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.

At this point, it's time to stop being concerned with the long-term ramifications of this ugly streak for the Pirates and just start hoping they win a game soon. A four-game losing streak isn't all that long of a slide, but once we move towards five, six, seven, and beyond, things get harder and harder to stomach. Even tougher to stomach is this ugly scoreless streak we're on right now. We shut the Braves out in back-to-back games back in our first homestand and they rebounded with ten runs in the third game of the series. I'd love to see that sort of reaction tonight against Micah Owings.

Ross Ohlendorf gets the ball for the Bucs tonight. He was successful in his last start, but he didn't mix his breaking pitches and changeup in with his sinker nearly as well as he did in the start before that against the Marlins and after his start he said he just didn't feel all that confident in those pitches. Much of Zach Duke's success last night seemed to come from keeping the Reds off balance all night, so I'm hoping to see Ohlendorf work that slider and changeup in much more tonight than he did against the Padres. But mostly, I'm hoping to see some runs scored.

What can you say about this one? Getting shut out by Bronson Arroyo sucks. Zach Duke pitched a great game last night, constantly keeping the Reds off balance by changing speeds and getting a lot of ground balls, and there was nothing the Pirates could do against Arroyo, scratching out four singles in eight innings.

There's not a lot else to say about this. The Pirates didn't score on Friday, they didn't score on Wednesday, and they didn't score after the fifth inning on Tuesday. Even Nate McLouth's return didn't seem to help much last night. He singled and he almost hit a homer, but his long foul ball was probably the offensive highlight of the night. Where have you gone, Ryan Doumit?

This is it. Maybe it's too early to say that a certain set of games is a defining stretch for a baseball team, but the Pirates need some wins against the Reds this weekend. Three straight losses against the Brewers has really taken the air out of the tires on the Pirate bandwagon, but Zach Duke (the Pirates' best pitcher this year) goes against Bronson Arroyo (a guy the Pirates have hit well recently) at PNC Park tonight. Nate McLouth makes his return to the starting lineup tonight, and hopefully he can give a jolt to an offense that was depantsed by Yovani Gallardo two days ago. If this year is going to be any different at all than past years, the Pirates need a win tonight.

The new baseball facility in the Dominican Republic that we've heard so much about is officially open. It's really, really nice to read Bob Nutting and Frank Coonelly's comments about it, because this is something that they both care a great deal about.

Jen Langosch has a TON of pictures and movies on her blog, and you should check them out if you have time.

Is anyone else blown away by the fact it's May 1st? And yet here we are, standing on the brink of summer with the Pirates holding an 11-10 record. The record is the only thing that matters in the end, but the Pirates finished April at .500 in 2007, and we all know how that turned out. Will 2009 be different?

First things first; in 2007 the Pirates scored 86 runs and allowed 106, but finished 12-12. This Pirate club has scored 101 and allowed 75. Their record actually isn't indicative of how well they've played. They're not 11-10 because they got a few good breaks, they're 11-10 because they've played well enough to be 11-10. This is an important distinction to make. This team is at least capable of playing good baseball. The 2007 team went right on playing the way they did in April, and they sucked for the rest of the year.  It won't be an easy task, but if this team replicates the baseball they played in the month of April, they'll probably be in the wild card hunt this year.

So what do they have to do to to do that? We can start with the offense 101 runs is sixth in the National League, which is awesome for a club that's spent much of April without their two best hitters. The 69 walks they've drawn is second to last in the NL, but that total should increase as Doumit and McLouth see more playing time. And don't forget that Andy LaRoche spent the first half of April without a hit and since then he's hitting .340/.389/.489. So can the offense continue doing what it's doing? Yeah, I think it can. It's not going to be a great offense at any point, but it's a fairly deep one from top to bottom when McLouth and Doumit are in it and Freddy Sanchez and the LaRoches are hitting and I think they can be average or slightly below average, which is where they are right now.

So that leads us to the biggest question. Can the pitching staff continue as one of the best in the National League? This question is either harder to answer, or the answer is quite easy and none of us want to talk about it. Indvidiually, three of the four pitchers who have played a big role in this good start look primed for a big fall. Ian Snell is carrying a 3.72 ERA with a 1.62 WHIP and a 20/18 K/BB ratio in 29 innings. If he doesn't stop putting people on base, he's headed right back for the sort of season he had last year. Paul Maholm has done a good job limiting the hits allowed, but his K/BB ratio is 1/1 right now and to my eye, he just hasn't looked quite right to this point in the season. He got hit pretty hard in his last two starts, and that's not the start of a great trend.

Then there's Ross Ohlendorf. I need to go through his PitchFX a little more closely, but I wonder if a big part of his early success has to do with teams just not having a good scouting report on him to this point. He was billed as a power pitcher from his minor league days and he's been a sinkerballer this year. How will things change when teams adjust to him? And Zach Duke's been awesome, but he can continue to be awesome and have his ERA rise pretty significantly from 2.43.

Of course, the hardest question to answer is what effect the defense has on the low ERAs of the pitching staff. The defense has been awesome to this point and that's certainly part of why Snell and Maholm have good ERAs with poor peripherals and Duke has an excellent ERA with decent peripherals.

I know this sounds excessively negative, so I'll end with this: prior to the season started, I thought the Pirates were a 65 win team that might win 68 or 70 games if they were lucky. Now, they look like they could be a 70-75 win team. Maybe that's not a lot of consolation, but the pitching is better, the defense is better, and the offense isn't nearly as bad as some expected. I still don't think this is a winning or contending team over the long haul in 2009, but it was never supposed to be. That doesn't stop them from making a lot of strides in the right direction, and those will certainly help in building a strong team for the future.