John Van Benschoten basically lost (1-3) one last game for the Pirates as he was ripped for seven runs in less than two innings in the Pirates 9-6 loss to San Diego.
Seven runs,four walks,two three run homers and one bus ticket out of town.
Goodbye and good riddance.
In one of the games bright points,the Bucs hung around and made it respectable behind homers from
Jason Michaels (5),yet another bomb from Adam LaRoche (15) and Jose Bautista (12).
The other shining star was T.J. Beam from the bullpen with 4 scoreless innings of just one hit ball.
Best performance all year from Beam and his work took a hopeless contest and made it worth watching throughout.
Since todays game is over,I will not be putting a pitching matchup up for today.
During last nights FSN Pittsburgh was having a charity auction all during the game to raise money for a baseball stadium for special needs children,
The charity was laudable and I didnt even mind the constant updates and shilling for higher bids,but all too often game action was missed for scintellating shots of Paul Alexander on the phone and the game did not flow well.
Hopefully,if this is done in the future,FSN can do a better job of covering both during the game.
Bullpen Notes
Two great fights over the weekend in the 147 lb division.
On Friday on Telefutura-Jesus Soto-Karass suddenly ended a terrific fight with one right hand in Round 8 of his fight with David Estrada to win the North American Welterweight title.
While Antonio Margarito won the WBA crown with an 11th round stoppage of previously undefeated champ Miguel Cotto in a mild upset.
That fight will likely be on HBO next Saturday,but reports say it could be the fight of the year.
The Cleveland Indians made two pretty nice deals as Casey Blake was shipped to the Dodgers for a good catching prospect in Carlos Santana and power throwing Jonathan Meloan and former top Cardinal pitching prospect Anthony Reyes was obtained for Luis Perdomo,who was until recently the closer for the Kinston Indians.
Both bring in talented arms and Santana is tearing up the California League with awesome numbers and adds to Cleveland's seemingly endless supply of catchers.
One can never have too may backstops!
Meloan is a hard thrower that could help in the pen and just two years ago Reyes was considered untouchable by the Cardinals and could just need the proverbial fresh start.
And finally,the XM-Sirius merger is done.
No word on how it is going to work yet,but DCRTV and Dave Hughes has a terrific idea on how the merged company could have some positive PR right out of the starting blocks.
Hughes offers this from the site-
"If the soon-to-be-merged SiriusXM wants to show that it's seriously going to "show the love" for its combined subscriber base, the first thing new CEO of the expanded firm, Mel Karmazin (right), should do is to take a batch of Sirius's most-popular channels - Howard Stern, NPR, NFL - and make them immediately available to XM subscribers on the XM platform at no extra charge. And ditto with XM's most-popular channels - Oprah, MLB, O&A - to Sirius subs on the Sirius platform. Do it from "day one" of the new married company. Since the two satrad systems are technically incompatible, it could be quite a while before XMers get Sirius stuff, and vice-versa, via new receivers. Mel, this would be a great way to get XM and Sirius subscribers "feeling good" before the receiver, programming, and billing hassles that will undoubtedly be coming with the new SiriusXM, or whatever it'll be called."
Dave-I could not agree more!
Until tomorrow
Photo Credits
JVB-Gene Puskar-AP Photo
Boxing-Ronda Churchill-AP Photo
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