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Wednesday?s game should have been about Roy Halladay having another quality start. It should have been about Chase Utley and Ryan Howard hitting solo home runs. It should have been about the Phillies winning.
It wasn?t about those things, because the Phillies didn?t win. And the Phillies didn?t win because the bullpen failed.
That unit had been pretty good lately. In 14 of the last 16 games before Wednesday?s meeting against the Pirates at Citizens Bank Park, the Phillies' 'pen allowed one or no runs. That had a lot to do with why the Phils were 6-0 after six innings this season. They were 6-0. They aren?t any longer.
When Halladay came out of the game, the Phils had a two-run lead. Then Antonio Bastardo, Mike Adams and Jeremy Horst pitched the last three innings against Pittsburgh and that lead turned into a permanent deficit.
Pirates 5, Phillies 3 (see Instant Replay).
Bastardo, Adams and Horst combined to allow six hits and four earned runs from the seventh inning on. Adams had a particularly bad outing. He gave up two hits, two walks and two earned runs and was pulled after facing just four batters in the eighth inning. He didn?t record an out.
?It?s very frustrating,? said Adams, who got the loss. ?We got out to a lead and got to the bullpen, but we weren?t able to hold on. It?s frustrating when the guys are battling and trying to put something together. For us to let them down like that, it?s very frustrating.?
Utley hit a solo home run in the first inning, his fourth of the season. Howard added a solo home run in the fourth when he crushed an 0-2 curveball to right field. It was Howard?s second homer of the year. The blasts by Utley and Howard were the first for any of the Phillies off a left-handed pitcher this season. When Kevin Frandsen hit an RBI single in the sixth, the Phillies looked like they were in good shape.
After all, Halladay had his third solid outing in a row. In his first two starts of the season, Halladay allowed 18 base runners and lasted only 7 1/3 total innings. Since then, he?s been much better. He won his last two starts, and he looked sharp against the Pirates on Wednesday.
Halladay went six innings, surrendering just one hit, one eared run and two walks. He struck out eight and threw 95 pitches, 57 for strikes.
?To me, it was like two different games,? Halladay said. ?We did so many things early. Defensively, we made some great plays. Chase hitting a home run. Ryan hitting a home run. We did a lot of great things early on in the game. Then, obviously, later in the game we didn?t do things like we had earlier. It almost felt like two different games.?
True enough. Bastardo took over for Halladay in the seventh and surrendered a home run to Pirates third baseman Pedro Alvarez. From there, things deteriorated quickly.
?[Wednesday] our bullpen, the back end of it, we had some trouble,? Charlie Manuel said. ?We didn?t get it done.
?I felt like we were in control of the game. Even after Bastardo gave up a home run to Alvarez in the seventh, I still felt like we were in control of the game. [Wednesday] was one of those nights. Our bullpen has been real good and we didn?t get it done. That?s going to happen.?
The bullpen was the most obvious reason the Phillies fell to the Pirates, but it wasn?t the only factor. The Phillies had several opportunities to score more runs. The Phils had 10 hits, but left eight men on base. They were also just 2 for 8 with runners in scoring position.
The biggest blunder came in the fifth inning. The Phillies had runners at first and third with no outs. But when Michael Young hit a grounder to third, Jimmy Rollins, who was on third base, didn?t immediately break for home. The hesitation resulted in a rare 5-4-2 double play when Rollins was thrown out at the plate. The Phillies didn?t score that inning.
?We definitely had a chance to score more runs, but we didn?t do it,? Manuel said. ?That?s the bottom line. We had chances. They were there for us.?
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Google isn’t the only company working on mapping out the entire world with satellite imagery and detailed information about every nook and cranny in the universe. Two companies are teaming up to create publishable information on your site or news article using detailed satellite imagery and advanced publishing tools. Skybox, a company that has raised $91 million?to launch its own satellites into outer space to capture detailed imagery of our streets and buildings, is working with MapBox, an OpenStreetMap contributor, on some pretty sweet analysis and publishing tools. Two Skybox satellites will be launched this summer, so the tools are coming at the perfect time. One of the examples of analyzing all of the images that Skybox captures, is a “change detection” system that focuses on one area and builds a playlist of photos that you can go through to detect changes in the area. Why would something like this be useful? Well, say you’re a company that has a fleet of ships and wants to know when they dock and leave. This tool could help track that: Additionally, MapBox provides tools that allow anyone to annotate imagery. In the example above, you could easily add notes to each coming and going ship that you’ve detected, with important context that will help you go back in time to make sense of all of the imagery you’ve collected: When I spoke with MapBox’s founder, Eric Gundersen, about the project, he pointed out that what you can do with maps is very limited right now, which is what makes this partnership important: You can’t annotate images, you can’t zoom in, can’t interact on your tablet. This is our first experiment of “how do you package up information along with data,” that would usually be a PDF. As Gundersen pointed out, the information that the tools above allow you to surface and track would normally be passed around in a huge Word document or PDF, which is a pretty rough and manual process for people who?are analyzing thousands of images a day. MapBox, which is fully bootstrapped, is working on some other really neat tools on their own, which should be available in the coming weeks. Think Google Map Maker, but easier to use and more available to the community that is already participating on the OpenStreetMap project.
Google 1, Germany 0. German regulators were furious when it was found that Google’s street car was unintentionally collecting email, photos, and passwords from its citizens’ unprotected Wi-Fi networks — something Hamburg-based regulator, Johannes Caspar,?called “one of the biggest data-protection rules violations known.” Yet, regulators could only muster a financial hand slap of 145 euros, or about 0.005 percent of the search giant’s annual profits. Regulators couldn’t find any “criminal” violations for the data-stealing misstep, and German law has a maximum ceiling of 150K euros for privacy law negligence, according to Bloomberg. Between 2008-2010, Google’s street car, which?photographs?and maps cities with a 360 degree camera, had ?stolen valuable, yet unencrypted data. Google chief privacy counsel, Peter Fleischer, claims it was?unaware?of the breach and did not use the sensitive information. Of course, not everyone in the Eastern Hemisphere has privacy hangups, like this randy Australian couple who cheerfully waved at the Google street car while having (fake?) sex. Google has been on a legal hot streak; it avoided potentially tens of millions of dollars in fines from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission for antitrust accusations related to how it prioritizes its own products in search results. Politico’s Tony Romm has a thorough account of how Google hired government insiders to deftly navigate the federal investigation. Google would have had a legal hat trick, were it not for a sizable $22.5 million settlement in 2012 for secretly collecting data from Apple’s Safari Internet browser. Google is still embroiled with six European nations over its general privacy policies, so Europe may still get the lucrative fines it’s desperately seeking. [Image Credit: Google]
The world is closer than ever to eradicating polio. With only 223 wild poliovirus cases in five countries in 2012, the paralytic disease has been knocked down to just a handful of small reservoirs. Recognizing this historic opportunity to achieve eradication, we have enthusiastically joined more than 400 scientists from 80 countries to sign the Scientific Declaration on Polio Eradication.
The second ingredient for success is creative problem-solving. For smallpox, the value of creative and flexible approaches was demonstrated in Nigeria in 1966, when the country faced a smallpox vaccine shortage just as the disease broke out in an isolated village in Ogoga province. An unconventional plan to vaccinate only those at highest risk of contagion proved pivotal. Vaccinators identified these individuals by working with community members and tracking the daily routines of villagers, such as visits to markets. This catalyzed a revolutionary ?surveillance and containment? strategy that is now used to fight other infectious diseases.
