What normally felt like the only possible world became one among many.
– Ben Lerner, 10:04
Opening Day is a day of optimism in the face of a Major League Baseball season that actively encourages pessimism. This is the reality of the Major League Baseball season: it is long, it is harsh, and it is random. At the end of it, there’s only one team that will win the World Series. It might be the best team during the regular season, it might be the best team in October, it might be the luckiest team in October. Chances are not great that it will be your favorite team, even if your favorite team happens to be very good at baseball. There’s no way to tell which team will pull this off on October 1st, much less on Opening Day.
There is a flip side to all of this: if you can’t say who will win the World Series on Opening Day, you also can’t say who won’t win. That’s the source of the optimism that permeates today.
That premise is more or less the basis on which a bunch of national pundits have picked the Pittsburgh Pirates to win the World Series. I don’t know who’s going to win the World Series, but the Pirates might, and if they do I’ll look like a genius for picking them. This is also a very Pittsburgh Pirate fan position for me to take. No one is picking the Pirates to win the World Series because they’re the best team; in fact they’re picking them very specifically because they’re not the best team. That sort of cynicism is actually exactly what I’m trying to force myself to avoid this April. Chuck Klosterman once wrote* something along the lines of this: All math is a lie, because the only probability that exists is 50%. Either something will happen or it won’t. Will you roll a six on that six sided-die? Either you will, or you won’t. 50/50. This is terrible math and it’s horrible statistical analysis, but it’s not actually bad advice. There are a lot of things that happen that are out of our control, and we waste a lot of time worrying over whether or not they’ll happen, despite our inability to control them. The real joy in being a Pirate fan this year is that we can talk ourselves into the Pirates being one of those teams that have a chance this year, and when we do it nobody raises their eyebrows at us. The Pirates aren’t the best team in baseball right now. But they’re close enough to the top that it’s not inconceivable that they might be at the end of October.
You know the arguments in both directions by heart right now. We know that this Pirate team might be THE PIRATE TEAM because they have Andrew McCutchen, because Starling Marte and Gregory Polanco keep making Pirate fans reminisce about Clemente and Parker, because they have Andrew McCutchen, because “F*ck You” Gerrit Cole is quite possibly ready to show up for a full season instead of just in September, because they have Andrew McCutchen, because Neal Huntington finds relievers that throw 100 mph and get ground balls more than half of the time much easier than you find quarters when you need to use the vending machine, because they have Andrew McCutchen, because Josh Harrison can be a 2014 fluke and a good player in 2015 all at the same time, because they have Andrew McCutchen, because Pedro Alvarez has clearly embraced his destiny as a first baseman and spent all spring mashing taters, because they have Andrew McCutchen, and because they have Andrew McCutchen. We know that this team might not be THE PIRATE TEAM because their starting pitching is terrifyingly thin, because Russell Martin is a Blue Jay and they replaced him with a guy that can’t stay healthy, a guy that can’t hit, and a guy that can’t field, because who knows what Pedro Alvarez’s deal really is, because Gregory Polanco was not great last year and then the Pirates traded the guy that took his job, because wait a second, they had a bad bullpen, they filled it with Radhames Liz and Arquimedes Caminero and Rob Scahill and now they have a good bullpen?, because they’re not the Nationals, because they’re not the Dodgers, because they’re not the Cardinals, because everyone’s already ready for them to not be the Cubs.
If I can go away from the philosophy and get briefly into baseball, my main analysis of this team and the coming season is this: the difference between the 2015 Pirates being a good team and the 2015 Pirates being a great team is going to be their starting pitching. They’re going to hit and they’re going to score runs. Some combination of Andrew McCutchen, Neil Walker, Starling Marte, Josh Harrison, Pedro Alvarez, Gregory Polanco, and even Francisco Cervelli, Jung Ho Kang, and Corey Hart is going to be more than sufficient to make the Pirates a very good offense. There’s enough depth, both in the lineup itself and on the bench, that the club doesn’t need everyone to contribute to be good, though you could argue that there’s a chance that literally every Opening Day position starter on the Pirates could end the season with a wRC+ of over 100. The Pirates are going to score enough runs to win games this year.
The problem is that the Pirates are no longer at a point where simply winning games is good enough. The Pirates should be winning divisions and winning playoff series, not just winning games. They did a decent enough job of masking their pitching deficiencies last year with their ballpark and their defense, but it was that pitching staff that was the difference between them hosting the Wild Card Game and them winning the Central. It’s no real secret what the Pirates need to do here: they need Gerrit Cole at the next level, they need more consistency from Francisco Liriano, they need AJ Burnett to at least somewhat resemble his 2013 Pittsburgh self, they need solid innings from Vance Worley and Charlie Morton and Jeff Locke, and they will eventually probably need either Nick Kingham or Jameson Taillon to step into the big league rotation and contribute. Of course, this is more or less exactly what I thought about last year’s Pirate team on Opening Day, and then they went out and illustrated exactly why that position was dangerous. It’s dangerous for mostly the same reasons this year: Liriano is a roller coaster, Burnett is old, Cole is a young pitcher that throws hard and that makes him volatile and injury prone, Morton is the definition of injury prone, Worley is decent enough for the back of the rotation but not much more, Locke is a fringe guy, and the rookies are entirely unproven. The ability is there with this staff, for sure, but there are plenty of places that they could fall short. The offense will be fun to watch and it’ll be the core of the team, but the pitching is what will take them to the next level. It’s probably what I’ll be watching most closely all year.
Let’s put those potential pitfalls aside, though. Every spring people ask me if this is the Pirates’ year, and on most years my answer starts with, “Well, if …” and then I ramble through idealized scenarios for ten minutes. This year, my answer to that question every time is to smile and say, “You know what? I think that it just might be.” And I feel a chill go up my spine. This feeling might not last forever, because we’re going to start replacing projections with games in less than six hours. Let’s enjoy it today, though, and then let the season take us where it will.
*I’m pretty sure it was in Sex, Drugs, and Coco Puffs, if you’re really curious, though I’m having a hard time finding the exact quote and citation via Google. If we’re being honest, it’s been a long time since I read Sex, Drugs, and Coco Puffs, and all of my Klosterman books are in a box in Hermitage. It’s funny: in one of Klosterman’s books (Killing Yourself to Live, I think, though again, I’m not totally sure because of the elapsed time) he talks about how there is a point in every human male’s life in which they think that Led Zeppelin is the greatest band that ever was or ever will be, and for those six months or year or two years or whatever, you cannot talk that guy out of the position that Zeppelin is the greatest band because it’s the absolute truth for him. And then eventually, that guy grows up a bit and he still appreciates Led Zeppelin for what they were, but he become less dogmatic about the whole thing. And what’s funny about it is that I think that is probably exactly how I feel about Chuck Klosterman (and also about Led Zeppelin).
Photo by Justin K. Aller/Getty Images
