The long rain delay in the fourth inning put a bit of a damper on this one, but the Pirates came out of the gates firing on all cylinders against Edwin Jackson and the Cubs this afternoon. In the first inning Starling Marte and Andrew McCutchen both singled and stole bases, with McCutchen's hit driving Marte in and a Mike McKenry single driving McCutchen home. In the second, Marte singled again and Travis Snider tripled him home (also: check out this picture of Snider giving the Zoltan face down on third base), and McCutchen singled Snider home. It took a long time for those four runs to hold up, but eventually they did. 

Vin Mazzaro in particular deserves a hat-tip in this win. The rain delay came just as Jeanmar Gomez was hitting a rough patch, leaving runners on first and third with two outs after the Cubs tallied their first run. Mazzaro came in and got the final out of the fourth, then cruised through the fifth and sixth to give the Pirates the equivalent of a strong start even after the rain delay. I was as skeptical of the Pirates' acquisitions of both Mazzaro and Gomez this winter and while I'm still skeptical of Gomez's ability to be a useful starter long-term, Mazzaro's been a really pleasant surprise out of the bullpen and I think there's a chance that he could be a pretty decent swing-man over the course of the season. Knowing that there's a guy like that in the bullpen is certainly a huge help in games like today's.

The sweep of the Cubs is the Pirates' second sweep of the season, and it puts them at 29-18. After splitting with the Mariners, the Pirates have rolled off 11 wins in 14 games against the Mets, Brewers, Astros, and Cubs. That's how good teams are supposed to take care of business against bad teams. I know that's a cliche, but it's one heck of a good feeling to know that it applies to the Pirates at this point in the season, and not in the way that it has in the past.

The Pirates and Cubs have a 12:35 getaway game this afternoon, but Clint Hurdle is not messing around with the typical "afternoon getaway game after winning the first two games of the series" blowoff lineup; with the exception of Mike McKenry starting for Russell Martin, Hurdle's got all of his regulars on the field today. 

That's good. The Pirates have had an easy spell in the schedule here and they've taken advantage of it, regardless of today's outcome, but after today things get tough for the next two weeks. There's a trip to Miller Park (still terrifying and still a significant hurdle-with-a-small-h for this club, regardless of how badly the Brewers suck at playing baseball right now), then two games in Detroit, then two games against the Tigers at home, then three against the Reds at PNC, then three against the Braves at Turner. That's a fairly significant 13 day stretch that sees the Pirates play some very good teams and go to four cities (Milwaukee, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Atlanta) without an off-day. Getting a win today and bumping the record up to 11 games over .500 before this stretch starts would be very nice. Clearly Hurdle feels the same way. 

For the Pirates, Jeanmar Gomez will try to continue his tightrope act for one more start. For the Cubs, Edwin Jackson will take the mound. Jackson's been hit pretty hard this year, but his peripherals suggest that he should start leveling out. Let's try and delay that by one start. 

Maybe it's just me, but isn't there something about taking a 1-0 lead in the first inning and holding it for eight straght innings that says, "Attention, Universe, this is a baseball team to be reckoned with?"

It's probably just me. It's probably just the Pirate fan in me that's so used to seeing something like this happening to the Pirates that I want to assign credit somewhere when the Pirates do it to someone else. 

Still, though. Taking a 1-0 lead in the first inning and then winning 1-0 is pretty awesome. It definitely counts as a win. I'm sure of that much.

For the last half-week or so, the Pirates have been winning ugly games against bad teams. I'm completely OK with this, so long as the wins keep coming. Francisco Liriano makes his third start for the Pirates tonight, and while the Cubs are not an intimidating lineup he did draw Pirate Killer Jeff Samardzija. Samardzija has cooled off a bit since his hot start and teams have gotten a bit homer-happy against him of late. 

Since I seemed to have some good luck writing out my formula for last night's game, I'll try it again tonight: draw some walks against Samardzija and cash in on them, preferably with a multi-run home run. Make him throw some pitches so that he doesn't get deep into the game. Liriano, meanwhile, needs to get at least through the sixth and hopefully into the seventh, because the bullpen will be slightly short-handed with Jason Grilli unavailable after last night's marathon outing. 

First pitch tonight is at 7:05. If the Reds and Cardinals are going to stubbornly keep on winning, what other choice do the Pirates have but to match them?

