Sorry for the lack of WHYGAVS this weekend: I spent the weekend out in the mountains and then when I got back on Sunday, I was far too exhausted to do much of anything other than sit around.
Taking the weekend as a whole instead of breaking down into three individual one-game units makes for a curious experience. The Pirates took two out of three from the Braves, a team that they are better than. A sweep would’ve been nice, yes, and it was frustrating as hell to watch Starling Marte and Gregory Polanco go fishing for Jason Grilli sliders that were miles away from the strike zone, but on the whole, two out of three is pretty much standard for a good team playing a bad team. The frustrating part is this: the Pirates lost another game to the Cardinals in the standings, as the Cards swept the Cubs.
I don’t really want to spend a whole of time flashing back to May, but my big concern when I wrote this was that the hole the Pirates had dug for themselves up to that point was so deep that it was going to be rough to dig out of it if/when the Pirates turned their season around. I’m not trying to make this into an “I told you so,” because back on May 22nd I pretty obviously did not think there was much of a chance that the Pirates would end June with the National League’s second best record, and I probably would have assumed that doing so would’ve resulted in them making up at least one game on the Cardinals.
They have not made up even one game on the Cardinals. When the Pirates lost on May 20th, they fell nine games behind the Cardinals. Even with the sweep at the hands of the Nationals and the 3-3 week against the Braves and Reds, the Pirates are 24-11 since then. The Cardinals are also 24-11 since then, which means that when we all said to ourselves on May 20th that the Cardinals were 27-13 and there was no way that they could keep playing that way, we were wrong: they’ve actually played slightly better since then (24-11 is .686, 27-13 is .675).
And so now what happens if you’re the Pirates? You basically have to go 24-11 again, and hope that maybe the second try will work out better than the first. I suppose that’s possible, of course; the Pirates are a very good team and they’ve put together the second best record in the NL despite a lackluster start and their offense never really getting into gear. Asking for them to put together something like a 48-22 streak isn’t actually entirely out of the question.
It currently leaves the Pirates in a weird sort of purgatory. They haven’t really done anything wrong this year as per our preseason expectations. They’re on a 91-win pace and are generally playing right about to their peripherals. I think it’s fair to say that the pitching has overachieved and the offense has disappointed, but at this point we’re looking at a Pirate team that’s got a 42-33 record, that seems to have generally put its worst days behind them, and could potentially play quite a bit better if the pitching holds on and the offense wakes up. This is pretty much what you want from a baseball team as you approach mid-season: to feel like they’re good (the Pirates are) with the ability to get better better (the Pirates can). And they’re still nine games behind the Cardinals, which is bigger deficit than the Rockies (33-42) have and only slightly better than the 11 1/2 game deficit faced by a Marlins team that has already fired their manager and created a clubhouse mutiny by replacing him with their general manager. That makes every loss feel like a huge failure, which is a hard way to go through a 162-game baseball season.
At this point, I guess all the Pirates can do is try to keep taking two of three, and hope that the earth’s gravitational field finally engages the Cardinals or that the Cards somehow fly too close to the sun.
Photo by Justin K. Aller/Getty Images
