Since May 17th

On May 17th, the Pirates were 18-23, 6 1/2 games behind the Reds and five behind the Cardinals. Through 41 games, they’d scored 147 and given up 179, which made their pythagorean win percentage (.411) even worse than their actual win percentage (.439). They looked like the Same Old Pirates, in other words. 

Since that day, the Pirates are 33-22, which is the National League’s fourth best record. They’ve allowed 181 runs, which is the fewest allowed by any team in baseball in that span. They’ve also scored 226 runs, which is eighth in the NL and more than the Braves or Giants have scored over the same span. That spread — 226 runs scored and 181 allowed, gives them a Pythagorean winning percentage of .600. Their actual winning percentage over the same timespan? It’s .600 on the dot. 

The reason that I’m mentioning this isn’t because I’m ready to hang an NL Central pennant, it’s because some people are still talking about the Pirates like they’re this team that’s been playing terrible baseball but is somehow managing to win games and that at any second, they’re going to stop winning lucky games and just plummet like a rock. This Pirate team is not the 2007 Diamondbacks, who got outscored by 20 runs and still managed to finish 90-72. They’ve been playing excellent baseball for two months now and that’s why they’re winning games.

Is the Pirates’ pitching staff guaranteed to be able to keep keeping runs off the board if they can’t strike anyone out? Of course not. Can we be sure that a patchwork offense with less than a handful of decent Major League hitters that in general can’t hit for average or power will keep scoring at a decent rate? Definitely not. But you can’t discount what they’ve done to this point already, because they’ve been playing great (if potentially unsustainable) baseball. 

What the Pirates have to do to win the NL Central isn’t a mystery. They have to play their next 55 games exactly the way they’ve played the last 55. They have to play excellent defense, get some good starts and some timely hits and the bullpen has to slam the door at every opportunity. That’s far from a given, but it’s also not even remotely out of the question at this point. One of the biggest Pirate skeptics earlier in the year, Joe Sheehan, wrote about the Bucs for Sports Illustrated yesterday, pointing out that finishing last in the league in strikeouts doesn’t always preclude you from keeping runs off of the board. Like me, Sheehan is far from ready to hand the Pirates the NL Central crown, but he’s also noted that it’s impossible to ignore how the Pirates have gotten to first place to this point in the season and with most of the season already in the rear view mirror, it’s also unfair to keep dismissing them as contenders right out of hand, just because they’re the Pirates.