The 36,418 fans at sold out PNC Park tonight very well could have had their collective souls fixed on two things during the 2 hours, 31 minutes the Pirates played host to the National League East leading New York Mets:

• The will he/won't he saga playing out until midnight involving the signing of the Pirates' top draft pick, Pedro Alvarez.

• Or they might have been counting down the seconds until the SkyBlast fireworks shot from the barges floating in the Allegheny.

If their attention was diverted to either of those two -- or a mixture of both -- they missed an admirable effort by Pirates starter Jason Davis that was upstaged by even better outing by Mets starter Mike Pelfrey. And all of it added up to a 2-1 Pirates loss.

Davis' beginning looked inauspicious; he gave up three hard-hit singles right out of the gate. In his second start since being called up from Indianapolis, Davis lumbered through 23 first-inning pitches and permitted the Mets to take a 2-0 lead after that first inning on a David Wright RBI single and a wild pitch that allowed Argenis Reyes to trot home.

From there Davis settled down, retiring the next eight Mets batters in order and not yielding another hit until there was one out in the fifth.

Pittsburgh Baseball Club

Updates as Major League Baseball's deadline to sign draft picks approaches at the PBC blog with Dejan Kovacevic and Paul Meyer.

There was one big problem, though.

For as well as Davis was throwing, his righthanded counterpart Pelfrey, who advanced to 11-8, was sharp from the outset.

Pelfrey didn't have that tough, early inning. Instead, he roared into the fifth working ahead in the count time and again, constructing an efficient effort wherein only one Pirate -- Jason Michaels in the fifth -- reached as far as second base.

The Mets still held that 2-0 lead when former Pirate Duaner Sanchez stepped in to relieve Pelfrey in the eighth. Jack Wilson then sent Sanchez's fourth pitch into the left field seats for his first home run of the season, a solo shot.

But it wasn't enough to undo the Pirates' inability to pack much of an offensive punch in the other eight innings.

The Pirates frittered away what had the makings of a opportunities in the sixth and seventh.

In the sixth, Nate McLouth hit a flare down the right field line to begin the inning and alertly hustled into second for as leadoff double. Freddy Sanchez followed, blistering a groundball straight back at Pelfrey, who whirled around to find McLouth hung up between second and third. McLouth was eventually tracked down for the first out, with Sanchez reaching first on a fielders choice. Ryan Doumit then hit into a 1-6-3 double play, turning what had been a no-out, man-on-second situation into another harmless inning.

And in the seventh, Adam LaRoche collected his third single of the game, moved to second on a groundball out, but was thrown out by centerfielder Carlos Beltran when he tried to score on a single up the gut by Brandon Moss.

After Wilson's home run sliced the lead in half to begin the eighth, Pedro Feliciano worked the remainder of the inning before making way in the ninth for Mets closer Aaron Heilman, who got out three of the four batters he faced to end it.