Collier: Pirates' Alvarez arrival only drama
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For everyone who feels as if all the Pirates need to escape most of two decades of substandard baseball is a fiery manager and a $100 million payroll, I give you the Chicago White Sox.
Fiery Manager Ozzie Guillen (it's all but the charismatic former shortstop's official job title) is here this week pushing buttons on a $105 million roster that includes four players making between $10 and $15 million, and still the club needed a recent burst of relative competence just to make it to Pittsburgh 28-34, on pace to finish well up the track in the American League Central.
"The Club," by the way, is also a new reality show on MLB.com, debuting July 4, ostensibly to turn Chicago's combustible front office chemistry into compelling TV drama, which only makes you wonder if the Pirates will ever have a show.
Or is that what "Six Feet Under" was about?
Don't be mistaken, the gap between these clubs is still every bit that wide. The White Sox, on June 15, had been outscored this season by 29 runs. The Pirates had been outscored by 35 runs in the third inning.
In the absence of No. 1 Pirates prospect Pedro Alvarez, still as of last evening awaiting the green light out of Class AAA for reasons known only to upper management, The Club and the general clubees began a wildy unanticipated interleague series here Tuesday night, the kind of interleague matchup that calls the very concept into question.
For every Yankees-Phillies episode, there's a Bucs-Pale Hose hairpull. This one's a best-of-three between the teams with the fewest hits in their respective leagues.
Nonetheless, the Pirates chose the opener for an offensive explosion -- four runs! -- but still dropped their ninth consecutive game, 6-4, to 33-year-old righty Freddy Garcia.
Garcia managed to get through 5 2/3 innings with a sprawling assortment of off-speed pitches, which included a fastball that rarely exceeded 86 mph. A typical sequence went slider, changeup, splitter, changeup, fastball, changeup, changeup, changeup, small container of egg salad, changeup, slider, car keys.
The result was that the Pirates snapped a four-game string in which they scored three runs or fewer, meaning that they've now scored three runs or fewer in only 14 of their past 19 games. Better yet, it can no longer be said that the Pirates score three runs or fewer two thirds of the time. That's simply not true. It's a mere 65.6 percent of the time.
First Published June 16, 2010 12:00 am
