Did you ever actually think you'd be happy to see the St. Louis Cardinals? The team that's owned us for the better part of the past decade? Because right now, I'd be happy to see just about any baseball team other than the Brewers take the field opposite the Pirates. The Cardinals fall into that broad category, so bring it on, St. Louis.

Zach Duke gets the ball in hopes of stopping this latest three-game losing skid, but even a win tonight doesn't really snap the team out of the seven-in-eight funk we're in. It's a place to start, though, and I guess Duke vs. the rookie Mitchell Boggs is as good a place as any to try and right this ship. Delwyn Young gets the start for the Bucs in right tonight, even though Brandon Moss has started to hit a little bit in the past couple games, while Colby Rasmus is in center for Rick Ankiel after his scary accident over the weekend. And of course the game will be played right in the middle of both hockey and Lost.

Charlie already made this point, but I thought I'd use the PitchFX from BrooksBaseball.net to drive the point home: Ian Snell's start last night is a great illustration of why pitchers generally aren't allowed to throw more than 120 pitches in a start. Check out the velocity plots from his April 29th start against the Brewers and compare them to his start from last night:

Besides the difference in pitch speed (the average of his fastballs according to Pitch FX dropped almost a full 1 mph last night), it seems to me that his velocity was much more inconsistent last night, and maybe only 10 of his last 40 pitches even topped 90 mph. This is an obvious statement, especially if you've ever pitched before, but you always feel better on the mound than you do the next day. Maybe Snell felt great after 110 pitches last week, but it seems pretty clear that pushing him forward in that game had a negative effect on him yesterday.

It's strange. For about two years now, I've completely accepted the fact that by the end of the 2009 season, the Pirates will have racked up more consecutive losing than any sports team in any sport in American history. I've come to terms with this. It sucks, and I'm not happy with it, but I've managed to accept it.

This thing with the Brewers, though? I'm not OK with this. Seventeen straight losses against the same team? How does this happen? Why does it have to be against the Brewers? There have been a lot of things that have happened to the Pirates over the last 17 years that I can't explain, and this streak against the Brewers still leaves me at a loss for words. I mean, it's not surprising that Ian Snell fell apart after 80 pitches one start after he threw 130 and it's not surprising that Jesse Chavez and Evan Meek are coming back to earth a little bit, but why did that all happen in the seventeenth game after we'd already lost sixteen in a row to the Brewers? It's just inexplicable.

We don't play them until August, July and I'm probably going to be thinking about this until then.

First things first: I passed my exam this afternoon, and so I may or may not be celebrating tonight instead of watching the Pirates.

Second: this losing streak against Milwaukee is officially epic. I think it has to cross the 15-game threshhold for that designation, and we're there. It's an epic, epic losing streak and it's taken on a life of it's own. No lead we have against the Brewers will be safe until we can close out a win. Ian Snell and Jeff Suppan ... that should be a favorable pitching matchup for us, right? WRONG! Until we break this streak, I'm going to be convinced that the ghost of Jackie Chesboro himself wouldn't stand a chance against the Brewers. No one loses this many games in a row to another team. NO ONE.

You suck, Snell. You can't break the Brewer curse. No one can break it.

(That's right, I'm even bringing the insult back to break this thing up.)

You know, I want to write some BS line about "Hey! We knew the bullpen would blow some leads this year, we just have to accept it and move on," but f*** that noise. This loss stings. Maybe it's the Penguins' ugly start (I don't even know if I can put my dislike for Alex Ovechkin into words, but that's for "Where have you gone, Kevin Stevens' Eight-Ball?" and not WHYGAVS), maybe it's my impending thesis proposal/oral preliminary exam tomorrow (you guys are lucky there's a recap in tonight, I'm nearly to panic level DEFCON-5 over this thing), or maybe it's just that I plain don't like the Brewers. Whatever the case, this loss is not easy to swallow.

OK, so the Matt Capps meltdown has been an impending event all year. He hasn't looked sharp, his fastball seems to be clocking a little slow (it was about 93 tonight according to Pitch FX) and he very nearly blew a bigger lead against a worse team on Saturday. But six runs in the last two innings? After Paul Maholm's first real gem of 2009? After we scraped out four runs against three runs and a lead against a guy that absolutely dominated us last week? After Andy LaRoche hit a home run?!? Just not cool.

