Hidalgo has been a big zero at 0.167 / 0.270 / 0.204 in his last 62 PAs. Again, no word that he's injured so I guess it's a slump. With Biggio, Bagwell, and Hidalgo not producing, I'm surprised Jason Lane has only managed 12 PAs in the last 21 days.

In the rotation, Clemens, Redding, and Pettitte have been outstanding. Oswalt has been above average. Wade Miller has been throwing batting practice: opponents have been hitting 0.317 / 0.398 / 0.598 off him. Clearly, something ain't right there.

Brad Lidge has been the best in their bullpen, but he is somehow responsible for two losses in the last three weeks. Dotel has been solid. Brandon Backe has been torched and the rest of the crew has been average.

If we must identify scapegoats for the recent win/loss record, I guess they'd have to be the slumping studs and Wade Miller.

NL Central 21-day standings

Here's what has been happening the last three weeks (all games played between May 10 and May 30). More on these records in a minute.

	W	L	PCT
Cincinnati	13	6	0.684
Pittsburgh	11	6	0.647
Milwaukee	10	7	0.588
St. Louis	10	7	0.588
Chicago	8	10	0.444
Houston	7	11	0.389

Cardinals for four

Looks like Marquis, Suppan, Carpenter, and Williams - a steady diet of right-handers - at PNC this week to close the homestand. The Pirates counter with Benson, Vogelsong, Wells, and Oliver Perez. You have to wonder if Vogelsong won't be looking at a roster squeeze if he pitches not so good on Tuesday and the Bucs decide to hold onto Sean Burnett. There's no way you run Ryan out against the Cubs again, I think, not if you can avoid it at least.

As a team, the Bucs have a 1.089 OPS against Marquis, so maybe they'll get it going today.

Randall Simon and Jason Kendall have some crooked numbers against Jeff Suppan but those numbers don't really mean anything since they are close enough to average to fall with the MOE for a sample that small. Still, expect Simon to start on Tuesday.

No one has seen Chris Carpenter and he's been excellent this year. Jason Kendall owns Woody Williams so maybe he'll bat third on Thursday's finale.

the June draft

Neil Walker anyone?

Jeremy Sowers? Scott Elbert?

Burnett

Next Sunday against the Cubs might be a good time to start Sean Burnett again. That would keep the Bucs from using Ryan Vogelsong against the Cubs again.

Prior healthy

And it looks like he'll start against the Pirates next weekend at Wrigley. Be the best beat the best etc etc.

Not good

The team is only as good as its most recent game.

We'll say the same thing about home plate umpire Jack Samuels, who warned both benches that another HBP would warrant an ejection. Zambrano, one of the league's most notorious hotheads, went on to hit Daryle Ward - those two guys had been jawing at each other on the basepaths - and no ejection. Then Mike Johnston hits a Cub and Samuels tosses both Johnston and McClendon. That should be the last time MLB leans on that minor-league umpire in a pinch. It doesn't excuse the loss, not by a long stretch, but it's pretty pathetic when the umps huddle up every time someone protests and then the home plate guy can't apply his own rules consistently.

Bucs lead NL in OBP

Not quite, but third is good. What's up with the Cardinals being down there at .331? Is this some kind of Tony Womack effect?

Do we offend?

Bucs lead the NL in HBP.

NCAA softball

Thanks to Bryan for reminding me to blog how great the NCAA softball games were last week on ESPN (I watched a lot of TV on vacation in my cheering-induced stupor).

Fantasy baseball could be taken to a whole new level with an eight-team league of professional women softball players. (Yes, I'm thinking about that Anna Kournikova commercial from a few years back.) Pittsburgh needs a professional team of lady softball players. I don't want the lingerie bowl - I want these college players and serious, competitive play.

Set-up studs and wishful thinking

Is it really smart to use your best reliever as a set-up guy? Something about the way people are spinning Dusty Baker's decision to use Joe Borowski with a lead strikes me as wishful thinking. This isn't the only place I've heard that line of argument so don't excoriate me if that's not exactly what that article says. (Thanks to the Clark & Addison guys for that link, BTW.)

