Festooned, if you will, in their red weekend uniform tops, the Pirates again vaguely looked like busboys last night and were again very much at the service of whatever National League team happened to wander into the swanky North Side bistro, in this case the Los Angeles Dodgers.

You add suspenders and some wacky oversized buttons as adornments on those things and it would be very hard not to ask Zach Duke for some nachos and a cold one.

Duke gave away a 1-0 lead, a 2-1 lead, and, after Chris Duffy's two-run triple tied the score in the fourth, handed the lead right back to Los Angeles by bringing out something Russell Martin found delicious enough to pound over the center-field fence.

You wanna see a desert menu?

Coffee?

But Duke only works every fifth game, so he shouldn't be the focus of this essay, which deals essentially with the principle element keeping the 2007 Pirates from being certifiably decent -- hey, not talent.

No cracks.

It's the way they play at home. Dreadfully.

The Dodgers are here to start the 10th home series of the season. The Pirates have won exactly one of them, letting a second vanish at the hands of demoted closer Salomon Torres Thursday night. While homestand ineptitude falls short of the threshold of breaking news around here, particularly the TV variety, it's more vital this summer because of the club's mirror image. This second Jim Tracy edition is actually a highly competent road team, one with a 13-14 record. Were these Pirates matching that with anything close to competence in Pittsburgh, the holy grail of .500 baseball would be at hand.

"Some of the problems at home have come in situations late in games," Tracy said at the start of a four-game set against his former employers. "In fact most of the difficulty as I review our home schedule has been in situations in which we had a 2-0 lead against the St. Louis Cardinals on the first homestand, a tied game against the Cardinals in the same series, a seventh-inning lead that got away against the Chicago Cubs, a seventh-inning lead that got away against the Arizona Diamondbacks, and a 2-0 lead that got away in the ninth inning against the San Diego Padres."

Oh, so that's why they're 10-17 in this building at the start of another fast-curdling homestand.

While Tracy's basic sense of things seems to indict an increasingly squishy bullpen, the truth is much broader. In approximately 6¹/₃ summers at PNC Park, the Pirates have won 241 games and lost 270. Put another way, the all-time winningest pitcher at PNC Park is ... go ahead, guess.

Josh Fogg.

Josh Fogg! He was 19-18 here. In what seemed like 19 seasons.

Though they managed to win 43 games at home last year, they've not played a third of the 2007 without ever looking terribly comfortable at home, particularly in the batter's box.

Jason Bay, so hot right now he could put a good swing on a slider in a darkened broom closet, rifled his ninth homer last night to almost the exact spot he hit his eighth Tuesday -- the opposite field. Could it be that the Pirates' right-handed hitters have grown weary of trying to leave the yard along the capacious left-field perimeter.

"I think the way we've played a home is just the early trend, more a matter of who we've faced a home and which pitchers, teams with good bullpens like the Dodgers and the Padres," said leadoff man Jose Bautista, who was on base thrice last night but is well off his 16-homer pace of last year. "We've been in most of the games at home. We just haven't gotten a hit at the right time in some of them. We've had a lot of chances."

Some of the Pirates' home-field disadvantage would be ameliorated if Adam LaRoche hadn't made it to his June 2 bobblehead night with just five homers, because PNC Park would appear to be very inviting to his smooth left-handed swing. Bay, on the other hand, might always hit better for distance in other locales. His third-inning dinger last night was only his third at home this year. Twenty-two of his 35 homers last year came on the road, as have 64 of his career homers against 42 at home.

Tracy insists a timely hit or two would completely refocus this discussion, but there were simply none to be had last night after the fourth inning. The Dodgers went to 25-0 when they lead after seven innings, and the Pirates got within one loss of another failed homestand.