Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory

I opened the Post-Dispatch to read the game summary, and the photo coupled to the story features David Eckstein. I then flipped my Cardinals calendar to September. Care to guess who the featured player is for September? Yep.

As a seque, it has amused me for years the number of players that appear in the Cardinal calendar who are no longer with the team. This year that august list includes Edmonds, Rolen, the aforementioned Eckstein, and Juan Encarnacion (although the reason he's not with the team is anything but funny).

I saw the score scroll across ESPN's bottom line as 7-6 D-Backs, in the eighth or so (the inning escaped me, although it was late in the game), after sitting through what seemed to be an hour of college football scores from this weekend. Final score, as I'm sure you're aware, was 8-6 Arizona. What I didn't know until reading the game summary was the Cardinals led 5-1 through 4.

Who helped engineer this claiming of defeat from the jaws of Victory? Joel Piniero, that's who, the guy who leads the universe in 'games where I had the lead but couldn't hold it'. Jeez Joel, how do you sleep at night? How have you started 22 games but only gotten 11 decisions (the team is 11-11 in those starts)? How can you continue to cough up leads you're given? At what point does being durable (he's thrown 131 innings, which really isn't that durable but bear with me) get trumped by 'he can win games for us'?

Another stinging loss for a team that can't afford to lose right now. To add insult to injury, both Chicago and Milwaukee lost yesterday. It's probably my paranoia, but doesn't it seem what when they lose, we also lose, but when we lose, they typically win?

Not going to catch anyone with those metrics.