The aftermath

“Speak up, destiny, speak up! Destiny always seems decades away, but suddenly it’s not decades away; it’s right now. But maybe destiny is always right now, right here, right this very instant, maybe.”  — Walter M. Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz

When the 2013 Pittsburgh Pirate season ended, I was pretty OK with it. The Pirates had done some amazing things, they’d delivered a season full of memorable moments, and they generally reminded me (and Pirate fans everywhere) that baseball could be fun. Losing in the NLDS to the Cardinals was disappointing, of course, but last year’s Cardinals were a buzzsaw and it was hard to be upset over the loss. The Cardinals were the best team in the National League, after all, and while the Pirates hung with them during the season, that didn’t mean that they were quite in the same class.

The end of the 2014 season feels different. This is partly because expectations change. As a fan, you want something different out of a team that managed to have the NLDS-winning run at the plate in bottom of the 9th inning of Game 4 of the NLDS in the previous year than you do from a team that racked up 20 straight losing seasons. The Pirates were pretty good last year and they were not-quite-as-good-but-still-pretty-good again in 2014. The Pirates are supposed to be a young team building towards a crest, so it’s disappointing that 2014 wasn’t really a step forward for them, even if it wasn’t really a step backwards.

Walking out of PNC Park a week ago, though, I felt a little more hollow than I did watching the Pirates fall apart against Adam Wainwright in Game 5 12 months ago. I think the reason for that was this: last year’s Pirate team felt like they’d hit a ceiling. They had an adequate offense with pretty solid middle, they had a pretty strong rotation with three really good starters and a fourth solid one, and they had a lights out bullpen. There were weak links, of course, but when the Cardinals beat the Pirates in the NLDS, you looked at the Pirates and said, “Hey, this was a good team that just wasn’t good enough, but what else could you do?” You could plot a path to a series win for the Pirates (before the series started, I figured their best shot was to win with Cole against Lynn in Game 2, with Liriano in Game 3, and then to steal one against Wainwright in 1 or 5 or with Morton on the mound in Game 4; their best shot was Game 4, and damn did they come close), and they just didn’t get there.

This year, though, the team came into the playoffs playing their best baseball of the season and it was still hard to feel that they weren’t deficient in a way that last year’s team wasn’t. Edinson Volquez did a really nice Charlie Morton approximation in the second half of the season (he didn’t quite get enough ground balls to really be as good as Morton was last year, to be honest). Last year, that was good enough to be the Pirates’ fourth best starter heading into the playoffs. This year, no one on the Pirates pitched well enough to make it obvious enough to the decision makers that Volquez wasn’t the Pirates’ very best starter. The bullpen was OK at the back end but a disaster if asked to work long stretches. The Pirates’ strength this year was undoubtedly their offense, but given their pitching problems, it was pretty hard to look past the end of the season and see Bumgarner in the Wild Card Game or series looming against the Dodgers or Nats pitching staffs and wonder how the Pirates would fare if they were going to rely solely on putting up crooked numbers against those pitchers. When the Pirates were mired in their seven-game losing streak my main thought was this: How does a team with this rotation and this bullpen go deep into the playoffs, even if they find a way to make it? They sort of obscured those problems with their white-hot finish, but, then, we Pirate fans sort of obscured from ourselves that much of that happened against bad baseball teams.

I am of two minds here. On the one hand, I want to keep pointing out that the Pirates’ rotation was an issue in December of 2013 and it continued to be an issue straight through to the end of the season. I want to say that the bullpen was an issue from very early on (Easter weekend at the earliest, probably) and that it continued to be an issue right through to the end of the season.  I want to say that it was those two things that got them in the hole they had to dig out of in September, which ultimately put them in the Wild Card Game and not the NLDS. I want to point out that despite the great game pitched by Madison Bumgarner last Wednesday, that it was Volquez and the bullpen (frustratingly used by Clint Hurdle to not put any of his best relievers on the mound until it was 8-0) that turned the game into a laugher and changed the tone for the rest of the team,* and that that the team’s season ended like that in the playoffs was more or less inevitable from the moment that it became clear that they were going to make the playoffs.

