Upon Further Review, the Pirates Do Not Suck

Right off the bat, let me just throw out this disclaimer: I am not claiming that the Pirates are a good team.  I am simply stating that the Pirates no longer suck.  As a matter of fact, when I originally thought about writing this post, they had just swept the Astros on the road.  Now, the Astros suck, but the Pirates also used to suck.  My thinking was that one of the marks of a non-sucky team was that they could sweep sucky teams on the road.

Then they got swept by the Indians on the road and I was starting to re-consider my position.  Then I left the country and was expecting them to implode while I was gone.  Then they took two out of three from the Phillies, Red Sox, and Blue Jays.  Now, they're two games over .500 and they've almost reached the halfway point of the season.

For fans of good teams, this would probably be cause for panic.  For fans of a team mired in a losing streak that's old enough to vote, it's cause for celebration.  Or, at the very least, cause for guarded optimism.

How did this happen?

I was a little taken aback myself, so I investigated further.  I've been to three games thus far this season and watched a handful of games on TV.  I found a common thread in most of the victories and a common concern in all the losses.

Solid Pitching:

The Buccos have, for a number of years, always had a rotation stocked with veteran re-treads and young guys with potential.  This season, their oldest pitcher is Kevin Correia, who's 30.  Correia was a thrifty free agent signing in the offseason.  Usually, those kinds of signings blow up in the Pirates' face, but this one has paid off thus far.  Correia leads the National League in wins and has a respectable 3.79 ERA.  Having watched a couple of starts, I keep thinking that he's doing this mostly with smoke, mirrors, and run support, but ten wins is significant, especially considering that Paul Maholm led the team in wins in 2010, with nine for the entire season.

Maholm has the stats, but not the wins, since he's not getting any kind of run support.  He allowed only two runs against Toronto in seven innings on Wednesday, but still got stuck with the loss, as the Pirates managed only one run.  Jeff Karstens has been the star of the staff in the first half of the season, with a 2.65 ERA and a 1.08 WHIP (walks plus hits per inning pitched).

James McDonald -- no relation to former Orioles pitcher Ben McDonald -- is starting to improve on his control and has eight quality starts.  Charlie Morton -- infamous for having great stuff but poor command and control -- has improved his command and is now putting the ball where he wants it to go.  His stuff is good enough that, as long as the ball goes where it should, he will be very successful.

They're also 12th in Quality Starts (starts where a pitcher goes at least six innings and allows fewer than three earned runs), with 49.  Last season, they had 71 Quality starts total, so that is another step in the right direction.

The middle relievers, per usual, have done well.  The difference is that they're now being used to protect a lead -- or keep a game tied -- instead of being thrown in to stop the bleeding.  Closer Joel Hanrahan hasn't blown a save opportunity yet and he's 25-for-25 in save situations.

The Pirates actually rank eighth in the league in ERA and are middle-of-the-pack in Quality Starts and WHIP.  They're still not striking guys out or overpowering anyone, but strikeouts are boring.  Besides that, they're facist.

Timely Hitting:

The past few seasons, I could feel pretty safe getting up and grabbing something at the refreshment stand once the Pirates had two outs.  It seemed as though they'd always choke away opportunities in critical situations, which is one of the factors that led to them losing 100 games a year for most of this decade.

This season, Neil Walker's batting average is 80 points higher with two outs and runners in scoring position.  He's hitting .550 with the bases loaded for his career and already has a grand slam this season.  Most of the guys on the team -- Jose Tabata and Andrew McCutcheon have both been clutch -- have better situational averages than season averages.

Clint Hurdle:

I've been critical of Hurdle in the past, particularly concerning his comments that 500 is just a number and that it doesn't matter.  I agree with him in a Big Picture sense, but this is a team that has been mired in the longest run of futility in sports history.  In the Little Picture, our little corner of the world and our aspiration to, just once, to see what it feels like, be average, 500 is more than just a number.  In the context of actually just getting there, I disagree with Hurdle.

