Pedro Alvarez had 11 total bases last night. Just how many total bases is 11 total bases? Pedro Alvarez entered last night with 116 games and 448 plate appearances under his belt. He was hitting .240/.321/.462. After last night, Alvarez’s season line bumped up to .247/.327/.484. That’s an OPS jump from .783 to .811 after […]

Every baseball game — every single win and loss — is made up of a million tiny moving parts that are inextricable from each other. Some of these parts stand out, some of them fade into the background. As a season wears on, wins and losses do the same thing. Who remembers Erik Bedard beating […]

By virtue of playing good baseball earlier in the 2012 season, the Pirates have been lucky enough to play a bunch of Important Baseball Games over the course of the last month. The Pirates have lost most of these Important Baseball Games. If they can’t stop doing that, they won’t get very many more Important […]

Just as I was going to bed last night,

If you really want to get down to brass tacks, this whole game turned on one play. After the Pirates took a 2-0 lead in the bottom of the fourth inning, Yadier Molina lead off the fifth wiht a single. Skip Schumaker followed that up with a ball hit to left-center that seemed to hang […]

For almost a month now, I’ve been saying things like, “The Pirates aren’t quite collapsing yet, but they have to start playing better soon if they want to avoid a full-on collapse.” Or, “Well, it’s not quite time to panic but the Pirates are at some point going to have to stop playing bad baseball.” […]

It shouldn’t surprise you that the Pittsburgh Pirates’ Second Annual Playoff Collapse is wearing me out; last year’s collapse nearly killed this blog over the course of the winter and this year’s team is better, with more wins, more talent, and a stronger playoff position to piss away. That makes the unraveling that much more […]

The Pirates finally got back on track last night with their 4-0 win over the Brewers. The next step now is to actually stay on track. A win this afternoon wins them only their second series of August and it ensures that the Cardinals will be in town with no more than a one game […]

The Pirates are playing bad baseball and losing a lot of games. Stop that, Pirates.  Shaun Marcum returns from the DL tonight against Jeff Karstenst at 7:05. 

The Pirates were pretty busy for a Friday afternoon in August today; they sent Daniel McCutchen back down to Triple-A and brought Jordy Mercer back from paternity leave (this brings the roster back to 13 position players and 12 pitchers, which makes sense given that the Pirates were both off yesterday and will be off […]

The Pirates are 7-13 in their last 20 games. Andrew McCutchen hit worse in those 20 games than Gaby Sanchez. The pitching staff is cracking at the seams, the bullpen is a smoking crater that the team refuses to acknowledge or fix, and the Pirates are out playoff position for the first time since June […]

The Pirates have an off-day today for the first time since August 2nd. I had hoped that they would make it through this last 20-game stretch with a record of 12-8. Had they pulled that off, they’d have a commanding lead for the second wild card spot, and they’d be 2 1/2 games behind the […]

The Pirates and Padres will blessedly wrap up this accursed series this afternoon at 6:35 at Petco Park, which seems like a very strange time to play a getaway game for an East Coast team in San Diego, but then the Pirates actually have an off-day tomorrow so maybe it doesn’t matter.  The Padres are […]

After last night’s bullpen debacle, Clint Hurdle talked to the press about his weird bullpen management (you can find some of the quotes on

Here is what I wrote when the Pirates called up Chad Qualls and Dan McCutchen this afternoon:  I get not wanting to throw Morris or Wilson straight into the fire and risk having an untested rookie blow a lead, but keeping guys like Qualls and McCutchen around with Morris and Wilson in the minor leagues […]

AJ Burnett goes for the Pirates tonight. I want to say that he’s been pretty shaky since he nearly threw back-to-back complete games in late July/early August, but that’s not entirely true. In his two starts since the Reds’ series, he’s getting hit hard at a .296/.367/.574 pace, which has given him a 7.30 ERA […]

After Justin Wilson and Kyle McPherson gave the Pirates three solid innings of relief last night, the Bucs sent both pitchers down this afternoon to make room for Chad Qualls’ return from the bereavement list and Daniel McCutchen’s return to the Major League team. Literally nothing about this makes sense to me; Qualls has been […]

There are a number of ways to interpret this 3-1 loss to the Padres that the Pirates just suffered tonight. One is that they played a 19-inning game that ended 26 hours before and 1,800 miles away from the first pitch of this game; of course they looked lethargic, of course they got off to […]

After yesterday’s marathon game in St. Louis, it seemed logical that there were some roster moves coming today. With tonight’s 10:05 first pitch approaching, we know what most of them are now, though everything’s not perfectly clear.