Being a Pirate fan is something that means a lot of things to a lot of people and I never have and never will pretend to speak for every Pirate fan everywhere, but I will say that after 18 consecutive losing seasons a big part of being a Pirate fan is an in-game Murphy’s Law complex that always expects the worst at every junction. It’s only logical; any team that has lost as many games as the Pirates have over the last three (five, ten, eighteen) seasons is going to find a lot of ways to lose baseball games that other teams don’t. You don’t get to be The Pittsburgh Pirates without being the pittsburgh pirates, if that makes any sense at all.
Enter the seventh inning tonight. Since this week has started, the Pirates have been dominated by Dillon Gee, RA Dickey, and then Chris Capuano. Not one of the three looked particularly good, but they all looked good enough to make the Pirates look awful. The Pirates got some breaks against Dickey to sneak out a win on Tuesday, but when Capuano followed Dickey’s 10-strikeout start with six shutout innings things looked awfully bleak. It’s June, the Pirates are injury-riddled and they’re slowly slipping in the standings and in relation to .500. This is what happens to the Pittsburgh Pirates. Getting dominated by Chris Capuano is disappointing, but it’s also what happens.
When Andrew McCutchen lead off the seventh with an infield single, I barely even batted an eye. I was pretty deep into some James McDonald PitchFX numbers, trying to get things ready before I headed out to trivia. Then Neil Walker squared around to bunt and reached on a hit. I heard Greg Brown announce it, but I was only half paying attention until my Twitter notifications went crazy (they always do when someone on the Pirates bunts). To be clear, I don’t mind bunting for a hit if it’s well-timed and properly executed. I wish that a guy with power like Walker wouldn’t do it, but it has its places and if it’s done right it doesn’t give up an out, so it’s not always a bad play.
After Walker’s bunt, my first question was this: “How are they going to screw this up?” With the injuries, the Pirates’ lineup isn’t deep at all right now and Matt Diaz, Chris Snyder, and Lyle Overbay were due up. Hardly awe-inspiring. Somehow, though, Matt Diaz found a soft spot between Capuano and third baseman Willie Harris for a third straight infield single. “This is crazy,” I thought to myself. “This is the sort of thing that only happens to the Pirates and not for them.” But I also reminded myself that the score was still 2-0 Mets. Someone still had to come through with a big hit.
The weirdest part of the inning is that no one really ever did come through with that big hit. Chris Snyder hit the ball into another soft spot between short and third and Harris’s confusion about whether there was a tag play at third or not confused the third base umpire into missing the call, and the Pirates’ first run scored. The Lyle Overbay softly lined a ball to right field and Carlos Beltran got a bad break on it and misplayed the hop and the Pirates second run scored. Then after Ronny Cedeno struck out, Xavier Paul more or less duplicated Overbay’s hit and the Pirates’ third run scored. Then Jose Tabata hit a ground ball and the Mets were desperate for an out at that point and sacrificed the third run to get it. Then Josh Harrison somehow snaked a fifth infield single out between Harris and third baseman Ruben Tejada and that allowed the Pirates’ fifth run to score. It was a weird, surreal inning where the Pirates got bounce after bounce in situations where we, as Pirate fans, are conditioned to never, ever expect them to get even one lucky bounce. Two balls hit out of the infield, five runs, and a new ballgame. In the eighth, the Pirates actually did tee off on the Mets’ bullpen and hit some balls hard and run their lead up to 9-2.
How many times have the Pirates been on the wrong end of this game, especially in June? How many muggy June nights have seen the Pirates take a game that seemed close in the seventh inning only to end up losing by a ridiculous score to the Brewers or Mets or Phillies or some American League team? How many times has this kind of game sucked the life out of Pirate fans, made us wish for hockey or football or anything else at all to take our minds off of the Pirates?
I’m not trying to attach any kind of extra significance to this win by the Pirates because that seventh inning was almost by its very definition as lucky as lucky gets within the confinement of a three-out baseball inning, but damn did it feel good to see that happen and have the Pirates come out on the right side of it. In a completely abstract, subjective, and non-scientifific/non-sabermetric way, this season has felt very different to watch as a Pirate fan and this game only added to that feeling.
