Friday, April 10, 2009

It Must Be Rainin' All Over The World

The Bucs and Reds were rained out tonight, with the game to be made up later in the season. Both coaches opted to keep their rotations intact by sending their fifth starters to the pen.

For the Pirates, that means Jeff Karstens will be the missing long man until his next start Thursday, and for Cincy, Micah Owings skips tomorrow's start and will join the Red's relief corps.

Paul Maholm will try to keep his good times rolling against Johnny Cueto tomorrow afternoon at the Great American Ballpark, if the clouds go away.

-- Jenifer Langosch of MLB.com tells us that Jeff Karstens is going through a second adjustment to his delivery.

He tried the same thing once before in the minors without any luck, but hey, if Joe Kerrigan says try it, he will. We were looking forward to seeing how it worked out tonight, but it's probably better that Karstens gets a couple more days to iron out the kinks.

-- Adam LaRoche shares some personal favorites with Jeff D'Alessio of the Sporting News.

-- FSN Pittsburgh filled the dead air with a rerun of the 1990-92 Pirates seasons and the breakup later in the decade. We didn't hang around for 1992 (we know how that ends) or the sell-off, but we did catch a rehash of the 1991 spring training blowup between Jim Leyland and Barry Bonds.

Bonds wanted all the photographers cleared from the field, except, of course, for his personal guy. The Pirate PR suit got into it with him, and then Bill Virdon went jaw-to-jaw with Bonds. Leyland joined the fray, and told BB something like "I've kissed your *bleeping* butt for four years and ain't gonna do it anymore."

It went down in Pirate folklore, but Leyland says for the wrong reason. He wasn't trying to stand up to or embarrass Bonds, but just trying to get him to focus on the game and not the things off the field. The Bucs took it in stride. Apparently there were a lot of raucous Leyland chats with different players, every bit as loud and obscene, but that was the first one to be captured on camera.

Ah, for the gool ol' days.

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