In both 2011 and 2012, Andrew McCutchen got off to a bit of a slow start. In his first 25 games of 2011, he only hit .202/.318/.348. In 2012, he got off to a more rounded start, but he didn't hit a home run until his 28th game of the season. In both seasons, I pointed out encouraging signs from McCutchen's start and wrote a post that amounted to, "If he gets hot, he's going to be having an incredible season." In 2011, it was that his walk rate took a big jump forward. In 2012, I noted that his batting average was much higher than it had been in the past. One of the great things about a player like Andrew McCutchen is that you can predict he's about to get hot at just about any point and he'll make you look like a genius. This is the 2013 edition of that post.

The Pirates are 26-17 and if you asked a fan to point to the players that have contributed the most offensively to the club's scorching quarter-season, I think that most people would point to Starling Marte and Russell Martin. This is not the wrong answer! Martin is hitting .269/.360/.504 including his awful start, and since April 15th (the day after Mike McKenry hit two home runs against the Reds and we all collectively decided that Russell Martin sucked) he's hitting .341/.426/.648. He's drawing walks and driving the ball into the gaps and hitting home runs and he's thus far generally looked like 24-year old Russell Martin again. It'd be foolish to count on this happening for a full season, but it'd also be flatly wrong to deny his huge contribution to this point in the season. Marte has cooled off a bit lately, but he's more or less been every Pirate fan's best case scenario for him to this point, blasting extra base hits all over the park and running the bases like an incredibly fast maniac and flashing home run power when it's needed. 

Most fans wouldn't give Andrew McCutchen as an answer right now. He went through one of the worst slumps of his career from April 21- April 29, hitting just .100 over those eight games with a measly three singles in 30 at-bats. He came out of that streak with a four-hit night against the Brewers on the 30th and since then he's had another four-hit game and a three-hit game and that huge walkoff homer against the Brewers, but he's been kind of spotty, too, despite his .347 average since breaking out of his slump. He's got  a few 0-for-4s and an 0-for-5 all mixed in with those great performances and he doesn't quite seem to own left-handed pitching the way he did last year. 

With all of this said, it's might surprise you to know that McCutchen's now hitting .274/.341/.457 on the season, which is an OPS+ of 125, which is more or less in line with the first three years of his career. He hasn't really excelled at any point in this season and he's often looked a bit lost, and he's still hitting well above-average at the plate and on pace for a something like a 5-6 WAR season, which would put him in the upper-echelon of NL players for the third year in a row. 

Here's the thing though: suddenly, he's not striking out so much this year. If I had to pick out one thing about McCutchen's career to this point that hasn't gone perfectly (and please: this is me picking nits here and not me complaining about Andrew McCutchen), it's that his strikeout rate has slowly climbed upwards in each full season of his career. It's never gone over 20%, but 19.6% is starting to get up there. This matters because while 'Cutch has enough power and patience to be a good hitter even when he hits .259, he doesn't quite have enough of either to be able to disregard batting average entirely. This will obviously change throughout his career as he evolves as a hitter, but the way I see Andrew McCutchen right now is that he's an All-Star when he hits .270 and he's an MVP candidate when he hits .300 or better. It's not quite this simple, but fewer strikeouts means more balls in play, and that can help boost a batting average. 

This year, McCutchen's only struck out 19 times in 182 plate appearances. FanGraphs noticed at the beginning of May that he was making more contact, and that's mostly still true 2 1/2 weeks later. And so here it is: McCutchen is going to heat up as the summer starts. I don't know if he's going to go all Right-Handed Ted Williams Nuclear like he did last summer, but he's going to get on a hot streak again. I think it's probably going to happen soon. And once that happens, we're going to look at his season numbers and we're all going to do the same collective double-take that we did around July 1 of last year. Every year, the Andrew McCutchen that plays around the Red Hot Summer Andrew McCutchen is getting a little bit better. 

You can take pretty much any old baseball adage about gutting out a win on a night when you don't play your best game and apply it to this 5-4 Pirate win against the Cubs right here, but it doesn't mean that the win counts any less. Wandy Rodriguez didn't quite have his best stuff tonight, which got the Pirates in a 3-0 hole in the second inning after Matt Garza hit a two-run double. The Pirates couldn't figure Garza out in his 2013 debut, either, which was really frustrating to watch. On the other end of it, Jason Grilli re-enacted all sorts of Bad Closer memories in the ninth inning by white-knuckling his way to a terrifying save, saving his first and only swing-and-miss for his 35th pitch of the ninth inning, slipping a slider past Anthony Rizzo to somehow close out a closer-than-it-should've-been-win.

