The Pirates at the 20% (actually 19.1%) Mark

I have always said that I would wait until a team played about 30 games, and batters accumulated around 100 at bats, and pitchers got a reasonable amount of innings under their belts before making any pronouncements on a team and a season.  Well we are now at that point.  The Pirates have played 31 games and sit at 16-15, good for fourth place in the NL Central, three games behind the first place Cubs.

They got to this point with, thus far, three distinct periods of this still young season.

The started at 12-6 and sat in first place.  This was sparked by unbelievably terrific starting pitching from Jameson Taillon, Trevor Williams, Chris Archer, Joe Musgrove, and Jordan Lyles.  It also featured some, shall we say, "uneven" work from the bullpen with set-up guys Richard Rodriguez and Keone Kela coughing up leads that they were brought in to protect, often times by giving up soul-crushing home runs.  Still, 12-6 was good for first place at that time.

There then followed an 0-8 tailspin wherein the starting pitchers regressed a bit and the hitters failed to, well, hit.  More on that later.

They have just completed a five game stretch where they have gone 4-1.

Before looking at the shortcomings, let's focus on three guys who have more than held their own.

The offensive performance of Josh Bell was a big question going into the season, and he has more than delivered.  He is batting .287 and leads the team with 8 home runs and 25 RBIs.  His OPS is .981.  Can't ask for much more than that.  Critics keep mentioning that he is less than elegant defensively at first base, to which I say, if he keeps hitting like this, the Pirates will live with his shortcomings with the leather.  I always said that if Pedro Alvarez could only have managed to hit .260 or so, he'd still be playing at first for the Pirates. (Well, he would have been gone by now via trade or free agency because the Pirates wouldn't have paid the going rate, but you get my drift.)

All-Star reliever Felipe Vazquez has been absolutely lights out as the team's closer. In fourteen games and 15.2 IP, he is 1-0 with a 0.57 ERA, 26 K to only 5 BB, and nine saves in nine opportunities.  He would probably have even more saves but for the performances of Rodriguez and Kela alluded too above.

And then there is rookie outfielder Brian Reynolds.

Reynolds came to the Pirates from the Giants in the Andrew McCutchen trade last year.  He should probably still be in Triple-A, but injuries forced the Pirates to bring him to Pittsburgh.  He has responded by hitting in his first eleven games, and batting .405 (albeit in only 37 ABs) with one HR and four RBIs.  He will undoubtedly cool off, but until then, he's not leaving Pittsburgh any time soon.

Now, what are the concerns?

Injuries.  The Pirates have had a litany of guys on the Injured List, including starters and guys expected to play  big roles like Corey Dickerson, Starling Marte, Gregory Polanco, and Lonnie Chisenhall.  Now starting pitchers Taillon and Archer are on the IL, so what has been the strength of the team, it's starting pitching, now has some big question marks.

Lack of offense.  It is at the point where if the Pirates fall behind by three or four runs, there is almost no hope that they have what it takes to overcome such a deficit.  consider these batting averages:

Adam Frazier .257

Colin Moran .239

Starling Marte .211

Cole Tucker .208

Jung Ho Kang .146 (with 30 Ks in 82 ABs)

Francisco Cervelli .176

Too many weak spots in that batting order for any team to contend.  It is a batting order that forces its pitchers to hold the opponents to two or fewer runs a game, and that is just not sustainable over 162 games.

A word on Cole Tucker.  Like Reynolds, he was brought up from Indianapolis, probably too soon, due to injuries on the big club.  He probably needed to get a couple of hundred AB's in Indy this season before advancing to Pittsburgh, but he does appear to be the real goods, a kid well worth that first round draft selection in 2014.  He is over matched at times by NL pitching right now, but he can and will hit, and for sure he is a major league short stop defensively right now.   He may well be the next "Face of the Franchise" for the Pirates.

Conclusions?  Well, they now sit at 16-15, and appear to be a team that will be flirting with that .500 mark throughout the season.  My Las Vegas bet in January, that the Pirates will win "Over 79.5 Games" will probably not be decided until the last week of September, which will certainly cause me to maintain interest right to the end.

The Grandstander will check in once again at the One-Third Pole, or fifty-four game mark, of the season.

The Lone All-Star, and Other Pirates Thoughts

As I do every year at this time, let me salute the Pirates All-Star (it's singular this year - a sad commentary on the state of the Pirates), reliever Felipe Vazquez.

Vazquez is 3-2, 3.38, with 18 saves.  He can be a totally dominant ninth inning guy (witness yesterday's game against the Phillies) so he undoubtedly has earned the spot on the NL squad, but there can also be no doubt that he is also there because, well, every team has to have at least one guy on the team, a rule with which I totally agree, by the way.   I just feel bad that he won't have any teammates there to chat with during the workout sessions in Washington.

The other irony is that with a July 31 Fire Sale pending at PNC Park, there is a very strong likelihood that Vasquez won't be a Pirate much for much longer.  I wonder how many "Vazquez" All-Star jerseys the Pirates will manage to sell before he might be sent to some contending team.

This past December I met Felipe Vazquez (he was Felipe Rivero then) at a charity event for the Caring Place.  He seemed like a nice enough fellow, so I'm happy for this bit of good fortune for him.  I hope that he had a bonus for making the All-Star team written into his contract.

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If you follow the fortunes of the Pirates, you know that yesterday's win over Philadelphia snapped a five game losing streak, but it was not just any kind of a losing streak.  It was one that included two games wherein the Bucs gave up 17 runs.  Yep, SEVENTEEN RUNS. Hey, these things happen to  even the best of teams over the course of a 162 game season, but when it happens twice within a span of four games, well, that should get your attention.

