I only caught the tail end of last night’s game; a friend of mine and I set to out see Mad Max last night and ended up driving halfway to Raleigh when the theater in Durham was sold out for their 8 PM showing. By the time I got home, the Pirates were nursing a 3-2 lead in the late innings. I was in the process of fretting about Mark Melancon, which is more or less my default position with a one-run lead, when Josh Harrison, Gregory Polanco, and Andrew McCutchen came together to give Melancon some insurance. McCutchen’s results over the last few weeks should have already convinced you that he’s back, but if for some reason they hadn’t his swing on that ninth inning double should do it. Kevin Quackenbush left a fastball up in the zone and slightly in on McCutchen and he opened up and turned on it to create a laser line drive down the left field line that was as hard hit as most any ball you’ll see. When a player is struggling, for some reason most armchair analysis of that player always seems default to, “he’s trying to pull the ball too much.” This analysis is 100% wrong whenever it’s applied to Andrew McCutchen because Andrew McCutchen is a pull hitter and a deadly one at that. When he’s turning on balls like he turned on that one last night, there aren’t many better hitters in baseball.
For me, there are few wins better than the first win after the first loss after a losing streak. All winning streaks have to end, of course, and sometimes they end on Golden Sombrero catchers hitter walk-off grand slams in the bottom of the ninth inning of tie games. Being able to get out and win the next day always feels great; that seven game winning streak wasn’t a fever dream, the one weird and bad loss doesn’t have to plunge the Pirates back into the mediocrity they were mired in before that winning streak. The Pirates got a bunch of hits when they needed them last night, they got another absurdly oriented groundball start from Charlie Morton, and they got a win to ensure a series split in a place that has been less than friendly to them in recent years. That takes a lot of sting out of that Friday night loss.
While we’re on the topic, let’s take a second and talk about Charlie Morton. Charlie Morton has made two starts in 2015. He’s pitched seven innings in both of them, which means he’s recorded 42 outs. He’s recorded five strikeouts, which is obviously not a lot over 14 innings. He’s had three runners erased via double plays. The Padres hit one lineout against him last night and two foul pop-outs. The rest of the outs he’s recorded this year have come via the groundout. That’s crazy and it’s unsustainable but it’s also pretty cool to watch (or, y’know, read about in a box score since I went to a movie instead of watching it last night).
Last night’s win coupled with a Cardinal loss puts the Pirates six games behind the Cardinals in the NL Central. There is a part of me that wants to say, “THIS is why I was worried about the Pirates’ mediocre start, because they’ve won eight of nine and still find themselves six games behind the Cardinals.” That’s not necessarily an invalid line of thinking, of course. Both Baseball Prospectus and FanGraphs project the Cardinals to finish in the 91-92 win range; if we give the Cards the upper limit of that, that means that they finish 60-53. In order to top that and get to 93 wins, the Pirates would have to go 67-46 (if you count this current hot streak, it’d make for a 75-47 finish). That’s a .592 winning percentage over the season’s last 113 games. Watching the Pirates these last two weeks should tell you that it’s not completely out of the question. It’s still a tough row to hoe, though, and if the Cardinals do any better than a 60-53 finish, it gets much tougher.
Because of that, I was kind of surprised when I read Jeff Sullivan’s latest about the Pirates on Friday. The main idea the piece is organized around is that the Pirates had a pretty great off-season by spending money on guys like Francisco Cervelli and AJ Burnett and Jung Ho Kang, all of which has gone a long ways towards (or possibly even beyond) making up for the loss of guys like Russell Martin and Edinson Volquez. Sullivan also points out, though, that the Pirates have one of the NL’s best run differentials and that FanGraphs has them projected forward very favorably, giving them about a one-in-five shot at winning said division. His closing (and, as always, you should read the whole piece) is this:
In some ways, the Pirates miss Martin. In other ways, they very much don’t. Hard to think too much about an ex-player when you’re trying to win the World Series.
That kind of caught me off guard; not even two weeks ago the Pirates were getting steamrolled by the Twins and sitting at 18-22 and nine games behind the Cardinals. When Sullivan wrote it, the two clubs were in pretty much the same situation they are now (the Cards won and the Pirates lost on Friday night, then the clubs reversed it last night). I know that it’s not even June yet, but six games is six games, you know? Unless you spend the whole season in first place, there’s a point in the season in which the deficit that’s been created between you and first place is big enough that it doesn’t matter what you do on your own, you’re still relying on someone else to stumble to get you to where you want to be. I don’t know if that place is a nine-game deficit at the quarter pole or a six-game deficit on the last day of May or if the Pirates haven’t quite hit that point yet, I just know that the Pirates doomed themselves to a Wild Card last year with a bad start and didn’t (and still don’t) want to see it happen again this year.
Of course, last year’s Pirates went 63-44 in June, July, and August, and they managed to do that with Francisco Liriano, Gerrit Cole, and Andrew McCutchen all spending time on the disabled list. The pre-season hope we all had for this club was that the Pirates that finished last year 17-6 after the return of Cole and McCutchen was closer to the true potential of the 2015 Pirates than anything else that we saw in 2014. There is enough time left for that Pirate team to make themselves contenders for the NL Central. And if the last nine games have done anything, they’ve given me some hope that that Pirate team was more than just a pipe dream.
Photo by Denis Poroy/Getty Images
