When I was working on my recap last night, I couldn’t decide whether to use the above picture of Pedro Florimon in the post-game celebration or the amazing shot of Cervelli barrel-rolling into home plate with Gregory Polanco face down on the ground waving him home. In the end, the Cervelli/Polanco shot on the recap below was just too fantastic to not use, but I felt like I was kind of cutting Pedro Florimon a little bit short by not putting up a picture of him. It was his moment, I figured, and who knows how many of those he’d get.
That was around 12:30 AM, after the game ended. It’s 16 hours later and Pedro Florimon has been designated for assignment to allow the Pirates to make room for Josh Wall in the bullpen, after a long week of extra inning games. The move was inevitable; Wall will be up for a couple of days to spell the over-worked ‘pen, then Josh Harrison will take Wall’s place on the roster over the weekend. Florimon would’ve been out with Harrison’s return anyway, the bullpen situation is just a harsh little baseball reality that hurried the process up.
Let’s take a moment to salute Pedro Florimon, though. Being a baseball fan in the information era is a constant internal struggle between reducing the season to a bunch of data points on a trend line to understand the underlying progression of the season and celebrating (or not celebrating) the individual games on their own. Each season is a massive and unwieldy thing that has 162 games and countless pitches that make it its own unique result and it’s hard to find one game or one pitch that are really meaningful in the whole mess. We watch the individual games, but we know it’s the big picture that matters. If you’re in a playoff race and you make or miss the playoffs by one game, it’s hard to call any one loss or win important, because the reality is that they all are.
And that’s the Pedro Florimon game. Maybe it won’t matter in the long run, but maybe it will. Maybe the backup backup backup shortstop with the .201 career average banging a ball off the right field wall, then running his ass off to third base even though the game was probably over because his hit sent the dog-tired catcher belly-flopping home will be one of the thousand tiny moments that makes the 2015 Pittsburgh Pirate season special. It was a wonderful and weird way to win a baseball game. Maybe Pedro Florimon will be back in September (there’s a good chance he clears waivers) and maybe he won’t, but he’s part of the 2015 Pirates now, and I’m happy that he was.
