I guess that all things considered, maybe Evan Meek wasn't the right guy to bring up for short-term bullpen depth. 

I dunno, that's all I got for this one. Josh Harrison hit a home run and now he has more home runs than walks this year. In fact, he's only got one fewer home run than walk for his entire career. Don't ask for more numbers. They'll depress you. 

Don't have much time to write a pre-game post here since I have RNA club tonight (this is a real thing), but Gio Gonzalez and Erik Bedard both strike out a ton of hitters and are pitching against teams with bad offenses. This could be entertaining/boring/frustrating. 

First pitch is at 7:05 

The Pirates announced this afternoon that Alex Presley is being demoted to Triple-A Indianapolis and that Evan Meek will be recalled to take his place on the roster for now. There's an awful lot of immediate snark at the Pirates calling up a bullpen arm to replace a bat, but I'm guessing that this will be a very short-term move. Considering that the bullpen threw four innings on Sunday, Kevin Correia didn't make it out of the fourth inning last night, and Brad Lincoln's currently unavailable since he started on Monday, and the team doesn't have an off-day for a week, it makes sense that they feel like they need an extra arm for now. 

I'm guessing that at the end of the week, either Meek or another pitcher will be demoted/DFA'd and the Pirates will be bring a bat up (probably Jake Fox) in time for the interleague series against the Tigers this weekend. As for Presley, well, he's struggled a ton lately (12 strikeouts in 40 May plate appearances) and he looks completely lost at the plate. Something had to happen, and sending him to Triple-A to get sorted out is probably just the first step.

This is what's happened in Kevin Correia's last four starts: 22 innings, 12 walks, four strikeouts, four home runs. He failed to get out of the fifth inning in one start. He failed to get out of the fourth inning last night, which was one night after Brad Lincoln turned in a solid spot start against the Marlins and two days after Rudy Owens tossed eight strong innings in Indianapolis. 

Correia has turned in a couple of decent starts this year and even his last start before last night's debacle (his showdown with Stephen Strasburg at PNC Park) wasn't a bad start, but pretty much everything Correia's done this year looks like a bright red flag to me. His strikeout rate is down by quite a bit for the second year in a row (it was 7.14 in his last year with San Diego, 4.5 last year, and after tonight it's 3.15 this year). Not only that, but his strikeout percentage is dropping, too (17.9% to 11.7% to 8.7% before last night's debacle). The completely whacked out K/BB ratio from his last few starts says to me that he's not fooling anyone and that hitters are either waiting for him to make mistakes and hitting them or waiting for him to miss the strike zone. His results thus far may not be as bad as the peripherals suggest, but there's absolutely no reason to think that Correia's going to improve at this point in his career, especially given how much his peripherals declined last year. 

The Pirates need to get Correia out of the rotation now and put Lincoln or Owens in his spot. Owens deserves a shot and they need a longer look at Lincoln as a starter. If they keep trotting Correia out there every fifth day, it's going to be ugly. It's going to be hard to watch. It'll be humiliating for Correia. Worst of all, the Pirates' and their awful offense can't afford what Correia's currently bringing to the table every fifth day. They've got to make this change now, before things get worse.

As games go, there's not much to talk about from this one, I don't think. The Pirates' offense was predictably inept against Josh Johnson (they scored in the first inning on the strength of an Andrew McCutchen walk and back to back singles Pedro Alvarez and Garrett Jones, but that was mostly it) and Kevin Correia had one terrible inning in the fourth that torpedoed the Pirates' chances to win. 

Correia was really bad and I think it's time the Pirates take a look at someone else for his rotation spot, but that's another post (for tomorrow, specifically), I think. What I think is worth mentioning here is that ever since the Pirates' offense had a mini-breakout against the Cardinals and Braves, scoring 6+ runs three times in four games, the Pirates haven't gotten back over the five-run barrier. In ten games since then, the Pirates have only scored 28 runs. Correia was bad tonight, but this offense just isn't going to cut it.

Without going into the ridiculous things from the last few games that nearly caused a blood vessel in my forehead to burst, let's consider the Pirates' current situation: they're on a three-game winning streak, they're 17-18, and they're still in the NL Central and NL wild card races nearly a quarter of the way into the season. Those sorts of things are ultimately meaningless in late September, but they're true right now. They're true right now, without the Pirates having really played very good baseball at any point this year. So ... what would happen if the Pirates started playing better? Besides the cynical answer that their luck would run out and they'd probably lose a bunch of games anyway, of course. I'm not really counting on this happening, because the problems with the Pirates' offense run pretty deep and because they refuse to maximize the chances they do get on offense, but it's always nice to day dream

Tonight, the Pirates shoot for a two-game sweep in Acid Trip Stadium, though Kevin Correia vs. Josh Johnson is a mismatch, even if Johnson has struggled quite a bit early this year. First pitch is at 7:10.  

If you've managed to digest my ranting about throwing outs away on the bases from last night, then I'd like to point you towards a guest piece I wrote for Baseball Prospectus about Brad Eldred and Jose Bautista and how they color my opinion of Pedro Alvarez. 

This is a table of National League teams, ranked by on-base percentage heading into Monday's action (this holds true for all of these charts):

Provided by Baseball-Reference.com: View Original Table
Generated 5/14/2012.

