This is the top-line: Through 81 games, the Pittsburgh Pirates are 47-34. That’s a 94-win pace, which would match their best season in a generation. That’s within percentage points of the Kansas City Royals (46-33) for baseball’s second best record. The Pirates haven’t finished with or tied for baseball’s second best record since 1992 (the Braves won 98 games, they won 96 along with the A’s and Blue Jays that year). All of these things are good and are in line with what we expected/hope for from this Pirate team before the season began. There is one mitigating factor: the Pirates are six games behind the St. Louis Cardinals for first place in the NL Central.
That leaves us with a series of questions as we head into the season’s second half of games (if not the nominal second half, since the All-Star Break isn’t for another week). Can the Pirates keep playing this well? Can the Pirates play better? Can the Pirates play well enough to catch the Cardinals?
The record is not an illusion. The Pirates have scored 328 runs and allowed 271, which gives them a Pythagorean record of 48-33. Their third-order win percentage (based on projected runs scored and projected runs allowed based on underlying statistics and adjusted for schedule difficulty) is .564 (~46-35). This Pirate team has more or less played exactly as well as their record indicates in these first 81 games. The way the Pirates have done it is unexpected, though; they’re eighth in the NL in runs scored and second in runs allowed. More analytically, they’re second in FIP and seventh in wRC+.
We’ve talked about this quite a bit already, but it’s a flip of what was expected from this club and it’s something worth wondering about at the half-way point of the season. Before the season began, the question about the pitching staff was whether or not Gerrit Cole could step far enough forward to become the bulldog that the rotation was missing last year, whether Francisco Liriano could pitch well for most of the season without needing a mid-season reset like last year, and whether AJ Burnett, Jeff Locke, Vance Worley, and Charlie Morton were good enough to give the rotation the depth that was missing for much of last year due to injuries and inconsistent performances. The answers to those questions have been resounding: Cole is both spectacular and reliable, Burnett is having what’s probably the best year of his career, and both Locke and Morton are capable of helping the Pirates win games on their best nights. Francisco Liriano has mostly great. The Pirates’ ERA (2.90) is lower than their FIP (3.23), but not by much more than it was last year (3.49/3.80). Given what we know about their defensive approach and since this would make three years running with a considerably better ERA than FIP, this is probably a sustainable trend. The bullpen has mostly been what was expected, with Mark Melancon (who is no longer worth worrying about) and Tony Watson turning in great performances that have been bolstered by pitchers both expected (Jared Hughes) and unexpected).
There is one problem with all of this: the Pirates’ rotation has been stunningly healthy through 81 games. The only health issue their starting rotation has dealt with was Charlie Morton’s return from his hip surgery. There’s a decent chance Pirates’ pitching staff will be just as good in the second half as they were in the first if they can give 49 starts to Cole/Burnett/Liriano and 31 to Morton/Locke/Worley again (the other one went to Casey Sadler), but I don’t know how good they’d be if an injury to the Cole/Burnett/Liriano trio caused those numbers to flip and I’d be flat-out concerned if more than a couple of starts went to the first pitchers outside of those six (currently Chris Volstad and Radhames Liz). This is what I’m talking about when I’m talking about finding another pitcher, not necessarily just upgrading on Jeff Locke.
Talking about the offense is a much more fluid situation. Both Neil Walker and Pedro Alvarez have caught fire lately, which leaves the Pirates with three offensive regulars with below average OPSes: Josh Harrison, Gregory Polanco and Jordy Mercer. Harrison’s close to average, though, and he’s been hitting quite well since his low-point in early May. Mercer’s below average because his start was so horrendous. Polanco is his own issue at this point to be discussed separately. Like Mercer, the Pirates have been weighed down a bit by their ugly start. Since May 1st, they’ve scored 239 runs in 49 games, which is 4.88 runs per game. Currently, the Diamodnbacks lead the NL with 4.56 runs per game in 2015 (note: offense tends to be down across the league in April, I’m just providing the D’Backs total runs per game because it’s easy context).
The question on everyone’s mind is the one about the Cardinals, though. Those six games back with half a season to go are not insignificant. If the Cardinals drop down to play the second half as well as the Pirates have played the first, they’ll still win 100 games. If they drop to just about .500 (say, 41-40), they’re still a 94-win team. That means that it’s likely that the duplicating the current 47-34 is the absolute minimum the Pirates will have to do to have a shot at the NL Central, and that it’s possible they’ll have to continue playing at the level they’ve been at for the last 40 games (meaning their .644 pythag over that time span and not their .707 winning percentage, which would be insane to maintain over that long a span) for the entire second half to have a shot at the Cards. And I suppose the larger point of this this post has been to say that this is not impossible, though playing at that high a level for any significant amount of time is a plate-spinning act and the longer the run lasts, the most plates there are to be spun. The Pirates would be pretty seriously affected by an injury at the top of their rotation and they’d be hugely affected by any combination of pitching injuries. The offense looks better, but it still has some holes and is without a serious power threat. They’re still prone to awful games against high-strikeout pitchers in an era when most pitchers are high-strikeout pitchers. And then there’s the matter of the Cardinals themselves. The Pirates could keep steamrolling opponents in the second half and finish up with 98 wins and still finish in second place, because that’s how baseball and the universe and the Cardinals work sometimes.
All things considered, though, this has been a pretty good 81 games for the Pirates. Not perfect by any means, and not good enough compared to the Cardinals, but close enough on both fronts that one strong week before the All-Star Break could change all of this quite a bit. Now to figure out how to keep it all going for at least 81 more.
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