On June 1st, the Pirates woke up seven games out of first place in the NL Central. The Pirates went 17-9 in June. The Cardinals went 18-8, and actually gained a game on the Pirates. The Bucs went 17-9 in July, and made up 2 1/2 games as the Cardinals went 15-12. The Pirates went 19-8 in August, but the Cardinals went 19-9, and so the Pirates only made up a half game. Since June 1st, the Pirates are 53-26. That’s the most wins in baseball, that’s 6 1/2 games better than the Cubs and 8 1/2 better than the Mets. That’s better than the Royals or the Blue Jays. But it’s only two games better than the Cardinals, and so we sit here on September 1st, staring at a Pirate team with a .612 winning percentage (that’s a 99-win pace) that’s staring down the barrel of facing Jake Arrietta in the wild card game. It’s ridiculous and unfair and brutal reality.
The Wild Card Game would not be an automatic loss for the Pirates, of course. Not at PNC Park, not with Gerrit Cole on the mound, not with the Pirate lineup. The problem, of course, is that it’s not a guaranteed win, either, nor is it much of anything better than a coin flip. For a team looking at their third straight playoff berth and somewhere in the neighborhood of 95-100 wins, this season will be a disappointment if it ends with anything less than a World Series. The chances that they will win the World Series will be basically halved by being in the Wild Card Game.
The Pirates do have two more games than the Cardinals, as they have 33 left compared to the Cards’ 31. They also play the Cardinals six times (once at home and once at Busch). Both teams have two series left against the Reds and Brewers, though the Cardinals have seven games against each team and the Pirates have six. The Pirates have to go to LA and Colorado, while the Cardinals are basically done traveling for the year (their only non-division series is one against the Braves in the season’s next-to-last week) and their toughest non-division series is right now, at home, against a crumbling Nationals’ team. In other words, their schedules are similar but the Cardinals certainly have the advantage, as they don’t have a long road trip and they play fewer games against the Cubs.
I rolled back to June 1st in the first paragraph to make nice round points about months, but if we go back to May 22nd, the Pirates are playing at an insane .685 pace (61-28). They’ve made up four games on the Cardinals in that span. How do they make up five in a month?
If they keep playing .685 ball, that’s 23 wins (I’m rounding up) in the season’s last 33 games. That would give them 102 wins, which would be the most games won by a Pirate team in 106 years. The last Pirate team to cross the 100-win barrier was the 1909 World Series Champion Pirates, who won 110 out of 152 games. 102 wins would make this team the third 100-win Pirate team in history, behind that 1909 club and the 1902 club that went 103-36. They also would only win the division if the Cardinals go 16-15 down the stretch. They would only earn a tiebreaker game if the Cardinals go 17-14.
To be clear: a world in which a 102-win team is forced to play their way into the playoffs in a one-game spectacle staged solely for TV ratings and invented because the end of the 2011 season was exciting is a dystopian future that is Bud Selig’s greatest legacy. It’s horrible and antithetical to what baseball tries to accomplish with the longest regular season and smallest post-season pool in the four major North American sports. It might change in the future, but it will not change in the next 34 days.
The math is easy, though. The Pirates have 10 series left. If they only lose one game per series, they’ll get to 102 wins. That seems (from here, at least) like a reasonable estimate of a number of wins the Pirates could end the season with that might force a tiebreaker. It’s an arbitrary number, of course: they could win 104 games and finish in second place or they could win 99 and take the division if the Cardinals collapse. It seems a number as good as any to shoot four, though: 102 wins, with at least four wins against the Cardinals in the final six games between the two clubs. That gives the Pirates a shot, at least. That’ll require a lot of wins against the Reds, Brewers, and Cubs — one loss per series against those teams means going 13-6 against three teams that the Pirates are a combined 15-22 against this year.
This whole hot streak (actually, it’s cheap to call 61-28 a hot streak — it’s a torrid three-month romp through the heart of the National League) for the Pirates has been a truly Sisyphean task. But hey, let’s roll that boulder up the hill one more time. I mean, it’s worth a shot, at least. Right?
Photo by Justin K. Aller/Getty Images
