Jeff Locke beats Phillies, joins with James McDonald to confuse us all

Jeff Locke pitched six shutout innings as the Pirates defeated the Phillies 2-0 on Tuesday.

First James McDonald, now Jeff Locke. What the heck, Pirates? It's almost like these players don't realize they're supposed to just keep doing whatever they were doing to start the season, so that we all can continue freaking out over whatever we were freaking out over. It's like I sometimes have to moderate my opinion, or even change it! It's not right. Things change so quickly at the beginning of the season. I get disoriented!

Anyway, truthfully, Locke didn't look that great, but as we saw with Jonathan Pettibone yesterday, sometimes not that great is good enough. Cole Hamels pitched eight strong innings of his own, but Locke stayed ahead of him, thanks to an RBI double in the fourth by Brandon Inge (did I mention what a genius promotion that was?) and a solo shot in the eighth by Gaby Sanchez.

Facetiousness about Inge aside, it's fun to see all these platoons actually work. Hey, what do you know? If you use Travis Snider against righties and Gaby Sanchez against lefties, they do good things!

Anyway, after Locke departed, Tony Watson, Mark Melancon and Jason Grilli pitched the last three innings. Even if I hadn't told you the score, would you be wondering how it turned out? No, you probably wouldn't. Even national writers are noticing how good Melancon has been.