There comes a point when being hard-headed stops being useful and starts being stupid. After locking heads with Scott Boras on second overall draft pick Pedro Alvarez's contract for over a month, someone either in the Pirates' offices or in the Alvarez camp realized that refusing to budge was going to keep Alvarez from playing this fall and set his development back a full year. Accordingly, the two sides agreed to a revised deal last night that will get Alvarez into the Pirates' system as soon as possible.

According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the deal isn't much different from the originally signed $6 million bonus for a minor league contract beyond the fact that it's now a major league deal, which puts Alvarez immediately on the 40-man roster. The bonus is $6.35 million, but it's payable over four years instead of being immediately due. In the end, it's hard to say one side benefited more than the other.

It's likely that a lot of people will be unhappy with the Pirates because negotiating this deal after the deadline sets quite a precedent for Boras in the future, but the Pirates can't be concerned with that. I mean, have you seen the Pirates play lately? They're terrible. They need all the help they can get and a player of Pedro Alvarez's quality certainly qualifies as "help."

This is the biggest image of Doug Mientkiewicz I could put alongside this post without going off on a sixteen paragraph rant about how it had to be the PIRATES who gave this guy a minor league contract and then were bad enough to need him in the bigs. Imagine if Kevin Maas just showed up out of nowhere playing for the Nationals. It'd be "Maas Hysteria~!" all over again.

Tonight's Dugout is basically one joke that 0.05% of the regular readership of the Dugout, a readership that makes up about 0.005% of Fanhouse traffic, will enjoy. Nothing is truer to the spirit of the old Dugout than a joke that nobody gets or enjoys!

Tumbleweeds and the rest of the Dugout are after the jump.

Every year one or two poor veterans ends up stranded on a hopeless baseball team as they try to prove to the world they can still play and prolong their careers. This year, Doug Mientkiewicz took a minor league deal with the Pittsburgh Pirates, made their roster as a utility man, and is having a respectable year that should ensure that he gets another somewhere in the bigs. But the futility of playing for a team that has lost 19 of their last 26 games has really gotten to him. After last night's listless drubbing at the hands of the Dodgers, he had this to say:

"... It's just embarrassing. It really is. You've got three guys who run balls out right now. It's frustrating. Just frustrating. The whole thing is frustrating."

He motioned with his right arm to the rest of the clubhouse, no players left and only a vacuum humming in the opposite corner.

"I mean, look at this place. It's a ghost town."

Another shake of the head.

"I don't know. What are you going to do? Nothing you can do. Just pick up and try again tomorrow, I guess."

Anyone that's watched the Pirates play in the last month or so would have a hard time disagreeing with Mientkiewicz. I guess Doug's not planning on keeping his locker at PNC Park for much longer. If he wants, the Pirates would probably sign him on for one more year so they can totally crush his spirit and he can join Jeromy Burnitz, Joe Randa, and the host of other veterans who's careers have died with the Pirates in the past ten or so years .

When a team is as hot as the Houston Astros are, the only thing they want to do is keep playing baseball. It appears that Hurricane Ike is not an Astros fan, because the Astros are canceling two weekend games against the Chicago Cubs in anticipation of the storm while the currently visiting Pittsburgh Pirates are making plans to get out of town as quickly after tonight's game. The team's statement:

"We're trying to be careful and mindful of our fans safety," McLane said. "People in the greater Houston area and Harris County have been encouraged to stay home. School has been canceled and we just want to do the right thing. We don't have a date now. We just wanted to let the fans know as soon as possible."

On his blog at the Pittsburgh Post Gazette's website, beat writer Dejan Kovacevic details his plans to get out of Houston as fast as humanly possible after the Astros and Pirates finish up. There's no plan on or if the Cubs and Astros will make up these two games, and I suppose whether they do or not will be dependent on the standings. It's possible that neither team will need the games and they won't be made up at all, though that seems unlikely with the standings the way they are. I guess the goal is for the city to weather the storm first, and worry about baseball later. Those priorities are certainly in order.

Maybe you glanced at the box scores this afternoon and saw the Giants beat the Pirates 11-6. Chances are good that if you looked at a scoreboard, you didn't even think twice about that result. But there was something special that happened this afternoon in San Francisco. It wasn't the Giants ten-run third inning that made the game special. Instead, it was the number in the Pirates' loss column when the game ended: 82.

With today's loss, the Pirates clinched a losing season. That seems unimportant because the Pirates do that every year, but that's EXACTLY why it is important. With this loss today, the Pirates clinched their sixteenth consecutive losing season, tying the record for an American sports franchise set by the 1933-1948 Philadelphia Phillies, a team so bad that they changed their name to the Blue Jays for two years in the middle of the streak.

The tough news for Pirates' fans is that there's a very good chance that while their new front office works on rebuilding the minor league system, losing season number 17 is looming pretty large right now. Few people under the age of 20 remember the Pirates being any good, and starting in October, teenagers will get driver's permits without ever having been alive during a time that the Pirates were any good. That's depressing.

Since 2006, Zach Duke's career has been pretty disappointing. After a stellar rookie year in 2005 when he went 8-2 with an ERA of under 2.00, Duke has mostly been cannon fodder for the National League. Last night he came into his start against the Giants with a 4-13 record and a 5.14 ERA, allowing opponents an OPS of .839 against him. Against the Giants, he threw a complete game shutout, then got some interesting news when he got off the field. There had been a small earthquake during the game.

