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Pittsburgh Pirates Wake-Up Call: so that Happened.

By Jason Rollison

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Welcome to the Pittsburgh Pirates Wake-Up Call, a new daily feature here at RumBunter.com. Every morning at 9 AM, one of us will give you our random thoughts on the goings-on around the Pirates’ organization, and we’ll throw a few links to some good articles from around the web concerning our baseball team as well.

What’s the Happs?

We promise that’s our last pun about J.A. Happ. But he’s earned some time in the spotlight after turning in a competent performance in last night’s 3-2 extra-innings win over the New York Metropolitans. Although it was not an efficient outing – Happ needed 84 pitches to get through 5.1 IP – The results were very encouraging. Many cringed when they saw that the trio of Happ, Charlie Morton, and Jeff Locke were handling starter duties for this series, and Happ’s start put the Pirates on solid footing to win the series.

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Pirates offense – what’s not to like?

The Pittsburgh Pirates offense is a modern day Jekyll and Hyde. After flexing their muscle in a 10-5 win over the Cardinals on Thursday, the Bucs put up nine hits against the Mets in 10 innings. While that doesn’t sound all that horrible, consider the following:

Andrew McCutchen drew three walks. Michael Morse drew a walk as a pinch hitter late in the game. Those were the lone free passes drawn by the Pirates on this night.

Neil Walker – batting in front of McCutchen – managed to have a particularly strange night. After opening the scoring with a solo home run in the first inning, Walker then went 0-for-4, leaving five men on base.

The Immortal Aramis Ramirez finished 0-for-4, snapping a seven-game hitting streak. He did have a sacrifice fly, however.

The bottom line is this: The Pirates won, but wouldn’t it be nice to see this team consistently put up the kind of numbers we know they are capable of? Perhaps if it did, our concerns about the starting rotation would be moot.

Pirates talk around the web

Some big news came out of the manager’s office recently as Clint Hurdle announced that Ramirez had been approached to try first base. Even more surprising, Ramirez gave it a shot during pre-game. We are going to stay all over this as it develops, but for now please check out Call To The Pen’s take.

In Bill West‘s latest Pirates notebook, Chris Stewart‘s thoughts on a new role are captured.

While not a link, this can’t be ignored:

Next: Pirates must force more fastballs

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