And yet, I don’t want this to be an “I told you so,” post, either. There is something to be said for making the playoffs and taking your chances there. The Royals are, by almost any metric, at mediocre-at-best team this year (they barely outscored their opponents and their regular season third-order winning percentage is below .500) that’s managed to get hot at the right time and steam-rolled through arguably better opposition. The Cardinals are more or less doing the same thing (their peripherals are better than the Royals, but they were statistically the worst NL playoff team, including the Pirates) in the National League. The Giants stumbled through the entire second half, had the Wild Card Game gift-wrapped for them by the Pirates, and suddenly are THE GIANTS again, which is something that seems to happen every other year like clockwork. We put a lot of emphasis on the winner of the World Series being “the best” team, but the winner of the World Series is really just “the best” team after a sequence of short-series playoffs in October. The Pirates suffered through a ton of injuries and weird obstacles this year, got past all of them, and made it to the end of the season playing their best baseball of 2014. It’s really not hard to envision an alternate universe where they snuck out two more wins against the Cardinals or Volquez didn’t hang his curveball to Brandon Crawford or anything that put them into a Division Series, from where they could enact a National League version of what the Royals have done in the American League.

The goal of each 162-game season isn’t to be the best team in baseball, it’s to be one of the five best teams in your league, and then to play your best baseball of the season in October. I strongly suspect that this is why the Cardinals and Giants end up in the NLCS every year; they’re not always the best teams, but they do seem to have managers and front offices that understand that they only need to be one of the best teams that plays the best at the right time. The Pirates actually seemed to pull that off this year, before falling short in the Wild Card Game for a number of reasons that range from a generally non-optimal pitching staff, to managerial hubris, to poor performances by pretty much every Pirate that picked up a bat that night, to a sublime performance by Madison Bumgarner, and (most importantly, since it combines all of these things) finally to the arbitrary nature of a one-game playoff. The Pirates made the playoffs, which should be the goal of any season, and then they lost in the playoffs, which sometimes happens no matter what you try to to do prevent that from happening (Hellooooooo Oakland and Detroit! Welcome to the pity party!). Focusing on other stuff obscures the reality that the Pirates were a good team this year, that they were probably better than their record, and that nine out of ten playoff teams will fall short, sometimes for reasons beyond their control. Simply having the best record or the most talent isn’t enough to ensure that you won’t be one of the nine that don’t make it.

AND YET, I still can’t shake the feeling that this Pirate team wasn’t as good as it could have been. I realize that’s a somewhat dumb and arbitrary distinction, but I still think it’s an important discussion to have. The overwhelming impression that I got from the Pirates this winter was that they looked at the situation they were in in 2014, weren’t convinced that they could contend again, and deferred the big money-spending decisions to a later date until they were more certain about the club. When the time came to make those big money-spending decisions on July 31st, they hadn’t properly anticipated the trade market and found themselves with literally nothing. This is a difficult situation to understand from the outside. My best guess from the trades that were made at this year’s trade deadline is that the Pirates quite possibly could have ended up with David Price in their rotation if they’d been willing to send Starling Marte to Seattle, but it’s impossible to know how the season ends if that happens or to say that the Pirates should have done it because Marte was a huge part of September’s offensive explosion and his bat is arguably THE linchpin for the club going forward in 2015 and beyond.

The end result is that while there are easy and logical defenses for every decision that the front office made at every point starting from Day 1 of last year’s off-season through the Wild Card Game, the net result is still that they didn’t do much to improve a surprisingly potent offensive team, and that while last year’s Pirates hit the playoffs as a more or less maxed-out 94-win team, this year’s Pirates hit the playoffs as an 88-win team with a whole bunch of headspace in which one more starter or one more reliever could’ve changed their look substantially. I want to double back around again and say that this isn’t meant as a blanket criticism of everything the team did: they made great reads on Edinson Volquez and Vance Worley as undervalued pitchers that could help them, and the patch work they did on the bullpen in September might have been sufficient for a deep playoff run with a slightly deeper rotation, as really what they were missing was a seventh inning guy, which John Holdzkom might have been (though I think some cracks were starting to show down the stretch) and a useful LOOGY, which Bobby LaFromboise might have been (though I’m less sure about him).

