Joe Saunders Is BACK (And So Are The Taxibirds)

So!  How far have we come since Friday?  Rocketing north in the standings from fifth to third on the backs of our mighty pitching rotation, that's how far.  Here, in summary, are the outings we got from our starters this weekend:

• Friday
  Rick Porcello pitched 7 innings of 6-hit ball, allowing only 1 earned run and walking only 1, good enough for the win against the Pirates.
• Saturday
  Joe Saunders returned to the form we saw consistently before his recent 3-start skid, tossing 8.1 innings, allowing only 7 hits, 1 walk, 1 run, and striking out 5.
  Meanwhile, back in Pittsburgh, the Taxibirds switched dugouts, benefiting from another Zach Duke gem: 8 innings, six hits, 3 earned runs, picking up his 7th victory.
  George Sherrill gave us a mostly insignificant, but still helpful inning of scoreless relief in a non-save situation.
• Sunday
  Jered Weaver continued to pay even bigger dividends than we were hoping for, hurling his third complete game in a masterful shutout of the Padres, winning his 7th game and lowering his ERA to 2.08.
  We will not speak of Derek Lowe's drubbing at the hands of the Orioles, because it was both atypical as well as extremely exciting to watch as a Balitmore fan (but more on that later).   Seven runs in three-plus innings is horrible, but that's only twice this year he's been knocked around that hard, and I'm not overly concerned.

We also got a four-hit game from Brian Roberts, who has his average back up to .299, a couple dingers from Jason Kubel (who has 11 in 56 games, compared with 20 all of last year), one from Adam Jones (particularly encouraging given he and the rest of the Bird's recent outage), and another from Yunel Escobar, which unfortunately came against the Orioles, and also unfortunately preceded his getting benched by Bobby Cox in the third game of the O's-Braves series for lack of hustle.  Fantasy obviously doesn't measure things like that, but it incenses me when multi-million dollar athletes can't be bothered to give a damn, and Escobar in particular has good reason to hustle--he's having a great season (.293-6-33 so far), and the Braves are very much in the hunt for the NL wild-card. We also saw another 2-hit game from Matt Wieters, whose patience continues to pay off.  All in all, third place, with some real distance between us and NextPlease, with a lot of our big home run and average guys getting healthy again (we picked up all our points without the usually-reliable Miguel Cabrera, who had a quiet weekend), our pitchers in a collective groove, and Wieters the Secret Weapon beginning to find his stroke is an excellent position to be in.

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