The Pirates cobbled together a great win last night and the best part about it is that if they win again tonight, last night’s win means that tonight’s win is by default even better. This is a normal occurance (it’s why when a team loses the division on the last day of the season, their fans agonize over that final loss on September 28th and not any of the 65+ losses that came before it) it’s certainly a unique feeling for me as a Pirate fan and I love it. I suppose if this club does find a way to make the playoffs, my head will explode.
There’s been a ton of talk about the Pirates beyond the scale of the places you’d expect to find Pirate talk in the last 24 hours and a lot of it is focused on how it’s really, really hard to find a way to explain what they’re doing once you step beyond the usual clichés. All I can say about that is this: if there are a million different possible outcomes to the 2011 Pirate season, 9,999,999 of those outcomes are something other than winning the World Series and if they don’t, then we’re going to have an entire off-season to sit back and figure out what happened in 2011 and what it means for 2012 (if the other outcome happens, we’re going to get drunk and try to parlay our blogs into book deals … well, at least the first part). But until we hit one of those outcomes, you’re seriously depriving yourself as a Pirate fan by worrying about the hows and whys and not enjoying this ridiculous, improbable, delightful run of Pirate baseball.
Tonight, James McDonald takes the mound against Mike Leake. I think the Pirates can score some runs off of Leake and while McDonald has been maddening at times this year in terms of efficiency and he sometimes seems to be dancing through a pretty fine spray of raindrops, he’s done a good job keeping runs off of the board for about two months now. Part of the reason is because his homer problem from earlier in the year has settled down a bit. If he can keep the Reds’ potent offense in the park, I think he’ll be fine tonight.
First pitch tonight is at 7:05. Getting to first place is only part of the battle. The second part starts tonight.
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