The problem is that they misread what they needed: AJ Burnett pitched like a top-of-the-rotation pitcher last year for 213 2/3 innings, and they replaced him with a middle of the rotation pitcher in Volquez. Vance Worley was a solid mid-rotation addition, too, but the rotation basically lacked even one front-line starter all year with the health problems of Francisco Liriano and Gerrit Cole. What bugs me is that given Liriano’s history and Cole’s age, none of this should have come as a surprise. Basically, the Pirates let one of their best starters walk, they replaced him with a middle-rotation guy instead of someone on the same level, and then they put all of their eggs in the baskets of two pitchers that had not ever pitched 200 innings in a season and who, at this point in their careers, probably shouldn’t have been counted on to do so. Now, maybe I’m falling into hindsight here with Cole (I really didn’t think his workload last year was too much of a problem, given his size and mechanics) and maybe I’m understating the effect that Jameson Taillon would’ve had on the rotation had he been healthy (though, again, counting on rookies is not really all that wise), but I really don’t think that it can be repeated enough that the Pirates went into the camp short on starting pitching, spent most of the year with Edinson Volquez as their most reliable starter (meaning that he wa the guy most likely to take the ball every five days and , and still made the Wild Card Game and got within two games of the Cardinals in the NL Central. There are admirable aspects to that, but there’s also something deeply frustrating about it.

I’ve probably already rambled on in a circle for too long at this point, so I’d like to close by going back to a theme that I hit on a bunch in the spring. When the season started, I looked at what the Pirates had done over the winter, interpreted it as a “punt” and wondered what the very best way to go about contending in the Pirates’ situation was: to open a window and load up in one or two years in which you’re best equipped to make a serious run (from this spring it looked like maybe 2015 or 2016 would be the very best year for the Pirates to do this, once Taillon and Polanco got their big league legs underneath them), or to bring your talent up and then have a persistently good enough base around it that things can suddenly break right in any given year to turn your team from a basic contender into something really special.

I didn’t really have an answer in March, and I wasn’t really positive if the Pirates had gone about things the right way or wrong way or even if there was a right way or a wrong way. What happened this year, though, was that for a number number of reasons, the Pirates held back on upgrading the pitching staff all year, only to watch Josh Harrison and Russell Martin and Neil Walker and Travis Snider and who-knows-maybe-even-Andrew McCutchen have career years and come away with a blowout loss in a Wild Card Game. Obviously nothing that the front office could have done would have guaranteed a different result (again, Oakland and Detroit), but doing nothing didn’t end up producing a result that was all that great, either.

I really, really dislike it when Pirate fans imply that this front office has had little to do with the franchise’s turnaround in the last few years. 2014 was the Pirates’ fourth straight year of playing meaningful second-half baseball, their third straight year of being a legitimate playoff contender, and their second straight playoff berth. The Pirates have an incredible core of talent at the moment that should guarantee that they at the very least contend more or less every year from now until when Andrew McCutchen’s contract runs out in 2018. The problem, from my perspective, is that we’re longer at a given point where it’s safe to assume that everything will exist at the same level or better next year as it did this year. Obviously Starling Marte and Gregory Polanco provide a tantalizing upside to the Pirates, but it’s really hard to say exactly how long or what the peaks of players like McCutchen (who’s turning 28 in two days) and Walker (who turned 28 in September) will look like. In other words, the clock is ticking, and I can’t help but feel like the Pirates were content to just let it tick this year. We’ll get into 2015 in the near future, but I’ll close with this: I think that 2015 could be a very good year for the Pirates, but they’re going to have to approach this winter differently than last winter.

*I very much hate the, “Why focus on the pitching! It was a shutout!” argument that’s used quite a bit in regards to last Wednesday’s game. Brandon Crawford’s grand slam took the air out of the team and the stadium and the Giants never really stopped scoring after it. Bumgarner pitches differently, the Pirates approach him differently, and Bruce Bochy manages differently if the game is 1-0 or 2-0 in the late innings than if it’s 5-0 and functionally over after six innings. Bumgarner was great last week, but pretend that a shutout was fait accompli under all circumstances is ridiculous because we simply don’t know what would’ve happened in a close game.

Image: VFS Digital Design, Flickr