During the summer of 2013, as I experienced the first actual pennant race of my adult life, I began to notice something. It seems dumb and obvious and patronizing, but as the summer wore on I realized that winning a division is hard. The Pirates started that season 42-30 and found themselves four games behind the Cardinals. They ripped off nine wins in a row to take a two game division lead, and found themselves back out of first place in a week after a 2-6 stretch put them at 53-36. They won nine times in 11 games (with four straight wins against the Cardinals) in late July and early August to flip a 1 1/2 game deficit into a four-game lead, and two weeks later they were tied for first again. Those four wins in five games against the Cardinals over the trade deadline did not prevent the Pirates from being swept in St. Louis a month later.
And so we sit ten games into the 2016 season, with the Pirates at 5-5 while the Cubs have raced to an 8-1 start. A big part of the reason the Pirates are 5-5 is because they’ve left rafts of runners on base against the Reds and Tigers, and because their bullpen has been unable to keep them close in games in which their offense might be able to pull out a win. In the three losses to the Tigers, Kyle Lobstein let a 4-2 deficit become a 7-2 deficit, Arquimedes Caminero served up a grand slam that obliterated a 2-1 lead, and Tony Watson immediately gave back three runs to the Tigers after a Pirate rally had trimmed a 4-0 Tiger lead into a 4-3 one with the tenuous Tiger bullpen on call.
I’m not worried about Arquimedes Caminero or Tony Watson or even Kyle Lobstein at this point. I’m really excited about the team’s .381 OBP and Gregory Polanco’s hot start and I thought Gerrit Cole looked excellent yesterday and I’m baffled that Neftali Feliz was a throwaway reliever that nobody wanted.
And I’ll feel much better about all of this if the Pirates play a really solid nine inning baseball game in the immediate future. If you remember back to last spring, I was pretty down on the Pirates about their 20-22 start. I was not, at that point, worried that the Pirates were not a good baseball team, because I was relatively sure that they were. I was worried that the distance between them and the Cardinals was growing to a point that it wouldn’t matter how hot the Pirates got, the Cardinals would be uncatchable. This isn’t to say that I think the Pirates lost the division in April or May last year or that I’m freaking out about how far they are behind the Cubs right now. It’s to say that winning a division is hard and that positive early season indicators only really mean much of anything once they start to be converted into wins. Given the division the Pirates are in, the sooner this starts to happen for them, the better.
Jeff Locke starts for the Pirates tonight. Jimmy Nelson starts for the Brewers. The Pirates went 17-21 against the Reds and Brewers last year and lost the NL Central by two games. The Pirates are 1-2 against the Reds and Brewers right now. It’s never too early to start to play well against the dregs of the division. First pitch is at 7:05.
Photo by Justin K. Aller/Getty Images
