With all of the things that have been frustrating about the first 2 1/2 weeks of the 2016 season for the Pittsburgh Pirates, sometimes it’s really gratifying to sit back and watch a game play out the way that you think it should ahead of time. With the Pirates coming off of two ugly losses […]

I’ll admit that I thought a lot of the off-season conversation about Jeff Locke was a bit misguided. Locke is not a great Major League pitcher, but in his three full years in the Pirate rotation he made 81 starts and threw 466 innings with a 3.98 ERA. That’s quite an output from a fifth […]

Me, in a sleepy haze around 11:30 last night: Wait, did they say Rosales hit that monster homer off of Arquimedes Caminero? As in, Adam Rosales? As in, that guy that the A’s and Rangers DFA’d like three times between them in one week that one year? Is still in baseball? And hitting towering homers off […]

This is just a hypothesis at this point, but I don’t think that there’s any more that separates the frustrating Pirates that lost six times in seven games against the Reds, Tigers, and Brewers and the fun Pirates that obliterated the Brewers on Saturday and Sunday than there appears to be at first glance. More […]

The Pirates finally got an easy win last night to snap them out of a week-long stretch of ugly baseball, and I don’t think anyone should be surprised by what got them there; a really nice start from their rotation. In last night’s case it was Jon Niese, making the first seven inning start of […]

We should be clear about something: the Pirates have played nine games. They’re 5-4 because they’ve lost four of their last five, but a 5-4 start isn’t a hot start or a cold start or anything at all other than a decent run through nine games (5-4 is actually on pace to win 90 games). […]

Story time! Way back in the cold hinterlands of Pittsburgh Pirate history known as 2001, we Pirate fans had little we could do other than accept on faith that Dave Littlefield could not be any worse than the man he was replacing (Cam Bonifay) and that he was about to set the Pirates on a […]

After Juan Nicasio’s first start, which was obviously hugely positive, I ran a brief list of things that we couldn’t draw conclusions about after one start. They were: If he can really survive with two pitches (he only threw five changeups tonight), how he adjusts when hitters adjust, if he has lefty problems, how he holds up […]

Here’s a good way to erase the bad taste from a series loss to the Reds that included a lot of frustrating non-clutch hitting: seven runs on 17 hits without a homer that included a 6-for-15 performance with runners in scoring position. The Pirates absolutely hammered Justin Verlander this afternoon, touching him up for ten […]

It is relatively easy to want to instinctively refer to certain baseball games as “bad” losses or “good” wins. This is a natural and understandable response, given that sometimes baseball teams lose games they probably should’ve won (like, for example, the Pirates yesterday) and sometimes the win games they probably should’ve lost, but I’m not […]

I was out last night for a friend’s birthday, which meant that I spent the night stealing glances at my phone, wondering if the Pirates were going to somehow score enough runs to erase the deficit that kept growing. There’s a little jolt of electricity that you get when you watch a game this way and […]

At any point in the early season, I try to keep two main goals in mind: try not to over-react to a small-sample size result, but to try and find things inside of those small sample sizes that might be meaningful going forwards. So, for example, Juan Nicasio’s line tonight was great, but it’s not […]

In the immediate aftermath of last night’s walkoff win, I think I missed the most important part of the game in my recap; the way that the bullpen bailed Jon Niese (and the defense behind him) out of a subpar start is exactly how the Pirates plan on surviving several months of Niese + Locke + Nicasio […]

In watching Sunday’s Opener against the Cardinals, I kind of felt like the Pirates were clicking along in mid-season form against a team playing their first game of the year on a cold Pittsburgh April afternoon. The Pirates very quickly reminded me tonight that drawing conclusions based on one game is dumb by doing some […]

There was plenty of discussion (read: analysis, hot takes, etc.) when the Pirates swapped Neil Walker for Jon Niese over the winter, but there was one unmissable implication in the trade itself: the Pirates wanted Jon Niese. Sure, they wanted his contract (the two team options give them a lot of control over a potentially valuable […]