Every single time I feel like maybe this Pirate team is about to turn a corner, they go and do something dumb like lose two games in a row to the Phillies. Seriously: the Pirates had a four-game set against the Phillies this week, and lost ground on the Cardinals and Cubs. It’s still “early”, but it’s less early than it was two weeks ago, and the Pirates aren’t in much better shape.
The good news, I suppose, is that the Pirates will get to send both Gerrit Cole and AJ Burnett to the mound this weekend against the Cubs, which means that there’s an outside shot that they’ll win their first series against the Cubs in three tries this year. It’s hard to count on the Pirates to do much of anything, though, because it seems like it’s entirely unpredictable whether they’ll be offensively capable or not in any given baseball game.
Today Jeff Locke starts for the Pirates. His rotation spot is not currently being threatened by Charlie Morton’s imminent return, because Vance Worley has been terrible this year whereas Locke has been merely inconsistent. Clayton Richard is off to a decent start on his rehab/comeback trail, though, and will be worth keeping an eye on going forward if Locke can’t pitch any better than he has in the early part of this season.
I’ll spare you the boilerplate worrying about what this team is doing and just say this: it’s mid-May and the Pirates have two regulars with an OPS+ of above 100 (Walker and Marte) and just two more above 85 (Alvarez and McCutchen). They spent a week scoring a ton of runs, and their offense still looks awful on aggregate. Their starting rotation after Cole, Burnett, and maybe Liriano (Liriano is his own post at the moment, because his season has been weird) is either unreliable or outright bad. Their bullpen is terrible besides Watson, Hughes, and Scahill (who is likely to be demoted to make room for Charlie Morton next week). In short: the Pirates have, to this point at the season, played like an average-ish baseball team. They have an average-ish record. That’s not good enough. If it continues through yet another series against a division rival this weekend, the clock will be ticking considerably faster than it is today.
Be better, Pirates, is what I’m saying.
First pitch this afternoon is at 2:20.
Photo by David Banks/Getty Images
