On Wednesday night at the SABR Summer Hot Stove, Fred Shugars said that anything except being swept in Cincinnati would be OK, but that a sweep that would drop the Pirates six games back would be almost disastrous. Well, it almost came to that, but the Pirates behind stellar pitching by A.J. Burnett and clutch hitting by Neil Walker and Starling Marte averted total disaster in the Rhineland this afternoon.
I am amazed at how so many people were all but giving up on the Pirates after those first two losses to the Reds (and, earlier, after the back-to-back losses to the Astros and the Cubs that began the week). The Pirates have just come off a road trip where they had two series with two crummy teams and a series against what just might be the best team in the National League, and where the results of those series were 3-1, 2-1, 1-2. Now, you can argue that perhaps some of those wins in Houston weren't works of art, but so what? They went 6-4 on that trip, a pace that wins you 97 games over the course of a season. Not every win can be a masterpiece, but they all count the same.
I also am not buying that the Pirates now are only "playing for the wild card." Four and one-half games back with 57 games to play is far from insurmountable. I will concede that the Reds are a good, and possibly a very good team, so it will be a battle down to the wire, but as good as the Reds are, I will be absolutely amazed if they can continue the torrid pace that they have been on (23-4 over their last 27 games; that's 136 wins over a 162 game season; nobody does that!). Just as the Pirates hot hitting has "regressed to the mean" since the All-Star Break, I am guessing that a similar regression is due to occur at the Great American Ball Park over the next few weeks.
So, will all the gloom-spreaders that have been populating The Fan and Facebook's Pirate Chat these past few days just step back and take a deep breath, and as Bette Davis once said, "fasten your seat belts, boys, it's going to be a bumpy ride"!
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