The Pirates have a wild card spot locked up and last night’s celebration was all kinds of fun, but the reality is that there’s still a little bit of work left to be done in the 2014 regular season. At the bare minimum, the Pirates need to win enough games from here on out to ensure that the Wild Card Game is played on their terms at PNC Park. With a one-game lead and a tiebreaker against the Giants, the Pirates probably don’t need to do more than win two or three of their final five games to do this, but I think that they need to do it nonetheless. The NL Central is also still sort of up for grabs with the Bucs 1 1/2 games behind the Cardinals, but the clock is ticking quickly on that front. It’s certainly not an impossible dream to hope that the Pirates can make that distance up, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s not a terribly likely outcome to this season.
Anyway, Jeff Locke gets his last start of the 2014 regular season on Pirate Hangover Day against Julio Teheran. Locke is likely pitching to earn a spot in the Pirates’ playoff rotation over Vance Worley (should we come to a juncture where the Pirates need a fourth playoff starter, that is) tonight. He may also be auditioning for a start in a Monday division tiebreaker, as I wrote earlier today. Teheran is having a good season, but he’s given up a bunch of unearned runs lately. I honestly don’t really have any way of knowing if they’re his fault or the Braves’ fault as a whole, especially given how the Braves have played of late. Given all of the emotion of last night, this game sort of feels like a trap game to me, but then, the trap can only be so big with a playoff spot already in the bank.
First pitch tonight is at 7:05. To give you an idea of whether or not Clint Hurdle wants to win these games, the only lineup change tonight was to swap a slumping Neil Walker out for Clint Barmes. I suspect we’ll see guys get days off here and there for the rest of the season, and that’s fine with me.
