The Pirates went into Friday’s game with the Brewers as one of baseball’s hottest teams, while the Brewers came in as one of baseball’s coldest. I wrote this before Friday’s game, but there was no real reason to think that the Brewers were even remotely capable of rolling into PNC and sweeping the Pirates and turning the second wild card race back on its ear. And still, the Brewers aren’t a bad or untalented baseball team, and they had their backs to the wall. There was no reason to think they’d go down without a fight, either.
I went into the series with one basic concern that had a lot more to do with the Pirates specifically than it did the Pirate/Brewer dynamic that occupies the minds of so many Pirate fans. The Pirates have had a huge number of opportunities this season to seize control of the division or the wild card race or both, and they haven’t been able to do so. Until this last run, they left a lot of sweeps uncompleted, they lost a lot of winnable games to the Cardinals and Brewers and Reds. They responded well after the seven-game losing streak, but then they got swept by the Cardinals right when they had a chance to pull it all together. They responded well after the sweep by the Cardinals, but it was mostly against bad teams with nothing left to play for. Slicing through the Phillies and Cubs and Red Sox was necessary and not necessarily trivial, but it’s also not the same as stepping up and delivering a knockout punch to a desperate rival with their playoff life on the line.
And so, yes, Friday’s game was tense. The Pirates have lost so many winnable games to the Brewers and Cardinals this year that it seems borderline unbelievable how one-sided it’s been. When Russell Martin just barely eeked that home run over the fence in right center, it made it feel like maybe the tables were turning. We’ve been through the Easter Weekend Massacre in Milwaukee this year and the back-to-back losses to the Cardinals on walk-off homers, which came two months before the sweep to the Cardinals (by a grand total of four runs, of course) and probably ended the Pirates chances of winning the NL Central. The Martin home run was exactly the type of hit that the Pirates have surrendered to other teams all year long; having it come when it did on Friday was sort of a cathartic exclamation point. Speaking for myself, I knew coming into the game that the Pirates were probably a playoff team, despite all of the peaks and valleys of this season, but I was sure of it after that hit. That they were able to bounce back from a frustrating (on a number of levels) loss on Saturday to pull out a win in a close game on Sunday with their worst starter on the mound was the icing on the cake.
And so here we are, on the last Monday of the regular season. The Pirates have all but clinched the wild card and they still have an outside shot at winning the NL Central. They hold home field advantage for the Wild Card Game today, though that’s obviously subject to change as they’re tied with the Giants (they hold the tiebreaker by winning the season series). For most of this summer, the Pittsburgh Pirates have been their own worst enemy. For the first time this weekend, it seems like maybe that’s not true.