Someday, we're going to beat the Brewers. And it's going to be awesome.

First things first: fist-bump to my man Tecmo at PSAMP for this awesome Adult Swim clip. You know things are bad when you've become a punchline for stoners, insomniacs, and college kids.

Second things second; almost all of you want to watch the Penguins game tonight. I'm not going to tell you to not do that. Heck, I'll admit that I'm going to be watching hockey tonight, too. But keep an eye on the Bucs, at least, because Yovani Gallardo is taking the mound again at PNC and he's facing Paul Maholm and the Pirates are frustrated and the Brewers aren't happy with the Pirates and all of these things mean that this might be a little more ... "spirited" than your usual early-May ballgame.

Of course, at this point I feel more desperate than even Jim Mora. Win? Win a game? Winning? I'll just be happy if we score a run.

Well, so much for that. After an encouraging 8-run outburst last night, the Pirates were shut down completely by Johnny Cueto today. Cueto struck out nine Pirates in eight innings, holding the Bucs to just four singles and only one walk. Against Jeff Karstens, that effort was plenty to get the Reds their second win in the three-game series against the Buccos.

So the offense is a problem. It's a big problem. Not only were the Bucs shutout in two of three games against these Reds, they failed to register an extra base hit in both of the shutouts. They haven't hit a home run in a week now, since Adam LaRoche's two dingers against the Padres closed out the series win in San Diego last Sunday. It's hard to imagine the offense having a worse week.

On the bright side, Jesse Chavez and Evan Meek continued to pitch very well today, shutting out the Reds over the last four innings after Karstens got yanked. Maybe the offense will be as bad as we expected coming into the season, but hey, that doesn't mean the bullpen will be!

Yep. I'm grasping at straws. What's that? The Brewers are coming back in to town tomorrow? Crap. This is why the MLB plays a longer schedule than the NFL, I guess.

One of the best things about baseball is how quickly things change. Yesterday, we were all lamenting the Pirates inability to score runs and wondering if they'd ever win/score again. Today, they have a chance to take a series from the Reds and make that sweep by the Brewers seem like ancient history.

It won't be easy, though with a pretty unfavorable pitching matchup in Johnny Cueto and Jeff Karstens. We beat up on Cueto in his first start, dinging him for eight hits and four runs in six innings, but he also struck out nine Pirates and has quite good in his three starts since then, allowing just two earned runs. He did walk six in his second start, but he's been improving each time out, it seems. Karstens is the ultimate "what you see is what you get" starter. He's going to go out there, give you five innings or six, and if you've scored a few runs, you'll probably still be in the game. So will the Pirates score a few runs against Cueto? That's the question today.

I guess after a four-game losing streak, it doesn't matter if you take a game that should've been an easy win and turn it into a hard one, so long as you actually manage to win. The Pirates put four quick runs up in the first inning tonight, which was rather welcome after the team had failed to score in their previous 22 innings.

The Reds drew close on Alex Gonzalez's three-run homer off of the foul pole in the fourth, but the Pirates got a break when Alex Rosales and Brandon Phillips combined to completely botch what should've been an inning-ending double play ball off of Andy LaRoche's bat into two runs for the Pirates. Nyjer Morgan (beat out a double play ball, went from first to third on Ramon Hernandez's laziness on a wild pitch, scored on a sac fly) added an eighth run and the Pirates very nearly needed them all when the Reds dinged Matt Capps for five hits and two runs in the ninth inning before Capps got himself together and struck out Gonzalez to close the game out.

I'm not sure why I felt the need to recap all the action from the game, but perhaps it's to try and convey the feeling that I had for the entire nine innings that the Pirates were going to somehow find a way to blow the game. They very nearly did, and with the way Capps started the ninth inning I was half expecting Russell to get Jesse Chavez up in the bullpen. But they didn't blow it, they got some timely early hits, they got a nice start from Ohlendorf, they took advantage of some mistakes by the Reds, and they ended the losing streak at four. That means it was a good game.