But, you can't argue with the results.  He has kept the team focused on winning, on competing for the division title, and has brought some much-needed discipline to the clubhouse.  I won't say that he's change the face of the franchise, but he has improved the attitudes of his players and the fans.  I no longer feel like the Pirates are automatically lose any game that they play.  I was actually convinced that they were going to sweep Boston after they took the first two games of the series.  This gives the players something that they've needed for a long, long time.  I'm not talking about hope, I'm talking about some form of confidence.  Some expectation, however small, that the Pirates are going to win this one.

The difference between hoping you'll win -- or, really, hoping you won't lose -- and expecting to win is huge.  That's what Hurdle has brought to the team, which should help them in the coming months, because it's going to get rough.

Looking Ahead:

As of this writing, they're only three games over .500, but that's good enough for third place in the NL Central.  More importantly, they're only 1.5 games out of first place, which is something that hasn't happened for the Buccos this late in the season since 2002.

The good news is that the rest of the first half -- and a good chunk of the second half -- is divisional games, and the NL Central is a pretty crappy division.  They have eight games left against the Astros and ten games left against the Cubs.  Houston is the worst team in the league right now and the Pirates have, historically, done well against Chicago, even when they were good and the Buccos sucked.

The bad news is that they still have ten games left against the Cardinals and ten games against the Brewers.  St. Louis hasn't been too tough of a match-up for the Pirates in recent years, but Milwaukee has been crushing them for the past six seasons or so.  The Brewers have won every game versus the Pirates thus far this season.  If they can at least split in each of those ten game sets, then they can stay alive.

The rest of the schedule is not great, but it's not terrible.  They have three road games in the second half at Philly and a four-game road series at Atlanta.  They also have to play the Padres, Diamondbacks, and Giants, but get five games against the Dodgers (who are taking on a lot of water recently).

Since they're in spitting distance of the division lead and since, for the first time in about a decade, they're not already 15-20 games under .500, they'll actually be buyers as we head towards the trade deadline at the end of July.  They desperately need some help on offense (more on that in a minute), but they also don't have a lot of ammunition in terms of trade bait.  Their farm system isn't barren, but it's also not fully stocked.  Since they're currently at some point in some five year plan -- I've lost track, but I think they're towards the end of the fourth five year plan -- they can't afford to sell off too many prospects in an effort to win now.

They have five solid starters, but every one of those guys is more like a Toyota Camry and less like a Corvette.  They'll give you six good innings, but they're not flashy and they don't strike guys out.  Plus which, the quality of the starting pitching is what's currently keeping the team alive, so it wouldn't be a good idea to trade Maholm or Karstens for 60 cents on the dollar just to get another bat.  Add to that the fact that this is the first time in a decade that July isn't a fire sale and they can afford to be selective and it doesn't make sense to trade a guy just to trade him.

One ace that they do have in the hole is Hanrahan.  He's putting up great numbers -- the save can definitely be a dubious and misleading stat, but he's backing up his perfect save record with a 1.37 ERA and a .97 WHIP.  Most good teams are already set at closer, but Hanrahan would make a great set-up guy and could draw some serious interest as the trade deadline draws closer.  The Pirates have the luxury of not needing to dump Hanrahan and will be able to get top value for him.  At that point, they won't have a closer, but the one thing the Buccos have always been able to do -- even throughout these last two decades of failure -- is take any idiot off the scrap heat and turn him into a serviceable closer.  I'm not sure who that "scrap heap guy" is -- possibly Evan Meek or Chris Resop -- but I think he's out there if they can get top dollar for Hanrahan.

The next three weeks are critical.  They have two games left in the Houston series, then three games at home against the Cubs.  After the All-Star break, they play nine division games -- three on the road against the Astros, then a pair of three game series against the Cardinals and Reds at home -- then they head out to play a tough seven game stretch, the aforementioned three- and four-game series against the Phillies and Braves.

They usually implode right around the All-Star break, stringing together a losing streak that starts right before and continues directly after.  It looks like a different scenario this season, which is why the next three weeks are so important.

