These are the Pittsburgh Pirates we’ve been waiting six weeks for. Before the season began, the vision of the contending Pittsburgh Pirates was for the top of the rotation to be good, and for the offense to pound opponents into submission. These are some numbers:
- Pirates 21 Mets 4
- Actually, the Pirates hit as many home runs in the series as the Mets scored total runs.
- Combined line for Gerrit Cole, AJ Burnett, and Francisco Liriano: 21 1/3 innings, 32 strikeouts, three walks, three runs allowed (two earned), and just 17 hits. Three straight dominating performances.
- On May 6th, Andrew McCutchen was hitting .188/.279/.292. On May 25th, he’s hitting .261/.359/.464. That’s .386/.486/.754 with six doubles and five homers in 16 games. In other words: he’s baaaack.
I’ve taken some criticism for being too negative about this Pirate team, and once yesterday’s game blew up in the Pirates’ favor there were a few people wondering if I was going to eat my words about this team’s poor start. I think that sort of misses the point I was trying to make about said poor start: the reason that the Pirates starting 18-22 and falling so far behind the Cardinals was frustrating was because we all knew all along that this Pirate team was capable of blowing the Mets off of the field in a three-game set in which they started Matt Harvey and Noah Syndergaard. When a team as talented as this Pirate team is plays bland, uninspired baseball for a quarter of the season, they make it much tougher on themselves if or when they turn a corner.
Obviously it’s too soon to say whether these Pirates have turned a corner, but I think that what these three game tell us is pretty clear: the Pittsburgh Pirates we wanted to see before the season started certainly exist, and if they can stick around, they can make the NL Central interesting again.
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