Regular Season
The Pirates' season started well, as they swept the Houston Astros in Houston for the first time since 1991, when the Astros played in the Astrodome. However, that initial success didn't carry for very long, as the Bucs proceeded to lose 11 of their next 13 games. The Pirates pulled out of their early slump to post a 12-12 record at the end of April. May, however, would to be quite tumultuous, as Tony Armas was sent to the bullpen for poor performance, Zach Duke struggled mightily, the bullpen blew several late leads, and closer Salomón Torres was stripped of his closer's duties, in favor of youngster Matt Capps after Torres blew a 2-run ninth-inning lead against the San Diego Padres on May 31.
After the All-Star Break, the Pirates started off by losing 7 games in a row, and 8 out of 9 overall. Paul "Big Poison" Waner's number 11 was retired in a pregame ceremony at PNC Park July 21, 2007, conducted in part by members of his family and Pirate greats Bill Mazeroski and Ralph Kiner.
Read more about this topic: 2007 Pittsburgh Pirates Season
Famous quotes containing the words regular and/or season:
“He hung out of the window a long while looking up and down the street. The world’s second metropolis. In the brick houses and the dingy lamplight and the voices of a group of boys kidding and quarreling on the steps of a house opposite, in the regular firm tread of a policeman, he felt a marching like soldiers, like a sidewheeler going up the Hudson under the Palisades, like an election parade, through long streets towards something tall white full of colonnades and stately. Metropolis.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“The theater is a baffling business, and a shockingly wasteful one when you consider that people who have proven their worth, who have appeared in or been responsible for successful plays, who have given outstanding performances, can still, in the full tide of their energy, be forced, through lack of opportunity, to sit idle season after season, their enthusiasm, their morale, their very talent dwindling to slow gray death. Of finances we will not even speak; it is too sad a tale.”
—Ilka Chase (1905–1978)