Don't Start Planning the Parade Just Yet:

The pitching could very well come back down to Earth.  Earlier this season, I was watching a game and they showed a stat that said the Pirates were in the top five in a few defensive categories.  I took that to mean that they were playing some pretty solid defense, which would help to explain why their record had improved considerably over 2010.  Well, when I actually looked at the defensive stats, they weren't great.  The Pirates are currently ranked 26th in the league in errors and 25th in fielding percentage.  The defensive stats where they ranked high -- and still do -- were Assists and Put-outs.  This means that the pitchers are striking a lot of guys out and that the ball is getting put into play a high percentage of the time.  When it goes into play, the results have not been good.

This is a team that came into the season with a ton of questions and a dearth of talent on offense.  Lyle Overbay was listed as the clean-up hitter on the Opening Day roster.  In case you're asking yourself, "Who's Lyle Overbay?" you're not alone.  His career highs in OPS and home runs are .880 and 22, respectively.  An OPS of .880 isn't bad, but 22 home runs are not going to get the job done in the fourth slot in the line-up.  This season, he's been mired in a slump and has batted as low as sixth.

There isn't a guy on this roster that can hit 30 home runs.  They're currently ranked 20th in batting average, 21st in OBP (on-base percentage), and 26th in slugging.  They're still scoring runs and winning games, but most of that is due to the timely hitting I mentioned previously.  The thing with timely hitting is that it's, well... timely.  It's extremely difficult to get timely hitting throughout the course of an entire season.  They've done well thus far, but the season is barely half over.

(Quick Moneyball lesson for those of you that haven't read the book and aren't going to see the movie.  The best kind of pitcher is one that doesn't let the ball go into play.  When the ball goes into play, bad things can happen.  Not only can the defense commit errors, but more significantly bad things like singles, doubles, triples, and home runs can happen.  You're looking for pitchers are are efficient at recording outs and batters that don't produce outs.  Batters can avoid outs by getting hits, but they can also avoid them by drawing walks.  The facts that Pirate pitchers are inefficient at recording outs and the batters don't draw walks are two troubling leading indicators.)

The silver lining here is that they've been able to win games and stay in the hunt with an offense that started out handicapped and was then crippled by injuries.  They're currently working with their fourth-string third baseman and their third-string catcher (or maybe it's the other way around) and Jose Tabata was recently placed on the disabled list.  Once Pedro Alvarez and some combination of Chris Snyder and Ryan Doumit return, then things will get better but I can't say that they'll be good.  Even if they're able to trade for another bat, this is not an offense that is "one bat away" from being a quality line-up.

And Now for a Little Perspective:

The big news is that the Pirates have gone from being a sucky team to being a decent team.  My original thought was that they had gone simply from suck to bad, but I think they have officially made the leap to decent.  Now, that's not cause to throw a parade or anything, but it's a breath of fresh air for long-suffering fans like myself.

It's entirely possible that the bottom could fall out of the season and the Pirates could fall below .500 for the 19th straight year.  It's possible that they trade Hanrahan, the bat they get for him fizzles out, and the "scrap heap guy" implodes.

Regardless of the outcome, I'm just happy that it's early July and baseball is still relevant in the city of Pittsburgh.

Consider:

1. I've had more random conversations with people about the Pirates in the past three weeks than I think I have in the past three seasons.
2. The games I've been to this year were all well-attended victories.
3. My aunt called to try and get tickets for the July 4th game against the Astros and was told that there were no tickets available.  Sure, it was a holiday and sure she was trying to buy Lexus Club tickets, but the fact remains that someone wanted to buy tickets to see the Buccos and was turned away because the seats had already been sold.  Again, this happens all the time in cities where they have good baseball teams and a strong local following, but I have not heard of this happening in the PNC Park Era.
4. I spent ten minutes looking at the upcoming schedule, comparing that with league standings, and trying to figure out which games were most critical for the Pirates.  I don't think I've done that since 1997.
5. I used part of this post to discuss which players on the roster the Pirates might be able to leverage in order to improve their team and make a run at the division title.  I'm pretty sure that blogs did not exist the last time I thought about that.
6. I know a number of people that are limbering up in anticipation of jumping on the bandwagon after the break.  

As I mentioned, though, there is still a great deal of guarded optimism surrounding this team.  My optimism is extremely guarded, but I'm really starting to get caught up in Pirate fever.  If they can survive the next three weeks and add a bat without giving up too much, they have a shot.

If nothing else, they no longer suck.