If you're a believer, this team was just lacking some intangible bojo or whatever, we're about to find out.

Good morning to you.

Good.

Thursday morning.

I'm Dan Kvanovitch of D.K. Pittsburgh Sports. This is Daily Shot of Pirates. It comes your way.

Right and early every weekday. If you're into football and or hockey, I also offer daily shots of Steelers and Penguins in the same place that you found this. Pirates six nationals won last night at an almost completely empty PNC Park.

Couldn't have been 4,000 people in there. But they played well, at least in a couple of facets.

Bailey Falter pitched extraordinarily well. I put up seven zeros, really mowed the nationals down. By down, I mean down,

because that's where he stayed in the zone all night really, really efficient. 82 pitches to get

to those seven innings. Henry Davis homered in the fifth, that after throwing a runner out really

impressively.

Always good to see your 1-1 do something.

Then came the seventh inning.

Now, I'm not going to get into all the details of it.

It would take up this episode and probably the next three as well.

But let's just leave it at the Nationals having a complete idiot in Jorge Lopez come out of the pen and decide that with men on base in a two-run game, that would be an awesome time for him to start exacting revenge for home runs that were hit against him last year.

Back-to-back home runs at Wrigley Field by Brian Reynolds and Andrew McCutcheon,

at which point, idiot lefty throws into Reynolds' ribs to put him on,

throws not over Cutch's head, right at Kutch's head. Kutch did an excellent

job of bailing out. The umpires conferred and interestingly, even though they had not warned

the idiot lefty after he hit Reynolds, they determined that there was just way too much smoke there

after he hit Cutch. And they didn't bother with the warning. They threw him out as soon as they

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