Pirates Circling the Drain

On Wednesday morning of this week, I made the following post on Facebook:

Since the unbelievable run that the Pirates had in July, which included an eleven game winning streak, and since the Archer and Kela acquisitions on July 31, they have gone 1-1 against the Cubs, 1-2 against the Cardinals, 2-1 against the Rockies, 2-2 against the Giants, and 0-1 against the Twins, a total of 6-7. Not good enough to feed the bulldog or overcome five teams for the last WC slot. I think that the performance over the last 13 games is a kind of self-correction and that this is a case of water seeking its own level, or "regression to the mean" to use the overused SABRmetric term. In truth, the team was never very good, playoff-contender-wise, and would struggle just to play .500 in 2018. I said at the outset of the season that if they finished over .500, Hurdle should be manager of the year. The fact that they are over the .500 mark today is remarkable to me. Maybe they can sustain this for the 41 games they have remaining, but I'm not sure that that's the way to bet at this point.

Since that post, the Pirates lost another game to the Twins, and have lost back-to-back 1-0 games to the Cubs.  They are now one game under .500 at 61-62.  They are 6-10 since July 31 and are currently riding a five game losing streak.  They are 6.5 games out of the second wild card spot, and, more damning, thay would need to overcome five other teams to get to that slot.  They are in fourth place in the NL Central, eleven games behind the Cubs.

At the point, the Pirates will be simply playing out the string in 2018.  The big challenge will be: Can they finish the season over .500?   They will need to go 21-18 the rest of the way to win 82 games.  They have shown that they can play at such a level, but, as I said in the Facebook post above, at this point, it's not the smart way to bet.

The interesting things to see from this point forward all be....

• Will the players continue to battle it out, or just go through the motions?
• Will Neal Huntington have a version of the fire sale he so wanted to have on July 31 at the August 31 waiver deal deadline instead? (I would think that there would be a spot for David Freese on some contending team's roster.)
• Will the team start giving significant playing time to future players like Kevin Newman?  At this juncture, what would be the point in NOT playing a guy like this?

I will stand by my pre-season prediction of 73 wins.

Watch the games and enjoy them as individual contests, and think of the money you're going to save by NOT having to purchase Pirates Post-Season 2018 gear.