It's been almost two weeks since the Cardinals eliminated the Pirates from the National League playoffs, and the reason that I've had so much trouble getting this offseason primer together is that it's still hard to think of the Pirates outside of the context of the 2013 season. I really didn't think the Dodgers looked […]

When the Pirates collapsed in 2012, I started to wonder if the First Pirate Winning Season in a Generation could ever possibly live up to the expectations that we'd all built for it. Everyone thought it was going to be a little bit different: joyous, cathartic, validating, burden-relieving, etc., and I had this creeping fear […]

What I want to tell you is this:  One of the most venerable catch-phrases in baseball history is "Wait 'til next year." It's what the Dodgers used to say in the late '40s and early '50s before they broke through against the Yankees in 1955. It's what the Cubs fans tell themselves every year because […]

One of the coolest aspects of a Game 5 is that pretty much the entire baseball-watching world has turned its eyes onto the Pirates and Cardinals. As such, there are a couple of links that I think are good reading to open this preview with.  First up is Getting Blanked's preview of the Andrew McCutchen/Adam […]

When thinking about posts I wanted to have written for Game 5 today, I thought about doing a "historical perspective" post like I did before the Pirates/Reds game last Tuesday, but — and this is partially because the Pirates missed out on the playoffs for the entire "One Wildcard" era — the Pirates' have only […]

Just a little over two years ago, I remember bemoaning the lack of an obvious franchise player at the top of the 2011 draft. Neal Huntington's goal with the Pirates was obviously to stockpile talent, but they picked fourth in a 2009 draft that featured Stephen Strasburg at the top and they picked second in […]

Due to circumstances well beyond my control, I got to watch none of this game until the bottom of the eighth inning. Being unable to watch the biggest Pirate game in the last 21 years is a particularly helpless feeling, given that until about 2 PM I thought that I was going to be able […]

I will not, at any point for the rest of this postseason, tell you that there is a game that I don't think that the Pittsburgh Pirates can win. Once a team gets to this point, and once they win games like Tuesday's Wild Card Game and last night's NLDS Game 3 thriller, literally anything […]

I don't know how to say anything coherent about this game. Let's open up with that and go from there. Through three games, the only thing that this Pirates playoff run was been missing was a nail-biting, heart-pounding Playoff Game ™. Given Francisco Liriano's success against the Cardinals this year and Joe Kelly's success against […]

The balance in a best-of-five series is a pretty precarious thing. Headed into this series with the pitching matchups on the table, you could lay the advantages out like this: the Cards had a decent-sized Game 1 advantage with Wainwright against Burnett in Busch, the Pirates had a Game 2 advantage with Cole against Lynn […]

There are a lot of highlights from this 2013 regular season, but some of the games that stand out from the regular season for me are the ones that I dubbed "reminder games" in my head. The reminder  games were the ones where Pirates would come out and put together a complete and solid win […]

Is there a pitcher you'd rather have on the mound for the Pirates in a near must-win situation than Gerrit Cole? Cole has been consistent since the day he was called up in June, and he was dominant in September. The stats have been run through a million times in the last week, but in […]

There is almost no point in rehashing or dwelling on what happened in this game. AJ Burnett was terrible from the get-go; it was obvious in the first inning that his curve wasn't biting and that he couldn't locate anything the way that he wanted to. He danced through the raindrops for two innings, but […]

The turnaround time in this series is a little bit mind-boggling. I'm typing this up around 3 PM on Thursday afternoon. In about 25 hours, it's possible that either the Pirates or the Cardinals will be one win away from the NLCS. That's not quite the same urgency as the one-and-done elimination game on Tuesday, […]

TOn September 27, 2006, two friends of mine and I went down to PNC Park for a Pirates/Astros game. The season was beyond over for the Pirates; they were 65-92 headed into the game and they were already five games into what was ended up being an eight-game losing streak. The Astros were in the […]

It wasn’t until after last Friday’s game ended that it occurred to me that AJ Burnett may have thrown his last game as a Pittsburgh Pirate. The main reason for that was that I was doing my best to not think about what would happen if the Pirates lost Tuesday’s playoff game to the Reds […]

That was perfect.  I don't even really know what else to say about this game. The big concern with the one game playoff is that no matter what you think the advantage that your favorite team might have, it's not guaranteed to bear itself out over such a short span. No matter how many times […]

I want you to take just one minute from your afternoon, and breathe in. Watch your hands shake. Feel the butterflies in your stomach. Look at the second hand on the clock and wonder if it really is possible for time to slow down or stop. Since we're still a few hours out from game […]

"Cincinnati will bulllshit with us and kick our ass and laugh at us. They’re the only team that talk about us like a dog. We gonna get down. We gonna do the do. I’m going to hit these m——-s." — Dock Ellis in his famous "do the do" speech, before hitting three straight Reds to […]

In the last few days, I've posted links to a couple of wild card game strategy pieces (FanGraphs, Beyond the Box Score). Both of the articles mainly advocate that the Pirates use as many pitchers as possible, both to maximize results from starters like Francisco Liriano and Gerrit Cole (that is, knowing that they'd throw […]