Sorry for the lateness of this recap; I missed most of the game last night due to a softball game and kind of zonked out once I saw the Pirates lost, never quite recovering enough energy to sit down and type something out.
The long and short of it is that the Pirates weren’t going to win out through the end of September. That just wasn’t going to happen. The Braves and Brewers both lost, which means that the Pirates’ wild card lead stands at 1 1/2. All the Pirates really missed last night was an opportunity to draw one game closer to the Cardinals, and I’m not sure how huge the difference between 3 1/2 games and 4 1/2 games for relatively evenly matched teams is at this point in the season. The Pirates were going to lose again and last night wasn’t a bad night to lose.
The flip side of it is that the Pirates had a pitching advantage last night and really, you’d like to see them win on pretty much any night that that’s true. Anecdotally, it feels like the Pirates rarely win one game or lose one game these days, and so you could be forgiven for feeling like one loss means that more are impending. That doesn’t have to be true, though, especially given the Pirates’ schedule. They arguably have a pitching advantage again in the last two games of this series in Philadelphia, and they should for much of their series against the Cubs and Red Sox, as well.
Sometimes a loss is just a loss and it happens because nobody wins all the time. So long as that’s what happened to the Pirates last night, there’s just not much else to say.
