Pirates Caffeine: Astros Rookie Looks To Stop Bucs; Interleague Tickets

Jordan Lyles

starts for the Houston Astros today.  The rookie will look to save the Astros from a sweep while stopping the Pirates and white hot Andrew McCutchen.

Lyles reached the flew through the ‘Stros system after being picked in the 2008 supplemental first round.

He can pitch.  He has shown command of four pitches.

The Pirates finally put Lyle Overbay on the bench as he has been bad lately, really bad.  His lack of hustle for at least the part of one play last night was quite apparent.   While not anything worthy of a benching, raise a toast to Hurdle for giving Overbay a day to cheer from the bench.

Dusty Brown returns behind the dish for James McDonald this afternoon.  McDonald has an awful road ERA at 6.49 as the bad guys are hitting over .300 against the Pirates right hander.

Andrew McCutchen is on an absolute tear and has seriously lifted his batting average this month.  We also enjoy Cutch calling off whoever the right fielder of the day is for the Bucs on any fly balls that come close to him.  He grabbed one in front of Xavier Paul yesterday before flashing his million dollar smile.

Surprisingly, the Pirates are one of the best hitting teams in June.  The Bucs are third in the NL in hitting this month.  Damn.   It’s hard to even imagine how poorly other teams must be hitting.

Neil Walker continues to battle his way out of his funk.  While Ronny Cedeno hasn’t.  But #staythirsty has played well  with his glove.  Josh Harrison will be on the other side of Cedeno today after working through an oblique injury.

Swee ’em Bucs

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We got this letter from seatgeek about tickets for the upcoming series with Baltimore and Boston.

Dear Tom,

I wanted to share some interesting data that SeatGeek.com has collected on the Pirate’s upcoming home series’ with the Orioles and Red Sox.

If you weren’t aware, SeatGeek is the official ticketing site for Fansided–we power the Schedule’s page on your blog. SeatGeek is the leading ticketing site that allows fans to compare ticket prices across all major secondary markets like Stub Hub, TicketsNow, Ticketnetwork, and many more. It helps fans to pinpoint the best deals amongst all of those listed by secondary market sellers. As we aggregate millions of tickets across over 60,000 events, we are able to gather detailed data on industry trends.

As the Pirate’s finish up their series with the Mets, SeatGeek is looking ahead to this weekend and next weekend. Our data shows that Pirates fans are very interested in seeing the Bucs go head to head with the thriving Red Sox, and not so interested in their match up against the Orioles. Average ticket prices at PNC Park for this season have been hovering around $38, yet the series average against the Orioles is a mere $29. On the other hand, for the June 24-26 series against Boston, tickets have been selling for an average of $55. Fans seem excited about pitting their home team against the current American League leaders and seeing what they can do.

Still, there is a wide range of prices for tickets to the RedSox series, and SeatGeek has been able to find seats for as low as $7 (nosebleeds of course). Also, buyers can save a lot of money on relatively good seats just by knowing where to look. For instance, for Friday’s game SeatGeek has discovered that if a fan were willing to move 10 yards, from section 105 to 103, they would save $28.
Fans can find this and other great deals here: http://seatgeek.com/search/?search=pirates

I think that your readers would be very interested in this information, and would benefit from it. If you have any questions about this data, or about tickets for any other Pirate’s games, please let me know!

Thanks,
Mallory