How bad is too bad?

For a couple of years now, I’ve wanted the Pirates to blow up their big league club and let whatever happens in Pittsburgh happen while the front office focuses on rebuilding the minors. Neal Huntington and his staff finally set a plan like that in motion last year when they cleaned out the big league roster with a flurry of trades that started in June and continued on through the trade deadline. The resulting Pirate team has been bad. They’ve been much worse than I expected (I think, “I thought they’d be bad but I didn’t think they’d be this bad” is the team’s unofficial slogan this year) and they’re certainly one of the worst teams in franchise history.

I don’t like to write about this team when they play poorly and I don’t watch many games from start to finish right now because that makes me want to punch things, but that just doesn’t mean a whole lot in relation to the future. On Tuesday I thought Charlie summarized the situation very nicely:

And yes, they’re bad, but up-and-coming teams do not always, or even usually, improve in a linear fashion.

Everyone knows how the Rays jumped from 66 wins in 2007 to 97 wins in 2008 and while they might be the most dramatic example of a leap forward, they’re far from the only team to make one recently. The Padres won 63 games in 2008 and they’re on a 93-win pace this year. The Giants went from 72 wins in 2008 to 88 last year and they’re contending again this year. It’s true that none of those teams hit quite as low as the Pirates are about to hit, but the Diamondbacks went from 51 wins in 2004 to 77 in 2005 to an NLCS in 2007. The Tigers went from 43 wins in 2003 to 72 wins in 2004 to an AL pennant in 2006. If you’re rebuilding right, there’s no such thing as too bad.

I think that the reason some people are very concerned about the way the team has played is because Jose Tabata, Neil Walker, and Pedro Alvarez have been with the Pirates for months now, but the club hasn’t gotten much better. Except that they are playing better. Before the All-Star break, when Aki Iwamura and Andy LaRoche and Jeff Clement were prominently involved in the offense and Tabata and Walker and Alvarez spent a bunch of time adjusting to the big leagues, the club averaged a measley 3.23 runs per game. Since the break, they’ve averaged 3.91 runs per game. That’s not a huge amount by any means (about 634 runs on the season), but it is a big improvement and it’s come with Pedro Alvarez still being very streaky and Andrew McCutchen struggling.

The pitching staff is obviously a concern (they allowed about 5.43 runs/game before the break and they’re allowing 5.44 runs/game after), but Ross Ohlendorf made some big strides before being shut down and James McDonald has made some great starts with the Pirates. And while the Pirates have had some bad luck with prospect injuries this year, most of the minor league pitchers with a chance to help them in the near future (Bryan Morris, Jeff Locke, Rudy Owens, and Justin Wilson) have all had good years.

I’m not trying to make any predictions for 2011 here (a terrible season isn’t necessarily a predictor of good things to come: see Kansas City), but the truth is that there’s really no such thing as “too bad” when it comes to teams in the Pirates’ situation. The Tigers’ 119-loss season got them Justin Verlander. The Diamondbacks’ 111-loss season got them Justin Upton. For the Pirates right now, the only real difference between 65 wins and 55 wins is where they draft and the higher they draft, the better off they’ll be down the road.