We knew for a very long time that the Pirates were going to be bad in 2010. It was very apparent from a very long distance that Dave Littlefield’s Drive for 75 was going to fall off of a cliff after 2009 and that no one was going to be able to build a team in the wake of that quick enough to prevent it. It was so obvious that Charlie was writing about it at Bucs Dugout even well before Littlefield was fired in 2007. The Pirates being bad in 2010 wasn’t predictable, it was Calvinistic.
Last year was not a fun time to be a Pirate fan, but it was easy to accept it as a necessary evil of the rebuilding process. Of the key building blocks, no one’s arbitration clock had begun ticking evxcept for Andrew McCutchen. The team was brutal to watch from the perspective of someone that watches baseball to be entertained by it, but not a complete vacuum of hope when it came to thinking that the Pirates were going to be better in the future.
Now, it’s September 1, 2011, and the Pirates just finished August 8-22. They got swept by the Padres, Cubs, and Astros this month. It was clear even when they were in first place that they weren’t as good as their record suggested, but it was hard to see through the smokescreen to know exactly how good (or bad) they really were. They haven’t had that problem in a while. The clocks are all ticking now, and the team really isn’t much better a year later. I can pretend that it doesn’t terrify me and I can look on the brightside and say that they’re still a work in progress — they certainly are — but it’s a lot harder for me to look past this team’s awful performance and convince myself that it’s not a huge red flag.
Let’s hope the Pirates play better in September. If they repeat their performance in August, I might be going into the off-season as worried about the future of this team as I have been in a while.
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