This is a table of National League teams, ranked by stolen bases:

Provided by Baseball-Reference.com: View Original Table
Generated 5/14/2012.

This is a table of National League teams, ranked by times caught stealing:

Provided by Baseball-Reference.com: View Original Table
Generated 5/14/2012.

This is a table of National League teams, ranked by sacrifice bunts attempts:

Provided by Baseball-Reference.com: View Original Table
Generated 5/14/2012.

The Pittsburgh Pirates are terrible at getting on base. They are not particularly good at stealing bases, but they try them all the time anyway. The Pirates' on base percentage is more than 40 points below league average, yet they've tried four more sacrifice bunts than the average National League team. The ostensible reason that the Pirates do this is that their manager thinks that he must maximize the chance that every single base runner has to score by moving them along the base paths by any means necessary. 

This is a list of National League teams, ranked by the percentage of base runners that score:

Provided by Baseball-Reference.com: View Original Table
Generated 5/14/2012.

The Pirates are not generating more runs by bunting and stealing bases and running around like chickens' with their heads cut off. They're minimizing the few chances that they do have to score by giving the opponents even more outs than their pathetic offense already makes. 

Here's reality: there's no reason to think that bunting a runner from first to second or second to third results in more runs scoring. In fact, there's real, documented evidence to the contrary. Teams with runners on first and no outs have a 0.941 run expectancy for that inning (link via @inclementewthr, who put this out there right as I was about to start Googling for it). Teams with runners on second and one out have a .721 run expectancy for the inning. There's a similar drop for bunting a runner from second to third. That's not me futzing with numbers. That's not new age statistical mumbo jumbo bullshit. That's cold, hard reality. Trading a base for an out does not make you more likely to score. It makes you less likely to score. There is no room for argument. 

Whenever the Pirates play a game like they played on Monday night and I get on a rant about how dumb it is for the Pirates to waste outs, there are always people that get mad at me and say that bunting is part of baseball and that Clint Hurdle's managed more games than I ever have and that I'm crazy for thinking that ignoring more than a century of baseball bunting history is a way for the team to make their offense better. When baseball was invented, it was mostly played by uneducated roughneck borderline criminals that existed on the fringes of society. They thought that sacrificing an out for a base would make them more likely to score runs. No one had Retrosheet or Baseball Reference or SPSS back then, and without being able to crunch the numbers, that's a logical opinion to have. 

It's 2012 now. We know what's happened to every single baserunner in modern baseball history. We have computers that can handle these reams of data. We can crunch the numbers. We can calculate the probabilities. Sacrifice bunting by position players is dumb in almost every single situation imaginable (if you have a runner on second and no outs in a tie game or down by one run, you can bunt because while your run expectancy for the inning will go down, the probability of that single runner scoring will go slightly up; this isone of the few cases where bunting is even mildly defensible). It's not actually an argument worth having; it's dumb and if you disagree, you're wrong. This is not a point for discussion.

I don't understand why, "It's old school!" is a valid argument. There's no other aspect of our modern lives in which it's OK to disregard the advancements made in favor of "It's old school!" Do you use an abacus when you don't have to? A rotary phone? An Apple IIe? Do you ride a horse to work? Do you burn gas lamps at night instead of using electricity because gas lamps are old school? 

The Pirates' offense this year is really bad. It would be really bad if they never got caught stealing or wasted at bats with sacrifice bunting. But it's insane that they give away the outs that they do have left and right, that they bunt away with position players like mad and get caught stealing all over the bases with the few base runners that they do have. In Monday's game, the Pirates had three players touch a base safely after they took their one run lead (a hit, a walk, and a fielder's choice ON A BUNT, of course) and all three of those runners made outs in preventable fashion. That is beyond insane; it's negligent. The Pirates got away with it on Monday and they've generally gotten away with it to date in 2012, but it's going to catch up to them eventually.

The Pirates won tonight. Brad Lincoln threw six solid innings, Rod Barajas hit a home run, Pedro Alvarez had a huge double in a tie game in the top of the sixth, and the bullpen was great. 

After the sixth inning, the Pirates got three runners on base. One of them was Rod Barajas, who lead off the seventh with a double. He was thrown out going from second to third when Clint Barmes attempted to bunt him over. With a one run lead in the seventh inning, Clint Barmes attempted to bunt Rod Barajas to third base with zero outs. That makes Barmes the second base runner. He was thrown out attempting to steal second with two outs, ending the seventh inning. In the ninth inning, Alex Presley drew a two-out walk. On literally the second pitch, he was thrown out trying to steal second base. Literally, every single Pirate that reached base after they took the lead tonight was thrown out on the base paths. This is insane. This is unacceptable. How is a team that can barely reach base suppose to ever score if they're not allowed to stay on base? 

Don't think that I've said my last about this. 

The Marlins are on fire right now. The Pirates are winning games, but it's not always apparent how they're doing it. The Marlins are starting Anibal Sanchez tonight, who's averaging more than a strikeout per inning and has been generally as dominant as the Marlins hoped he'd be when they acquired him in the Josh Beckett trade oh so many years ago. The Pirates are starting Brad Lincoln, who'd I'd describe as "probably but not certainly better than Kevin Correia." I don't have a great feeling about this game. 

First pitch tonight is at 7:10.