Manager does something that is stupid or questionable, and everyone turns it upside down to praise it as something smart. This happens a lot with the Cubs. If it was Lloyd McClendon, no one would bend over backwards to argue that it was a smart move. Instead they'd damn him as a moron who continues to use Borowski with a lead. McClendon prefers Simon to Craig Wilson (in Wilson's can't hit breaking pitches phase). National media: McClendon is a moron who should be fired. Baker prefers Eric Karros to Hee Seop Choi (in Choi's can't hit breaking pitches phase). National media: Dusty Baker is a genius. I'm overstating the case here but the basic observation holds I think.

Explain to me, how is using Hawkins first necessarily tied to using Borowski in high-leverage situations at all? It's two separate issues. If using Hawkins (or Betancourt, over in Cleveland) in tie and slim lead situations is smart, why does that mean that it's smart to use Borowski an inning or two later?

P.S. Speaking of wishful thinking, check out this essay explaining how Borowski is really a stud. We can play the same game with any high-profile relief pitcher. Last night when Mesa came on with a four-run lead, I says to Mrs. Rowdy, "watch Mesa make this look hard." He has a reputation for being volatile when used in non-save situations, and sure enough he came through last night. But you won't hear me going on about how we have to throw those stats out when we assess his overall quality as a ballplayer.

Make every moment matter. Better said:

To finish the moment, to find the journey's end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom. It is not the part of men, but of fanatics, or of mathematicians, if you will, to say, that, the shortness of life considered, it is not worth caring whether for so short a duration we were sprawling in want, or sitting high. Since our office is with moments, let us husband them. Five minutes of today are worth as much to me, as five minutes in the next millennium. Let us be poised, and wise, and our own, today. Let us treat the men and women well: treat them as if they were real: perhaps they are. Men live in their fancy, like drunkards whose hands are too soft and tremulous for successful labor. It is a tempest of fancies, and the only ballast I know, is a respect to the present hour.

Let's go Bucs.

Sergio Mitre

This was news to me. Are the Cubs really showcasing Sergio Mitre for a trade? Is that why they're giving him so many starts? I thought it had something to do with the history of Glendon Rusch and Jimmy Anderson. And the lack of better options.

SportsCenter and the internet

I don't often watch ESPN's SportsCenter or Baseball Tonight. In theory, watching either program sounds like a great idea. In practice, I don't have time for it. I'm a busy guy, and so much experience with the Internet makes me too impatient to sit for an hour to learn what I can learn with three minutes and any of the major online papers. My impatience is such that I prefer USAToday's quick-loading scoreboard to the prettier and more overloaded ESPN scoreboard, though the ESPN page is the way to go sometimes for sure. I have a killer broadband connection except when I'm on the road, too, so we're talking about some serious impatience - half-seconds of delay will cause me to look for more immediate gratification on another site.

To be sure, I'm not ADD or anything like it. I have the attention span of a tortoise. What I want is efficiency, not speed. Why turn on the TV to sit through an hour of commercials and random (but predictable) highlights when I can get what I want in a few minutes on the Internet? You can only watch so many diving catches (and if someone is going to report to me about a diving catch, I'd rather see it re-enacted live than watch a tape of what it looked like from the TV booth).

When radio was king in the WWII era few people thought it would ever be marginalized to the extent that it is today. Television immediately gripped viewers and clearly offered something more than radio. It's not going away, but the internet is going to change it and what it does the same way that TV changed radio and what it does. The nature of these changes is such that I don't think there's much of a future for shows like Baseball Tonight. The internet will provide what that show offers in a much more tailored and efficient form.

I've never used TiVo, and if that becomes commonplace, maybe shows like Baseball Tonight will continue to thrive if they index themselves in some more predictable fashion. If they always spent two minutes on the Buccos, and if those two minutes were easy to find - say within ten seconds - I'd be hooked. Otherwise, I'm not going to sit around for forty minutes to see a video replay of Tike Redman's diving catch.

All that said, I did tune into SportsCenter early Saturday morning and I was tremendously pleased to see Rob Mackowiak and our two huge wins as the lead item. That did provide a kind of satisfaction I didn't expect and rarely get from television, and it does incline me to watch again some time soon. National media is pretty cool when your team is the center of national attention.

