One question that I’ve been struggling with since almost the beginning of this 2015 season is a pretty straightforward one. How do you define success for the 2015 Pittsburgh Pirates? Would a division title be a success? Would a trip to the NLCS be a success? Would it take a World Series?
From an emotional standpoint, my hunch is that because the Pirates have made the playoffs two years in a row, pretty much anything shy of a World Series is going to feel like a crushing disappointment in the moment for fans and for the team itself. That’s the way sports work: you spend a few years watching a team climb and being excited by the climb, but at some point you’re hoping for the payoff. The Pirates exorcised demons in 2013, they validated themselves in 2014, and so what’s left to do in the coming years is to punch the ticket and hang a banner. If they do it, they’ll have streets and statues named after them. If they don’t, they’ll have blogs named after them.
From an intellectual standpoint, though, I can recognize that a team can be a great team without winning a World Series. It doesn’t actually take a great team to win a World Series, it just takes a playoff team to do it. From that perspective, the goal is to be a Real Boy playoff team and not the cheap wooden puppet wild card alternative, subject to the turns of the rotation and the whims of an opposing starter about to set off on a historic month of dominance. Wild Card teams can win World Series, of course, and they can have streets and statues named after them, but their chances of doing so are literally about half that of a division champion. You can’t tell me that there wasn’t any point last October when you watched a Giant team with one pitcher slice through the National League and hoist a trophy and wondered what that month would’ve looked like with Gerrit Cole and the high octane Pirate offense that had slugged their way through September in their place. We’ll never know, though, and so the goal is clear: win the division.
For much of June and July, though, I started to wonder something else. How much blame can you put on the Pirates for not winning the division if they win 95 games and the Cardinals win 100? A 95-win team is a team good enough to win the division in a lot of seasons, but a 100-win team is a step beyond. Since the two great Cardinal teams that won 105 and 100 games in 2004 and 2005 kicked off this era of Cardinal dominance, the NL has had one 100-game winner — the 2011 Phillies with Roy Halladay, Cliff Lee, Cole Hamels, and Roy Oswalt. How can you be mad at the Pirates for not winning 101 games if the Cardinals win 100?
These sorts of gray areas are no fun, and I think another one has cropped up in the last two weeks. Leading into the trade deadline, the Pirates clearly had a starting pitching depth issue with Jeff Locke’s inconsistency, Charlie Morton’s struggles, and a rash of injuries to their Triple-A depth. Given that the Pirates also have a monstrous starting pitching depth issue for 2016, when they’ll no longer have AJ Burnett and many of the pitchers they’d counted on to be ready to replace him simply won’t be ready due to injuries, the approach seemed clear to most people: try and find a starter that the team could use down the stretch in 2015 and then would still be a Pirate in 2016. Paying through the nose for a rental like David Price would potentially be trading 60 games down the stretch this year for their ability to trade for a starter to take Burnett’s innings next year, and so it was an unwise move for a team that seemed on July 31st to be unlikely to win their division under any circumstances but nearly a sure thing to win a Wild Card. What the Pirates decided to do was to deepen the bullpen with Joakim Soria and Joe Blanton (Blanton has been excellent with the Pirates, so I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt even though I’m still mildly skeptical of him), which, coupled with a re-re-re-tooled Arquimedes Caminero and the Melancon/Watson/Hughes trio, gave them a huge variety of bullpen weapons to deploy on nights when Charlie Morton and Jeff Locke start or on the occasion that AJ Burnett shows his age. That’s the Pirate approach in a nutshell: find a non-obvious solution to a problem that is expensive to fix in the obvious way.
And then AJ Burnett got hurt with less than 24 hours to go before the deadline, and the only pitchers that moved on deadline day were JA Happ and Dan Haren. Happ is a fine back-end starter, but replacing Burnett with Happ essentially reverts the rotation back to where it was last year, where the Pirates are thin at the top of the rotation and the back end of the rotation is now the back-end-and-middle of the rotation.
That would be enough of a problem by itself, but suddenly Francisco Liriano has only made two starts of any consequential length since the break despite being scheduled for five (he missed one with a weird injury, he left one early with a weird injury, and he got rained out of one) and Gerrit Cole is suddenly having trouble pitching deep into games, and you can look back on the last two weeks and see a pattern that looks like a lot of trouble, especially given the Pirates’ upcoming schedule and their lack of off days and the uncertainty around Burnett and the need to wait until September 1st to create any sort of sense of depth in the starting rotation and bullpen.
If we go back to the original conceit of asking what makes a successful Pirate team and we accept that they’re unlikely to win the division but that a Wild Card isn’t the end of the world because we’re actually here for the emotional high of winning a World Series and not the intellectual victory of winning the division, then we come to another question. How does a Wild Card team and this Pirate team in particular as a Wild Card win the World Series? And the answer is easy: be able to play something approximating their baseball in October. Really, concern from fans in August and panic from fans in May and swagger from fans in July all have the same potential to be pointless — if you’re watching a good enough baseball team, your concern as a fan should be whether or not they get into the playoffs, and then whether or not they can play something approximating their best baseball once there. The rest of it is just semantics. The Pirates have a six game lead on the Giants and an eight game lead on the Nationals, so they’re about as likely to miss the playoffs as they are to win the division (depending on your favorite projection system, of course), which is to say that it’s not likely but not impossible. That can change pretty quickly, though, and so the two parts of the equation (make the playoffs, be at your best at the end of the season) go hand in hand and give us our last question: How does this Pirate team get better?
They need more from Gerrit Cole. All defensive questions aside, he has to be able to get out of the sixth inning. They need Liriano on the mound and giving them six innings more regularly. They need anything out of Morton, Happ, and Locke. It’s a little ridiculous to expect all three to click at once, but they need at least one of them giving them solid starts at all times. They need the defense to be better to help their pitchers out, which means that they need Jordy Mercer back soon because the Ramirez, Kang, Walker, Alvarez infield has all of the range of a tetherball pole. They need to seriously consider their options at first base, because neither Pedro Alvarez nor Michael Morse has any business being there, from a defensive standpoint. They need to hit, and not just in the streaky way that they’ve hit to this point in the season. They can do all of these things and sometimes doing one of them is enough (they swept the Dodgers on the backs of their offense and pretty much nothing else), but the longer these deficits exist the more likely the Pirates are to find themselves in race for a playoff spot as opposed to a race for the NL Central.
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