We all had a lot of fun saying things like, “The Pirates outscored the White Sox 20-4 in sweeping a four-game set” last Thursday, so it’s only fair that we turn the tables on ourselves. The Nationals outscored the Pirates 19-3 in this weekend’s three-game series in which the Pirates got six hits on Friday, zero hits on Saturday, and eight hits on Sunday. The math there is easy: the Nats scored 19 runs, the Pirates had 14 hits. That’s about as bad as weekends get for baseball teams, especially when you make sure to throw the no-hitter into the mix.
This is the nature of baseball, of course, because no one can be perfectly even keel over a 162 game season. The Pirates’ last two weeks have been a study in that; they were really awful in dropping back-to-back games to the Brewers, then they looked pretty great on their eight-game winning streak, and then they were abysmal against the Nats over the weekend. All things considered, an 8-5 run over 13 games is still pretty good. In fact, you’d probably say that the .615 winning percentage they had over those 13 games is the absolute ceiling going forwards as a realistic expectation for the Pirates over the course of the season’s final 93 games. If it’s not quite realistic, it’s still more realistic than thinking they could continue playing at the .840 pace they’d generated by going 21-4 prior to lost weekend in DC. If the Pirates continue on a .615 clip from here on out, they’ll win 96 games this year and that will give them an awfully good shot at winning the NL Central.
The Pirates were also at least partially spared over the weekend by the Cardinals’ loss to the Phillies on Sunday. I mean, of course it’s frustrating to know that they whittled the Cardinal lead down to six games on May 28th with their seven game winning streak, that they needed to go 14-4 over the next 18 games to whittle two games off of that lead, and that they gave those two games right back in three days. Still, it’s easy enough to see the Reds, the Braves, the Tigers, the Indians, and the Padres on the schedule between now and the next Cardinal series, and to think that the Pirates can make up some more room on the Cards between now and then. Simply put, if the Pirates find themselves six games behind the Cardinals after 69 games, then their goal should be to put themselves in a position in which the NL Central can be decided on the field between them and the Cardinals. That’s what this recent hot streak has really been about, and three straight losses to the Nats doesn’t really change that substantially.
What this ugly sweep at the hands of the Nats does do, though, is prey on some of the larger insecurities that I have about this particular Pirate team. Entering Friday’s game my largest concern about the club was this: that their success had been mostly driven by their rotation, while they were built to be driven by the offense. That maybe seems like a weird concern, but, as I mentioned on Saturday prior to Scherzer’s no-hitter, the Pirates didn’t actually score a whole ton of runs in their recent shutout dotted eight-game winning streak. They’ve leaned heavily on a rotation in which Gerrit Cole, AJ Burnett, and Charlie Morton were all heavily out-pitching their FIPs (Morton not so much anymore) and when you combine that with Francisco Liriano’s penchant for unevenness throughout his career, that feels like a rotation primed to regress. They did this weekend, and the results were ugly.
The results were ugly because even with Andrew McCutchen back on his usual MVP pace, the Pirates are, on almost every night, trotting out a lineup with at least three of four seriously underachieving every day players in Neil Walker, Josh Harrison, Jordy Mercer, and Gregory Polanco. Harrison’s come back to life some since his ugly start, but if you go back to the beginning of the Pirate hot streak that ended this weekend, he’s hit .318/.358/.373 in the Bucs’ last 27 games. That’s the Josh Harrison ceiling, not last year’s MVP-level performance. And the Pirates could absorb that without much trouble, except that Walker hasn’t gotten started yet this year, except that our expectations for Polanco have dropped so far that we’re looking at a 23-game stretch where he’s hitting .263/.306/.400 as progress, except that Jordy Mercer has been so bad that his .738 OPS over this 27-game hot streak has only brought his season OPS up to .555. Jung Ho Kang is a pleasant surprise and his near-daily presence in the lineup has helped mitigate the various struggles of Harrison, Mercer, and Walker some, but he can’t mitigate all three of them at once.
Make no mistake about it: I’m not asking if this is a good Pirate team, because this is a good Pirate team. The question surrounding the 2015 Pirates since Madison Bumgarner walked off of the mound in last year’s Wild Card Game has been whether or not the 2015 Pirates can be a great Pirate team. It’s been whether the 2015 Pirates can be something more than the 2013 and 2014 Pirates — teams that achieved a lot, but whose seasons both ended in disappointment. Sometimes they look like they can be, but the ugly sweep at the hands of the Nationals left a lot of weaknesses laid bare. There is a lot of baseball left to play, and there are a lot of questions left to be answered.
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