Umm... Look...

Umm. I mean, we've tried everything, haven't we? Of course we have. I mean, we've played every combination of the all right-handed lineup against lefties and we never score runs and we never win. What to do? Well, in Lou's world, we trot out the same group of players and we lose again and then we get huffy when somebody says we might have put Colvin into the lineup instead of Nady, but we were really happy for Nady to play two days in a row and raise his average over .180 for the first time this season. In fact, we get so huffy about it that we decide not to play Colvin on Sunday either.

One of the small pleasures of watching the Cubs is to see good players come up and play before they have had a chance to catch Cubitis. So it is nice to see Castro actually play baseball and take pitches and so on. In the ninth inning yesterday, he did do just that to get on base. Fukudome followed with a textbook AB, in which, after being completely fooled by Dotel's first pitch, he expertly worked the count until he finally got a pitch he could pull and delivered a triple against a Pirate defense that had radically over-shifted against him.

But then the game was over. Theriot and Byrd promptly struck out in overly aggressive ABs. Theriot's effort was particularly awful. He struck out on a ball over his head when all he had to do was hit the ball to the right side to tie the game. After the game, Piniella waxed philosophical about how your modern players don't shorten up in those situations, but hey, what can you do?

Well, I guess fans have a right to expect that players play intelligently and that managers make sure that they do. Good teams play that way and that is one of the reasons they win.