Break out the brooms

The bridge crew searches for an effective Met pitcher

Albert Pujols brought the whooping stick. Rick Ankiel saw past his cheesy porno mustache and made a fantastic catch to go with his first HR and 2 RBI. Lohse pitched 5 exciting innings, but wiggled off the hook when needed.

Under the bright sunlight, St Louis swept New York out of town, winning the finale 12-8.

For all the good in this game, and offensively, there was a lot of good, the bullpen continues to be a question mark. Called upon to get 12 outs, they responded by giving up 6 runs. Most of that fell on PJ Walters, but his pen mates did a lousy job stranding inherited runners.

With the reshuffled rotation, Lohse's start today marked the beginning of the fourth time through. Looking back at the first three trips through, some interesting items have come up.

- As Rick Hummel mentioned in yesterday's article, Piniero's effort on Wednesday was the first quality start since Wellemeyer's 13 Apr start at Arizona.
- After averaging 6 1/3 innings per starter the first time through, they're averaging 5 2/3 innings since. Which is a lot of work for the bullpen. Piniero's Wednesday start marked the first Cardinal starter to get into the seventh since that same Wellemeyer start.
- Cardinals starters haven't left the game behind since Carpenter's 9 April start. Yes you read that correctly. Lohse and Wellemeyer were tied when they left the game this week.
- Don't expect to see Reyes or Walters pitch tomorrow. Everyone else should be available.

No bullpen statistics yet that I'm willing to talk about here. I discovered tonight that one of my metrics (K/9) is messed up. This is because I'm using 0.3 and 0.7 to signify 1/3 and 2/3 of an inning, respectively. Well, that messes up the metric; for instance, if a guy throws 2/3 of an inning, and has 2 strike outs, he should have a K/9 of 27. But if 2/3 of an inning is represented by .7, the calculation is 25.71. I'll figure out how to correct that this weekend.

The evil empire comes to town tomorrow. We owe these guys. Let's keep rolling fellas!