With a 9-1 win over the Boston Red Sox, the Pittsburgh Pirates won their 81st game of the 2014 season and hardly anyone thought it was a big deal.
Think about this for a second. For 20 years, we as Pirate fans were obsessed with the numbers 81 and 82. In 2009, I wrote two separate long-running blog-columns based on those numbers. One of them, at WHYGAVS, was called “The Road to 17,” and it recounted each and every season from 1993 through 2008, anticipating the coming 2009 season in which the Pirates would set a record for the most consecutive losing seasons by any North American sports franchise. The other was at FanHouse and it was called “Futilitywatch.” I wrote it for general fans to count down towards the inevitable record-setting 82nd loss that season. Last year, as the Pirates climbed towards their first playoff spot in 20 years, I did a sort of reverse countdown with their win totals, crossing off years from 1993-2012 as the Pirates moved beyond their own win totals. When the Pirates hit 81 wins last year, Pirate fans everywhere actually had to debate over whether the milestone was 81 wins or 82 wins. Was it 20 consecutive losing seasons, or 20 seasons since the Pirates have had a winning record?
Tonight, the Pirates cruised to an easy win over the Red Sox. Francisco Liriano had some control problems, but it didn’t matter at all because Gregory Polanco hit a home run in the first inning and the Pirates cruised on from there at the plate: there was a two-run Clint Barmes double in the second, a solo Neil Walker homer in the third, a three-run Ike Davis home run in the fifth, and a few other offensive highlights along the way. The Pirates won easily, running their record to 81-70. My first thought after the game wasn’t that win ensured that the Pirates wouldn’t follow 2013’s magical run with their 21st losing season in 22 seasons, it was that the win put the Pirates a season-high 11 games over .500 and that I wondered what the score of the Brewers/Cardinals game was.
The Cardinals won, so the Pirates are 2 1/2 ahead of the Brewers for the second wild card and 2 1/2 behind the Cardinals in the NL Central. Since being swept by the Cards, the Pirates have won Last year, as I was doing the daily posts about the win totals while we all counted towards 81 and 82, I would end each post with the same sign-off. I haven’t thought much about this sort of thing since then, because 2014 has been such a crazy roller coaster for the Bucs that thinking beyond the next two or three games often felt presumptive. The 2014 Pirates are 81-70, though. They’ve won 10 of their last 12, they’ve eliminated the chance of a losing season, and they’re zeroing in on their second wild card berth in as many years. And as much as I realize that this team has its flaws and that they’re far from perfect, I can’t help but watch them these last two weeks and think that maybe there’s still work left to be done.
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