Zach Duke pitched a six-hit shutout to push the Pirates past the San Francisco Giants, 7-0, last night, and he did so through a light earthquake that registered 4.0 on the Richter Scale and was felt by many of the 31,133 at AT&T Park. It struck just before midnight Eastern time, coming with two outs in the sixth inning as Duke fielded an Emmanuel Burriss squibber to the right of the mound.

"Really?" Duke said, informed of this minutes afterward. "I had no idea."

Since the start of the 2006 season, Duke is 17-36 with a 5.03 ERA and a 1.60 WHIP in games that he started with no earthquakes taking place. In games started that did experience an earthquake, he's undefeated with a 0.00 ERA and a 0.89 WHIP. Perhaps you would argue that his 9-inning "earthquake" sample size is far too small when compared to his 472-inning "non-earthquake" sample size, but to that I would respond to you, "it's clearly not working the other way, so he might as well try to pitch through as many earthquakes as possible."

From The Windup is FanHouse's daily, extended look at a particular portion of America's pastime.

There is one name that strikes fear into the heart of baseball fans and it's not Rodriguez or Santana or Sabathia or Ramirez. It's Boras. Signing or drafting a Scott Boras client means that your team is going to be put through every wringer possible as Boras tries to hustle, hassle, and finagle every last dollar out by exposing loopholes in agreements that no one ever even knew existed. At best, it's annoying for the fans to deal with. But a guy like Boras is exactly what baseball needs.

If you're unfamiliar with the most recent Boras saga, allow me to get you up to speed (for all of the details, read Dejan Kovacevic's excellent piece at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's PBC Blog). In June, the Pirates drafted Pedro Alvarez with the second overall pick. After little contact the day of the August 15th deadline, the sides worked out a $6 million signing bonus on the cusp of the midnight deadline. Things got suspicious from there when Alvarez never reported to Pittsburgh for his physical or to sign the contract in person.

After nearly two weeks, word broke last Wednesday that the Pirates had placed Alvarez on the restricted list for not signing his deal and that the player's union (the MLBPA) was filing a grievance alleging that the contract had been signed after the midnight deadline. From there, the finger-pointing started between Boras and Pirates' CEO Frank Coonelly (formerly the MLB General Counsel in charge of draft slotting) with the Royals' first round pick, Eric Hosmer (who signed after the deadline with an extension from the commissioner's office) dragged into the feud.

With the Pirates mired in an nine-game losing streak and CC Sabathia dominating the National League since his trade, the stars seemed aligned for an easy Brewer win before today's Pirates/Brewers game even started. The resulting complete game shut out (CC's third in the NL) win for the Brewers was about as predictable as outcomes come. In fact, the only hit allowed by Sabathia was a fifth inning single by Andy LaRoche. Apparently, that was one hit too many, because the Brewers are protesting the scoring:

"That's a joke," Milwaukee manager Ned Yost said. "The scorekeeper absolutely denied Major League Baseball a no-hitter. He threw a hit up on the board before LaRoche had even hit the bag. It's sad. That's sad. I'm upset. I can see if it was borderline, that it could have gone either way. That wasn't even close."

Yost continued, "If you know baseball at all, you know that's a play that has to be made and is made all the time. He rushed it. That's a stinkin' no-hitter that we all got cheated out of. I'm upset. That was my first no-hitter. I could have told my grandkids about it."

The play in question was Sabathia's flubbing of a squibber off of LaRoche's bat that he didn't even bother to throw to first. Fielding errors are pretty rare for pitchers and with the easy 7-0 win the Brewers have a 5 1/2 game lead in the NL wild card with only a month to go. I'd like to tell my grandkids about watching a no-hitter today, too, but I bet they'll get over it.

On Deck is FanHouse's look at the day's most intriguing baseball matchups.

Toronto Blue Jays (75-60) at New York Yankees (68-67) 1:05 PM ET

If Alfonso Soriano can get booed, then why not the player he was traded for? There are probably still some people who want the merciless booing of Alex Rodriguez to stop. But they're getting harder and harder to find after Rodriguez's latest ninth inning gag job: a double play with the winning runs on base and nobody out against B.J. Ryan and the Blue Jays on Saturday. It's gotten so bad, the "Get Rid of A-Rod" websites are starting to turn up. While the Soriano booing might be a little bit silly with the Cubs steaming towards the playoffs, the Rodriguez booing can be understood a bit more with the growing reality that the last season of Yankee Stadium is going to end in September. (P.S. Your inevitable argument that all the injuries are to blame more than Rodriguez is probably valid. But it's harder to boo a player on the disabled list. Trust me, I've tried.)

It's the question that's been on every sports fan's mind: Quis re-custodiet ipsos custodes?

Okay, it's the question that's been on the mind of every late 1st and early 2nd centuries CE Latin sports fan, and even though it probably had more to do with throwing the discus, we're using it tonight to talk about baseball.

The instant replay initiative memos have been placed onto players' chairs, and that means instant replay is SERIOUS BUSINESS. Will it stop with home run calls? No. Will it stop with close plays in important situations? Of course not. Will it stop when we're TiVo-ing check swings and deeply investigating the use of the pogo stick in Ketchup's nightly victory in the Hot Dog Race? Okay, maybe then it'll stop.

Tonight's Dugout, and tonight's Dugout-within-a-Dugout, are after the jump.