Of course, everything that I wrote in my pre-game post about this past week not being so bad and the Pirates being in decent shape going into the All-Star Break all presupposed a situation in which the Pirates won this afternoon. Instead, Francisco Liriano lost his control after the first inning, served up a home run to an alleged human being named Kris Negron, the Pirates failed to capitalize on Johnny Cueto pitching 1 2/3 innings after an hour-long rain delay and a pitch count over 80, and so the Pirates lost five of seven against their divisional rivals this week.
The trick about baseball is that sometimes the border between “a decent week where the Pirates went 3-4 and definitely could’ve been 6-1” dissolves straight into “a terrible week where Andrew McCutchen was the only thing keeping the Pirates from going 1-7.”
For a contender, this team’s got an awful lot of soul searching to do at the Break this week.
