Why do the Pirates have two off days in four days this week? It’s dumb. I guess this is as good a reason as any to do a “quarter-season review” type post, since we’re a bit more than 25% of the way into the season.
Through 48 games, it’s easy enough to break down the Pirates’ season thusly: the pitching has been good, the offense has been bad, and the Pirates aren’t nearly as bad as they were last year but they’re not really that good, either. If we assume that their current pace (74 wins) is an approximation of their final record, then it’s fair to say that this team will probably be good enough to finish above .500 in the nebulous but near future, but also that they have plenty of work to do if they ever want to do anything more than that.
(Well, wasn’t THAT strongly stated? This was more or less where I was at the beginning of the season — that a team with some young talent on offense and some pitching on the way and their share of holes will eventually finish .500 but isn’t guaranteed more — and I haven’t seen much to dissuade that and I’m not huge on drawing conclusions based on 48 games anyway.)
So maybe the first question to ask here is this one: What is wrong with the offense? Andrew McCutchen, Neil Walker, Ryan Doumit, Garrett Jones, and Jose Tabata all have above average OPSes and Chris Snyder and Steve Pearce have both put up decent numbers, too. No one’s really having a standout season thus far (only McCutchen’s OPS+ is over 120), but it seems like they shouldn’t be this bad at the plate.
Besides the lack of depth (meaning that Brandon Wood, Xavier Paul, Matt Diaz, and Pedro Ciriaco contribute pretty much nothing to the team at the plate), I think the biggest problem is Pedro Alvarez. On the larger scale, I mean that the team needs one more hitter, but since neither Lyle Overbay nor Ronny Cedeno are long-term Pirates, I mean Alvarez. Hidden inside of Pedro’s awful run this year is the fact that he’s been a non-black hole since hitting his first homer in Miami about a month ago. Since then, he’s hit .238/.314/.393. This is obviously not good and not what we expected out of Pedro, but it is a sight better than his .177/.250/.210 in his first 18 games. And this is not at all a scientific or statistically significant, but the Pirates got shut out three times in their first 18 games when Pedro was struggling, then only once with him in the lineup after his bat started to come around. Now they’ve been shut out twice in the five games that he’s been hurt.
The offense’s problem is that the Pirates are regularly sending up a lineup with three or more black holes (Cedeno, Overbay for stretches, Alvarez for stretches, Tabata for stretches, Diaz and Wood and Paul against anyone). If Alvarez comes back healthy and rakes, that will help with that problem, especially if McCutchen and Tabata stay out of the funks that they both had at various points early in the season. Things won’t be perfect, but I think they’ll be much, much better.
The pitching is a different story, but it’s honestly something I’m not that worried about. Their ERA (3.64) is a bit lower than their FIP (3.95) and their xFIP (3.77), but if they regress back to those numbers, they’re a middle of the road staff. The bullpen is excellent and Neal Huntington’s showed quite a knack for putting good bullpen arms together the last two years. Charlie Morton and James McDonald are as good as anyone the Pirates have had in their rotation in decent years (this is not saying a lot, but it does say something), and the depth this year has been pretty good thanks to Karstens and Lincoln waiting in Triple-A. Even if the Bucs don’t exercise Paul Maholm’s option at the end of the year (they almost certainly won’t), Rudy Owens should be able to step in and do a solid Maholm impression in 2011. Same goes for Lincoln and guys like Karstens or Correia, I think. Add in Morris and Locke and Wilson and I think that the Pirates should be able to put together a staff that’s capable if not spectacular for the next couple seasons.
The biggest question going forward from here for me is what the offense is capable of beyond McCutchen. Walker, Alvarez, and Tabata all have their share of question marks, I think, and we already know that there’s no long-term answer at first base, right field, or shortstop (this does partially hinge on this year’s draft, also, I like Starling Marte but remain a bit skeptical about his plate discipline). Luckily for the Pirates, they have almost no firm payroll obligations beyond this year and could conceivably get a bit more serious on the free agent market in the near future, but it’s something they really have to be sure about. Neal Huntington all but admitted that there’s a “Pirate Tax” when it comes to free agents when he talked to me this spring and if the Pirates are going to spend money, it’s something they need to be completely sure about. Imagine if they had signed Jorge de la Rosa this winter only to see him go down with Tommy John surgery in May. That would be a total disaster.
A quarter of the way through 2011, I think we’ve seen some positive things from the Pirates. The question now is exactly what those things mean and how they affect the Pirates of the future.
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