Here is a partial list of opposing pitchers that have started games won by the Pittsburgh Pirates this year:
- Max Scherzer
- Clayton Kershaw (2x)
- Jake Arrieta
The Pirates faced Zack Greinke once and lost to him. They did not face Jacob deGrom. The only other pitcher likely to finish in the top half of NL Cy Young voting is Gerrit Cole, who pitches for the Pirates.
Here is a brief list of ways I can think of that the Pirates won baseball games off of the top of my head:
- Back to back wins in which they fell behind in extra innings, only to win against the team with the best record in baseball.
- Took a 4-1 lead, allowed the game to be tied on two wild pitches, won anyway.
- A Pedro Florimon triple.
- A nine-run seventh inning.
- A dominant eight-inning start by Jeff Locke, the least efficient pitcher with an extended career in the big leagues that I can think of, that only required 89 pitches.
- Two Pedro Alvarez defensive mistakes to put them behind, then a three-run Pedro Alvarez home run to take the lead.
Here are some ways they’ve lost games:
- Gregory Polanco fell down.
- 10 walks, four separate innings with the bases loaded, zero runs, and a dribbler through the infield that the outfield couldn’t pick up.
- The Reds crushed Gerrit Cole.
- The Reds crushed Gerrit Cole again, even though he was in the middle of one of his most dominant stretches of the year.
- The Reds somehow crushed Gerrit Cole a third time, despite Gerrit Cole not getting crushed at any point in the season besides the other two times the Reds crushed him.
- They couldn’t figure out [insert random rookie pitcher here].
I’m writing all of this down to tell you what you, as a Pirate fan, already know: baseball is a wonderful sport full of stats and data that we can pull apart and put back together to find interesting patterns and make pretty good predictions and understand the sport in a deep and meaningful way, but all of those stats and data come from individual games that in isolation are barely better than a random pattern.
I probably sound like a broken record since this is Year Three of the Great Pirate Wild Card Adventure, but the real crime of the Wild Card Game is that the Pirates and Cubs are both great baseball teams (from Christopher Kamka on Twitter: only one World Series in the last decade has featured two teams with 97+ wins, and this year’s won’t, either, since there are none of those teams in the AL), and that they deserve more than one game in the post-season to sort out which team is better. Pitting the 98-win Pirates against the 97-win Cubs in front of an October crowd at PNC Park with Jake Arrieta and Gerrit Cole on the mound in a winner-take-all game is a great spectacle and will make for great television, but it’s as likely to be decided by something wildly improbable like Jordy Mercer hitting a Jack Wilson Special off of the left field foul pole as it is to be decided by a great performance from Cole or Arrieta or Andrew McCutchen or Starling Marte or Anthony Rizzo or Kris Bryant. This game will be a lot of things, but it won’t be fair to send one of these teams forward after just one playoff game.
Andrew McCutchen has the right mindset for this game though: once the playoffs start, fair doesn’t matter and easy doesn’t matter, either you win and move or, or you don’t and you go home. Nobody will have time for the team that lost tomorrow or the unfairness of the situation. Put your best team on the field, play, and win, or go home and wonder what happens to the Pirates when David Price signs with the Cubs this winter.
Because of the randomness of one game, it feels like a waste of time for me to go through the match-ups and tell you what might happen or what might not happen in this game. What I will tell you is this: I think the Pirates are the best team in the National League. They didn’t win the National League Central because the Cardinals sprinted out to a huge lead in the season’s first 40 games, but in their last 122 games they were 5 1/2 clear of their closest NL competitor with the best pythagorean record to boot. Jake Arrieta is getting a ton of attention this week and rightly so, because he had one of the most insane second halves on record. In terms of peripheral statistics, though, Gerrit Cole was just a hair behind Arrieta this year and had nearly as much success against the Cubs as Arrieta did against the Pirates. His last five starts came against the Cardinals, Cubs, Dodgers, Cubs, and Cardinals. He had a 2.36 ERA and a 34:5 K:BB and a .547 OPS against. I don’t need to spend 800 words trying to find the secret formula to his success in the Pirates’ infield shifts: Gerrit Cole is the Pirates’ best pitcher and one of the best pitchers in baseball this year. He does not need to match Jake Arrieta’s entire phenomenal second half tonight — he only has to match him for one start. He can do that. The same goes for the Pirate lineup: they don’t need to score enough runs to invalidate Arrieta’s enitre great season tonight. They only need to score enough runs to give Gerrit Cole a chance. This Pirate lineup has had as much success against good pitching as any lineup in baseball this year. I can’t tell you that I’m sure the Pirates will win tonight. I can’t even tell you that I’m sure that they’re the favorites. I can tell you that if I had to pick one National League team in one circumstance to beat Jake Arrieta in a one-game playoff, it’d be the Pirates, at home, with Gerrit Cole on the mound.
There is only one directive for this Pirate team tonight. It’s not to make Arrieta hit a certain pitch count by a certain inning, or for Cole to strike a certain number of batters out. It’s this: find a way. It doesn’t matter how it happens, only that it does.
Photo by Norm Hall/Getty Images