Bob Smizik loves Aramis Ramriez

As much as I respect Bob Smizik's work, the man is irrationally infatuated with Aramis Ramirez. I'm not saying Aramis is a bad player, but it's a little early to frame last summer's trade as something like the Red Sox trading away Babe Ruth.

And I take issue with his assertion, often repeated, that the Ramirez trade sent a message to all Pirates fans that the Pirates were not interested in winning. That's his interpretation. It's not like Littlefield read an announcement titled, "We don't want to win," the day he announced the trade. It's not a fact. That's Smizik's interpretation. He got that message from that trade.

I said good riddance, see you later, thanks for all the memories. And I for one thought it was pretty good to sneak Bobby Hill away from Dusty Baker's Cubs. Just because he was a PTBNL doesn't mean he wasn't a key to the deal. I thought he was the PTBNL because the Pirates wanted to make sure he came back to play from that back injury. And I also thought Littlefield did a good job of playing down Hill's value - this is something that I do when I make big trades in my roto leagues. "Oh, and by the way," I said last January, "why don't you throw in Khalil Greene and we'll call it even."

Maybe I'm a fool. Certainly I say and do all kinds of foolish things. But at least I understand that this is my interpretation of the deal. Smizik should stop insisting that all Pirates fans everywhere understood the Ramirez trade as an admission that the team was not at all interested in winning in the long term. I think that reading is unduly pessimisstic and I don't share it. And I know plenty of other Pirates fans who were equally frustrated with Ramirez's play in Pittsburgh. It ain't right to keep writing as though all Pirates fans think dealing Ramirez for "nothing" means only that the Pirates ownership is not interested in winning in the long-term as well as the short-term.

Pirates finishing above .500?

The Trib has a poll. Go take it.

Nice to see more than 50% of all Bucco fans agreeing with my once-ridiculous and often-ridiculed prediction that the Bucs would finish with 83 wins.

Magic

The magic's not in the pills or beans or serums, it's in the babies. Any parent will tell you that.

Bucco minor league talent

I recommend Steve Novotney's run-down. It sucks that J.R. House went down right at the same time as Cota.

Power numbers steady

Duh, they keep hitting. Why does the public think more regulation of the private lives of baseball players is a good idea? Just because they make a lot of money doesn't mean that we have the right to test their pee and find out everything they ate over the last twenty-four hours. They aren't public servants; they are not our slaves; we do not own them; they deserve all the rights and privileges of any free citizen in this our great democracy.

If you are going to ban all performance-enhancing drugs, you better start with caffeine. I for one could never do my job without several daily performance-enhancing drugs. The other day, finishing a big job under deadline, I even cracked open a can of Red Bull. To single out one substance, call it "performance-enhancing," and ban it on the grounds that it improves performance is one thing, but to do that selectively and to not begin with the most obvious and most commonplace drugs is worse than hypocritical. It's stupid.

Anyone who thinks there's a magic home-run hitting drug is a fool who should examine the history of drugs in America before they humiliate themselves further. There's no pill or serum that adds muscle with no work. Ball players put a lot of time in the weight room and it's possible much of any performance-enhancing drug's potency is due to the placebo effect. Even if a player bulks up, that doesn't mean the additional muscles are going to translate into improved performance. Go ask Marty Cordova.

I can understand regulating drugs, especially if that regulation successfully restricts the access of minors to those drugs. I can't understand believing that Barry Bonds is the best hitter in the history of the game only because he took some magic pill or shot up some magic serum. That makes just as much sense as suspecting him of selling his soul to ol' Scratch.

Commish says drugs will be rooted out

Story here.

We'll do this right after we send a man to Mars and put a stop to all cheating on income taxes.

Four games out

Good morning. It's fun to win with Josh Fogg as your starter.

Welcome back, Jimmy Anderson.

37,806 fans came out to PNC tonight. That would qualify as a sell-out I believe.

The Pirates are four games out of first place.

It's a regular mardi gras around here tonight. Bones said something about starting a Rob Mackowiak parade. We'll see about that. In the meantime I'm headed outside to re-enact that diving catch by Tike Redman for friends and family. Cheers!