I’m going to say at the top that I’m a little bit speechless right now, but then I’ll probably go ahead and write something like 1,000 words about this.
The 2013 Pirates were a dream come true. I mean that about as literally as I possibly can. After a bad first week of the season, the Pirates got hot and stayed hot. It’s easy to forget this because it all runs together now, but last year’s Pirates were 51-30 after their nine-game winning streak ended along with the month of June. The NL Central race went deep into the season and there was some drama over whether or not the Pirates would host the Wild Card Game, but after about mid-June there was no question that they would win 82 games and for much of the second half a playoff berth was more or less a sure thing. Last year’s Pirates never lost more than four games in a row and most of the injury trouble that they faced (Morton, Liriano) came early in the year.
I’m not saying any of this to try and cheapen what happened in 2013, because it was amazing. It was fun, cathartic, invigorating, any of those sorts of adjectives that you can dig up fit. But when it was all said and done, it almost felt like it was too easy. The Pirates weren’t quite 94-wins-good last year, even if that’s what their record said, and the way that they glided through the season almost made it seem like it couldn’t possibly happen that way again in 2014.
It didn’t, but there’s nothing wrong with that. If the 2013 Pirates had to shoulder a 20-year collar that wasn’t entirely of their own making, the 2014 Pirates had to deal with something else: expectations. When the off-season didn’t go quite according to plan and the Pirates entered 2014 without AJ Burnett and with only Edinson Volquez in his place, I was nervous. I had the Pirates figured for about an 85-win team at that point. An 85-win team, I would tell people, can certainly win 85 or even 95 games, but they could also drop to 80 or 75. An 85-win team would contend for the second wild card, but maybe not win it. And all this would be well and good, but it suddenly became true that 85 wins and maybe-a-playoff-contender-and-maybe-not wasn’t good enough on Opening Day.
And so, yes, I spent much of the first part of this season frustrated as hell with this Pirate team. When they dropped to 10-18, I didn’t think that they were playing poorly enough to deserve that record, but it also seemed to me that they were bad enough that there were some serious flaws in the design of the team that were exposed. When the Orioles squashed them 9-2 on May 20th, I really sort of thought that was going to be the moment that we looked back and said that the season had ended. For a while, the Pirates didn’t really do much to change that. They entered June at 25-30. It took until June 26th for them to get above .500 for good.
If nothing went wrong in 2013, everything did in the first few months of 2014. Wandy Rodriguez and Jason Grilli bombed out and were sent packing. Francisco Liriano and Gerrit Cole got hurt. Pedro Alvarez got off to a slow start at the plate and his throws started going crazy. Whenever the Pirates seemed close to doing something, they’d drop a bunch of games in hugely frustrating fashion (walkoff homers by Matt Adams on back-to-back nights, for example) and it would seem like they’d have to start back at square one.
By the trade deadline, I started to have an appreciation that this Pirate team was close to pulling together into something. It was with that in mind that I wanted to see them trade for a Jon Lester or David Price at the deadline, thinking that they needed a started to tie the whole picture together. They got no one at the deadline (record at that point: 57-51), then lost Andrew McCutchen to a rib injury a few days later. A week after McCutchen went down, the injuries finally caught up to the Pirates. They lost seven in a row to the Tigers, Nationals, and Braves. They lost 11-2 in that seventh loss, dropping to 64-62, seven games out of first and in fourth place in the wild card race. With one more game against the Braves and then the Brewers looming, the Pirates had to pull themselves together.
And then they did. At various points of this season, it’s been obvious that the Pirate offense can be a force to be reckoned with and that Francisco Liriano and Gerrit Cole aren’t far from where they were last year, but for 126 games it never felt like everything came together. Since dropping to 64-62, the Pirates are 21-9. They’ve only had one hiccup in there: the sweep at the hands of the Cardinals in St. Louis. Other than that, the scorching run has moved the Pirates from playoff also-rans to a clinched playoff spot, a strong grasp on the first wild card (with the Giants’ loss tonight, the Pirates have a de facto two-game lead on them because they hold the tiebreaker), and they’ve whittled the Cardinals’ division lead to 1 1/2 games.
Instead of watching a collapse (like in 2011 and 2012) or an inevitability (like last year), in 2014 we’ve watched a baseball team overcome obstacle after obstacle (and yes, some of those obstacles were self-imposed), only to shine at the perfect moment. It’s crazy to think about it this way, but on September 23rd, 2013, the Pirates played their 157th game, picked up their 90th win, and clinched a playoff berth. They ended the night two games behind the Cardinals. On September 24th, 2014, the Pirates played their 157th game, picked up their 86th win, clinched a wild card, and are now ending the night 1 1/2 games behind the Cardinals. After everything that’s happened in 2014, the Pirates are actually in better shape through 157 games than they were in 2013. This is a crazy thing to think about.
Anyway, I want to talk more about how meaningful two straight playoff berths are and whether or not this year’s team is better than last year’s, but that’s down the road for now. I’m already the promised 1,000 words in and I didn’t talk about the game yet.
Most importantly, Gerrit Cole dominated the Braves after a slow start that gave the Braves a run in the first and second innings each. After loading the bases with no outs in the second, Cole didn’t let another Brave reach base. He got a double play and a strikeout to end the inning, then he shut the Braves down in order in the third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh innings. He was still hitting 97 on the gun in the seventh. He’s faded out in quite a few starts since returning from his lat injury, but from all indications tonight, he got stronger as the game went on and didn’t really show any signs of fatigue in the seventh, even after he went over 100 pitches. This is the Gerrit Cole the Pirates need in October.
The offense, meanwhile, managed to get together a run an inning in the third, fourth, and fifth, and that was enough to bring the win home. Andrew McCutchen scored on an error in the fourth, Travis Snider homered in the fifth, and Starling Marte doubled home McCutchen in the sixth. That’s a solid performances against Alex Wood, and it was nice to see after the low-scoring Brewers series and the 1-0 win on Monday.
Anyway, I think that’s enough for tonight. Last year was not a dream. The Pittsburgh Pirates are going back to the playoffs in 2014. I won’t pretend like I believed this team was capable of this on every day of the 2014 season, but I’m certainly excited to see what they’re capable of now.
