I will admit that last week’s ugly sweep at the hands of the Cubs has made it awfully difficult for me to figure out how to process May baseball in 2016. Even after losing a double-header to the Padres yesterday, the Cubs are massive favorites in the NL Central: Baseball Prospectus has them at 93.3% to win the division, FanGraphs has them at 94.3%, and FiveThirtyEight has them at a cautious 85%. If we were not one season removed from the Pirates being unable to scale a similar May mountain despite an insane finish in the season’s final 121 games while chasing a less-talented team, I might be more receptive to the usual baseball platitudes about it being early in the season and baseball seasons being 162 games long and not counting chickens until the eggs have hatched, etc. etc.
As it stands, I am not terribly receptive to those things. I think the blame for this mostly goes on the Wild Card Game. There is no universe across the entirety of existence in which I am looking forward to a third straight summer of caring a lot about the result of every single baseball game across an entire summer, only to know that it might (or in this case probably will) come down to the outcome of one game against one excellent pitcher. Part of me wants to say, “Wake me up on October 3rd, and I’ll just put all that energy into the Wild Card Game, if the Pirates are in it, and we’ll go from there.” Knowing that that’s probably where it’s headed, well, how do you care about a game against the Reds in May?
Anyway, we had a lab dinner on Tuesday and I didn’t even realize the Pirates were rained out until after the Penguin game ended. And I went to see Captain America last night and I did a little fist-pump when I saw that the Pirates hit a bunch homers to erase what had been a 3-1 deficit when I went into the theater, but I barely even bothered to look for the highlights when I got home from the movie.
Anyway, Kang is slugging 1.000 and McCutchen is quietly heating up and heading towards Andrew McCutchen territory and the whole pitching staff is still a mess, but coherent enough to win on most nights, and maybe some of this stuff will matter if the Pirates win some games in Chicago this weekend. Maybe.
Photo by Joe Robbins/Getty Images