Buried in the middle of all of that, the Pirates snuck in one good inning. Garza was on a strict pitch count, so he came out of the game after the fifth inning. Hector Rondon came in and served up an immediate double to Neil Walker, then after Andrew McCutchen grounded out he gave up a single to Garrett Jones and walked Russell Martin. Dale Sveum had seen enough, so he brought James Russell in to face Pedro Alvarez. Alvarez has had plate discipline issues all year (that's even if he's being judged on the Pedro Alvarez Sliding Scale of Plate Discipline Issues and not the plate discipline scale we'd apply to most human beings), but he laid off of some very close pitches from Russell and somehow checked his swing on a 3-2 pitch in the dirt to draw a walk and bring home the Pirates' first run. 

Sveum came out to get Russell and brought Shawn Camp in, and after Gaby Sanchez flew out to shallow left field for the second out, Clint Hurdle decided to pull some stops out of his own. I'm not sure if the uncertainty of a looming rain storm made Hurdle and Sveum treat the bottom of the sixth inning like it was the bottom of the ninth, but it was pretty great to see. One thing that managers do that never fails to get on my nerves is to save the "big" pinch-hitting bats for later in the game, even when an opportunity exists for them to make an impact early. Hurdle didn't fall into that trap tonight; with Sveum more or less committed to Camp as the third pitcher of the sixth inning, Hurdle sent Travis Snider out a batter early to pinch hit for Clint Barmes to ensure that a big bat would get to the plate with runners on. Snider paid that gamble back in spades by driving Camp's 2-1 pitch just over the right-center fence for a grand slam and the difference in the game. 

This is the exact sort of game that cropped up a few times last summer and a few more times early this year I have a little bit of difficulty processing. The Pirates didn't really play badly tonight by any stretch. Wandy Rodriguez was pretty good and Justin Wilson and Mark Melancon were excellent and Pedro Alvarez made an incredible play at third base. It's just that they weren't necessarily better than the Cubs and that for most of the night, it seemed like one of those games where the door was just going to be closed for the Pirates. Then, the door opened up for just a split second in the fifth inning and the Pirates jumped all over that one opportunity (to be fair, they had another opportunity later in the fifth when the loaded the bases up for Andrew McCutchen and he lashed a hard fly ball to left field, but it was hit right at Alfonso Soriano) and their manager put the right players in the right places at the right time and they got a win. Sneaking out a win in a game like this, even when it's against the Cubs, is a good feeling. 

Five of seven from the Brewers and Astros was an acceptable outcome. More would've been nice, but this is baseball. No one wins every day. The schedule is about to get a little bit tougher, though, so getting at least two wins from the Cubs here would be a pretty big thing. Matt Garza makes his 2013 debut tonight, so it'd be nice to see the Pirates wear him out early and get into the Cubbie bullpen and wreak some havoc. Wandy Rodriguez seems to have snapped out of his mini-funk and he starts for the Bucs. Starling Marte has the night off, but Andrew McCutchen is back in the lineup. First pitch is at 7:05.

Let's try a different perspective here: for the first time in a long time, you could accuse the Pirates of playing down to their opposition this weekend. Against an awfu Astro team, the Pirates spent most of this weekend playing on one side or the other of a low-scoring one-run game. Today, the only run was a solo homer by Pedro Alvarez that was the diametric opposite of his mammoth blast on Friday night; he just barely got enough to bloop the ball over the short wall in left field. That was enough, though, as Jeff Locke threw seven shutout innings, holding the Astros to just three hits and two walks. Mark Melancon and Jason Grilli were perfect in the eighth and the ninth, and the Pirates are eight games over .500 and tied with the Reds, both for second place in the NL Central and for the second best record in the National League. 

I said before this week started that I thought five wins against the Brewers and Astros would be appropriate, and that's what the Pirates have to show for the week. Now they've got three games against the Cubs at home before traveling to Milwaukee, then playing a home-and-home four-game set against the Tigers at the end of the month. I remember saying this a lot last summer when things were going well, and so I'll say it again now: all wins count the same, no matter how ugly they are or when they take place in the season. The Pirates have 26 of them right now, and it's impossible not to be happy with that on May 19th.

Eventually, Mark Melancon was going to have to do something that resulted in some runs and maybe a loss. Eventually, the Astros were going to have to win a game against a team better than them (this happens whenever the Astros win, of course). The important thing is that even with yesterday's loss, a win today puts the Pirates at 5-2 this week with three games against the Cubs looming after an off-day. That's a good week. 

Jeff Locke gets the start today. Last time out he struck out a season high six and only walked one hitter, so hopefully he can build on that today. Lucas Harrell goes for the Astros. You don't need me to tell you this since he pitches for the Astros, but Lucas Harrell has not been very good this year. He has as many walks as strikeouts and he's given up seven homers in just under 50 innings. The Pirates' offense hasn't done a ton in this series against the Astros. Maybe today's the day to change that. First pitch is at 1:35.