This is a weird kind of end-season baseball purgatory.
I want the Pirates to win the NL Central, maybe a little bit more than I’d be willing to admit to myself. If the Pirates end this season as anything short of National League Champions, the reality is that I will remember this season differently if they win the division than I would if they don’t. Clinching a playoff spot and earning a wild card bid is great (fantastic, amazing, etc.), but winning the division would somehow be different. Don’t ask me to explain it tonight, because I can’t.
On the other hand, I’m really concerned about the pitching situation for Monday and beyond. The Pirates had a few chances to get their house in order with the rotation and didn’t and I am terrified that it’s going to come back to bite them. Every day that they remain in the division race feels like one day longer that they’re going to string themselves along towards Edinson Volquez starting the Wild Card Game. That might work out OK, but it’s not immediately apparent that it will and that makes me nervous.
The Pirates playing in the Eastern Time Zone and the Cardinals playing the Diamondbacks out west makes this whole thing even worse. The Pirates spent most of this evening tied with the Reds, first 0-0 and then 1-1. For the entirety of the game, it was impossible to know how important it was; a win could be transformative and a loss could be devastating, but only relative to the outcome of the Cardinals/Diamondbacks game that had barely started when the Pirates finished off their 3-1 win (as it turns out, having Josh Harrison, Travis Snider, and Andrew McCutchen bat back-to-back-to-back at the top of the lineup leads to good things from time to time).
As it turned out, the Pirate win changed nothing. The Diamondbacks had a 2-0 lead, fell behind 6-2, tied the game back up with a run in the seventh and three in the eighth, and then lost in the tenth. I refuse to sit back and linger on each and every one of the Pirates’ bad/ridiculous/unfortunate losses at this point, but the Pirates have so many of those losses that it’s hard not to at least consider them with only one game separating the Pirates from the Cardinals after each team has played 160.
On the other hand, the Giants lost tonight, so the Pirates officially clinched at least one home playoff game this year. Tomorrow: grad student/TAs across North Carolina convince themselves that they can make recitation at 11 AM on Thursday morning if their flight lands back at RDU before 10.
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