Five Knuckle Shuffle

If you only watched the first  7 1/3 innings of this ballgame, you would probably be shocked to learn that the Bucs actually got the W. At one point, they were embarrassingly horrific. Awkwardly flailing at knuckleballs and striking out like it was going out of style. But in the top of the 8th, when things looked bleakest, the Bucs finally broke through to take the lead for good.

As with most ballgames there is good and bad you can take away. This one also had the ugly. I will break from the normal recap style and just highlight those that fall under the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly categories.

Good: Josh Harrison. In his first ML game, Harrison looked like a regular by going 2 for 4 and knocking in the Bucs first run.

           James McDonald. 6 IP, 6 H, 1 ER, 5 K 2 BB. That pretty much says it all as McDonald was on his game and got hitters to chase his off-speed stuff.

           Neil Walker- He was going under bad until his 2-run single in the 8th gave the Bucs the lead, 33 RBI in 53 games for a 2B is not too shabby.

Bad: Basically the entire line up other than Harrison. Cutch had a strikeout Hat Trick in going 0 for 4 and seeing his average plummet nearly 10 pts. They struck out 11 times, 10 against aging knuckleballer R.A. Dickey, who made them look foolish on more than one occasion.

 Ugly: Dusty Brown's failed bunt attempt. Unbelievable is all I could muster to describe this one. A 29 year old with 15 major league games under his belt, you think he would have learned some fundamentals during his 26 years in the minors. But no, not even close. In the 8th inning, down 1-0 and with Cedeno on 1st and 0 outs, he popped a bunt up in terribly inept fashion. Bob Walk defended this by saying that " it's hard enough to catch a knuckleball, imagine trying to bunt it". Well, it wouldn't be so difficult if you weren't attempting to bunt a pitch that was at EYE LEVEL AND IN THE OTHER BATTER'S BOX. When a friend texted me last night and said " Who the F*** is Dusty Brown?" I told him " a 29 year old career minor leaguer and if you saw him try to bunt, you would know why".

Overall, the Bucs got the 5-1 W over the Metrpolitans, whose only tally of the night came on a J-Bay RBI single in the 1st. Say what you will about J-Bay not being worth his current contract, but having met him and watched him play for years, he is the kind of guy you want on your team. He's a nice guy, he works hard, played hurt, and put together good power numbers during his time here and in Boston. The return we got for him was not even remotely worth it. The Red Sox got Bay, the Dodgers got Manny Ramirez, we got shafted again.

Right now, the starting pitching is really putting together a nice string of starts. I will be interested to see how many mid 20's AA/AAA guys we get for Correia and Maholm next month.