I watched yesterday’s game right up to Jordy Mercer’s home run. I had plans to go to a concert and do some tailgating ahead of time, and Mercer’s homer to give the Pirates a 5-0 lead was pretty much perfectly timed with when I was planning on leaving. Two hitters before Mercer, though, I saw Gerrit Cole up at the plate hacking away at Travis Wood and the thought that he was going to hit a home run actually did enter my mind. He hit several foul pop-ups in the at-bat, but he seemed to be right on the ball. I left the apartment, rounded up my friends for the concert, loaded the car up, drove out to Raleigh, set the tailgate up, and checked my phone. It was 10-4 with a little “Cole (1)” in the home run portion of the box score.
Seeing Cole charge out of the box after blasting that Blake Parker pitch for a no-doubter into Wrigley’s left field bleachers was an absolute joy, even in a replay on a cell phone screen. Home runs are kind of a funny thing; they’re commonplace in Major League Baseball, to the point that most players expect to hit at least a handful of them every year and if you watch a game from beginning to end, you’re more likely to see one than to not see one. For most of the rest of us, the Little Leaguers and the high school players and the adult league players and the softball players, they’re pretty much the most exhilarating thing that can happen to you on a baseball field. It’s rare to find a baseball player that can experience a home run the same way the rest of us do, but for a decent hitting pitcher like Cole, his first home run was a perfect distillation of that moment. He wanted that home run, and he knew he got it, and it was just a really cool moment to see as a fan.
With yesterday’s easy win, the Pirates are 74-68. That gives them a half-game on the Braves and Brewers each, who are 74-69 after losses yesterday. The Pirates have that half-game in hand with ten games against the Phillies, Cubs, and Red Sox (the six against the Cubs and Red Sox being at PNC Park) before playing seven against the Brewers and Braves. In other words, in the next ten days the Pirates have a chance to rack up wins and build a comfortable lead against the teams most likely to challenge them for the second wild card spot before they play those two teams. The Braves play the Nationals twice in that span, the Brewers have the Marlins and Cardinals. If the Pirates continue to take care of business the way they did against the Cubs this weekend, they will hopefully put themselves into a place where just three or four wins out of seven against the Braves and Brewers will more or less sew the second wild card up. They are back in control of their own destiny and barring any more injuries (which is a concern, given Josh Harrison’s ankle and Andrew McCutchen’s constant struggle with his rib problem), they’ll only have themselves to blame if they don’t end up in the wild card game.
Honestly, I still have no idea how I feel about this 2014 Pirate team. In a lot of ways, they’re frustrating: we’ve gone over the late-game-division-loss thing ad nauseum, but the reality is that the Cardinals are probably going to win the NL Central and that the Pirates are probably going to finish within a handful of games of them and every Pirate fan can think of enough blown leads and late-game losses to flip that division lead completely back in the other direction right off the top of his or her head. If the Pirates find themselves in a playoff series with the Cardinals this year, the general take from the larger baseball media will be that the two teams were much more even than you’d expect from their head-to-head records this year, and the general take from Pirate fans will be to cower in abject terror of Cardinal Devil Magic. The Pirates are good enough to win the NL Central this year, but they’re not going to. You can find blame to go round for everyone for this fact: the players for not performing in big spots, the manager for not optimizing the team’s chances in the biggest games, and the front office for failing to address the team’s biggest and most persistent flaws.
All of that being said, the Pirates very well could make the playoffs this year despite pretty much everything that you could imagine going wrong in spring training actually having gone wrong. Francisco Liriano has held to his “every other year” pattern, Gerrit Cole battled with shoulder and back issues a year after a big workload for a rookie, Charlie Morton regressed some and then got injured, Jameson Taillon had Tommy John surgery and ruined the illusion of starting pitching depth, the bullpen collapsed in on itself, Gregory Polanco failed to set baseball on fire in his rookie year, Pedro Alvarez forgot how to play third base, then got injured after showing some promise at first base, and we’re running on a month of Andrew McCutchen not being 100% right after a rib injury. If you would’ve told me that even with those things were going to happen in spring training, I wouldn’t have thought that the season could be salvaged even by Josh Harrison becoming a low-ballot MVP candidate, Jordy Mercer becoming a legitimate big league shortstop, Neil Walker becoming the best hitting second baseman in the NL, and Vance Worley and Edinson Volquez shoring the rotation up with solid performances.
It is certainly easy and fair to criticize the front office for not upgrading the starting pitching more than they did this winter or the bullpen at any point in the season (literally as I type this paragraph I’m seeing that Ernesto Frieri was released, which summarizes this criticism nicely) until John Holdzkom emerged from the literally the middle of nowhere. That lack of action on the pitching staff very likely has kept the Pirates relegated to fringe contender status as opposed to being a real World Series threat this year. At the same time, it’s also fair to give some praise to the front office for building a team with a much stronger foundation than any Pirate fan anticipated. Two years ago at this point it felt like the Pirates could only make the playoffs if everything went perfectly. Today, they have a chance to make the playoffs despite so many things going wrong.
And so, yes, I’m still conflicted as to how I feel about this particular Pirate team. I’m frustrated that they’re so close to being maybe the National League’s best team this year and that the weakness that is separating them from that is a pitching staff that’s seemed weak since Day 1. I’m excited, though, that last year wasn’t a mirage. It’s also (in my opinion) easier to dream on this Pirate team than it was to dream on last year’s team; last year the Pirates were an 94-win team that felt like it caught every break and faced relatively few stumbling blocks on their road to the playoffs. For all of the feeling that the 2013 Pirates were the supposed rebirth of the franchise, there was a large veteran component to that team. Those 94-wins kind of felt like a ceiling, and even with them the Pirates were clearly a step behind the Dodgers and Cardinals once you started delving into peripheral stats to try and evaluate the season. With a couple of weeks left in the season, this year’s Pirates are a massively-but-obviously flawed 85-win team that caught a whole slew of unlucky breaks to go with a handful of lucky ones. It’s easy to know what the 2014 Pirates need in 2015 to be better, and it’s easy to think that if they get those things that they could be much better. So yes, I’m disappointed that the pitching staff is likely going to hold the Pirates’ back from being a World Series contender, but the only reason that it’s doing so is that the club is much better set up for the next couple of years than I would’ve guessed in May.
Of course, these are all bigger thoughts for an off-season after all of the games are played. The Pirates have been as hot-and-cold as any team in the second half, and a half-game lead in the second wild card today does not guarantee a three-game lead next Monday. As much as I say that the Pirates’ pitching staff makes it hard to think that they can make a deep playoff run, I can admit that I’ll be disappointed if it’s not the Pirates playing against the Giants in AT&T Park in a wild card game when October starts. Regardless of the big picture questions about what the Pirates could have been this year, there’s still a remaining question about what they are. As of this morning, they’re in the driver’s seat for the second wild card. Whether or not they stay there is entirely up to them.