I tuned in that Friday evening game in the second inning when the Pirates had a 1-0 lead.  They then fell behind 5-1, got to within 5-4, then the dam burst and the next thing you know, you had a final score of 17-5.  Not only that, the game took 4 hours and 30 minutes to play.  It was a record for both the Pirates and the Phillies for the longest nine inning game in their franchise's history, and it tied the National League record.  Too bad that they couldn't have dragged it out for one more minute so they could hold that NL record all by themselves.

Anyway, amazingly and inexplicably, I stayed up and watched this atrocity of a ballgame until the very end.  As my pal Tim Baker put it, it was like seeing a crowded school bus stuck on a railroad track.  You knew it was going to end horribly, but you just couldn't peel your eyes away from it.

Here are some of the memories I will have of that game....

• The Pirates trotted out both Doyvadas Neverauskas and Josh Smoker in relief.  Unsurprisingly, both got blasted.  I made a semi-serious vow to never pay another dime for a Pirate ticket as long as these two guys were on the team. The powers that be must have heard me for both of them were sent packing to Indianapolis on Saturday.  May they never darken the door to PNC Park again.
• I lost track of how many double-switches Clint Hurdle made in that game.  There were at least two, but there might have been a third one, and who remembers and who cares.  It was National League baseball at its finest.
• The supreme highlight, though, came in the eighth (or maybe it was the ninth) inning when Starling Marte claimed he was hit by a pitch.  The umpire said he was not.  The game was already four hours old, and the Pirates were down twelve or thirteen runs at the time.  The Pirates weren't going to let them get away with it.  Clint Hurdle CHALLENGED the call.  An interminable slog of a baseball game became interminabler and sloggier.  But the Pirate challenge was upheld, and Marte was awarded first base.  Take that you incompetent Men in Blue!  Did I mention that the Pirates lost 17-5?
• It got funny as even the team's Chief Apologists announcers, Greg Brown and Steve Blass, ran out of things to say and actually were critical of the farce that the team was putting on that night.
• In retrospect, I just should have turned off the TV and gone to bed as soon as Neverauskas was summoned in from the bullpen.

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That game was followed up on Saturday when Hurdle gave a quick hook to Jameson Taillon in the seventh inning.  Taillon was pitching well, and had only thrown 77 pitches.  Now, at that point Taillon had put a couple of guys on base, and he was going through dreaded third-time-through-the-batting-order, but on a team whose bullpen was overused and was stinking up the joint, and when the guy who is your supposed #1 starter is going well, and when you're riding a five game losing streak, maybe, just maybe, you stick with him and if he screws the pooch, then he screws the pooch.  The reliever gave up a hit to his first batter that allowed the eventual winning runs to score (the runs were charged to Taillon), and the streak went to five games.  

Taillon questioned the move to reporters after the game, and you have to wonder if this is a crack in the dam that will lead to Hurdle losing the team and the players adopt a don't-give-a-shit attitude for the rest of the season, if that hasn't happened already.  Also, Neal Huntington defended Hurdle's move on his radio show yesterday in a classic bit of Huntington Bullshit which also contained his patented bit of what-do-you-people-know-about-baseball-anyway condescension.

Also on his radio show, NH said that unless the Pirates really, really turn it around before the All-Star break, the team may be forced to start trading away players.  He also said that before the season began, he and his minions had the Pirates pegged as a team that would win between 78-82 games.  In other words, Huntington felt that he had a mediocre team.  Funny how the front office brain trust never said that back then.

It is going to be interesting to see just who gets dealt by the end of the month.  Very likely that guys like Josh Harrison, Francisco Cervelli, Jordy Mercer, Vazquez, and at least one of the three outfielders (Dickerson, Marte, Polanco) are dealt.  Salaries and contracts will be dumped, "prospects" will be obtained, and the merry-go-round will start all over again.

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While I am on this tangent, I have to mention Huntington's comment of a few weeks back when he stated that the Pirates will not be able to improve the team by adding better players who cost more, because of the declining revenues due to the drop in attendance since 2015 when the Pirates failed to build on a 98 win team by, you know, not adding payroll and getting and keeping better players (after a season where they set attendance records). In other words, it is the fault of us, the paying customers, for not buying tickets to an inferior product that keeps the Pirates from obtaining and paying for better players.  Nope, not Nutting's/Coonelly's/Huntington's fault.  My fault.  Your fault.  The complete arrogance and condescension of that statement, not to mention it's tone deafness, is something that will haunt Huntington and the Pirates for as long as they remain in place at 115 Federal Street.

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One final comment.  Dan Bonk and I recently did some research on MLB teams' total wins since 1979, the last year in which the Pirates played in and won the World Series.  This covers the seasons from 1980 through 2017, thirty-eight seasons, and does not include the expansionist Marlins, Rockies, Diamondbacks, and Rays.  You ready for this, Pirates fans?

• Of those twenty-six major league teams, the Pirates have won the fewest games in that 38 season stretch.  They won 2,828 games. The Royals were the next rung up with 2,864 wins.
• Not surprisingly, the Yankees were Number One on the list with 3,388 wins.  That's 560 more wins than the Pirates, That's three and one-half season's worth of games. Just think about that.
• In that 38 season span, twenty-seven teams - yes, even the Marlins, D'Backs, Rockies, and Rays -  have played in the World Series.  Only the Pirates, Mariners, and Expos/Nationals have failed to reach the Fall Classic in that period.
• In that 38 season span, the Pirates have had ten (10) winning seasons.  That is fewer than any of the other 25 teams on the list.

Yes, my friends, for the last thirty-eight years (and going on thirty-nine), you can make a very strong case that the Pittsburgh Pirates have been THE WORST TEAM IN ALL OF MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL.

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Hey, have a great week, Pirates Fans!!