Some people don't like baseball because games can occasionally go on for forever and because there are so many games that each individual game looks meaningless in the context of an entire stadium. Not me. I love data. Long foul balls are just strikes unless you serve up a home run on the next pitch. One home run is just one home run unless you give up or hit another one. In the vaccum of one pitch, one at-bat, one game, nothing in baseball means much of anything. Not even 13-0 losses.
This is how great the first part of this week was for the Pirates: they just lost a game 13-0 and still outscored the Cardinals 22-20 in their five-game series. They set a four-day record for attendance at PNC Park this week, even though a whole bunch of the people through the turnstiles this week didn't count towards the attendance* because they were season ticket holders that redeemed tickets from missed games in April. The Pirates got beaten up pretty badly tonight, but they only used two bullpen arms and it doesn't seem like anyone got hurt. One bad loss doesn't invalidate four wins. It doesn't even knock the Pirates out of first place.
One loss is only one less. With the way the Pirates played in the first 107 games, why should it be more?
*When that story came out yesterday there was some confusion about it, so let me try to explain it a little better. As the story says, if you're a season ticket holder and you miss a game for any reason, you can trade your unused ticket in for a ticket on a weeknight later in the season. In general, this policy is mostly exercised during the early season because it's Pittsburgh in April and sometimes, no matter what, you just don't want to go to PNC Park when it's 42 degrees and rainy out. The thing is, if you bought a ticket for any game, you count towards the attendance of the game on that cold, rainy April night even if you didn't go to PNC. Because the Pirates let you exchange that ticket at zero cost, your new ticket doesn't cout towards the attendance of whatever game you exchanged the ticket for because it counted towards the attendance of the game that you weren't at. Lots of people exchanged unused season tickets this week for obvious reasons, which is why the attendance for all of the games was announced in the low 30,000s even though the Pirates were at or awfully close to capacity just about every day.
