It's the eighth inning as I write this, but I have to be somewhere at 10:00, and I've seen just about enough. If this doesn't turn out to be the low point in the Pirates' season, I'm not sure I want to go any further. The Cubs are a bad team, and they basically took batting practice off the Pirates for the first four innings today, smacking a remarkable six home runs, many of them no-doubters, like the Tyler Colvin shot that nearly landed in the river on the fly. It should be noted that Garrett Jones had two homers, and Brandon Wood added a two-run blast in the bottom of the eighth, but that's about all this game has had to recommend it so far.
The wheels of the Kevin Correia train appear to have completely fallen off, and that he represented the Pirates at the All-Star Game just a couple weeks ago feels like a bad joke. At this point, the Pirates need to be considering the possibility of moving him out of the rotation - I'm not sure they should actually do it yet, but it has to at least be in the back of their minds. His June wasn't good, his July was really bad, and his August is off to a terrible start. He had modest success as a reliever with the Giants a few years back; maybe that's something worth considering.
It's funny that 2011 has been the Pirates' most successful season in a decade, and yet their 2010-11 offseason has turned out to be so bad. The four guys they signed to major-league deals were Lyle Overbay, Matt Diaz, Kevin Correia and Scott Olsen. Three of those have turned out to be wastes of money, and that leaves Correia. The best you can say about Correia at this point is that he's been a reasonable fifth starter - before tonight's debacle, he had an 88 ERA+. The Pirates do deserve credit for Jose Veras, who was technically a minor-league signing, but still.
If anything exciting happens, I'll update this later. If not, hey, it's 11-5.
... Oh, hey, great, now Joel Hanrahan is pitching in an 11-5 game after sitting out every, or nearly every, relevant game the Pirates have played recently.
... Pirates lose, 11-6.