Pittsburgh Pirates Wake Up Call – Offense Is Overrated Anyway

In our daily Wake-Up Call, we get you ready for the day with a complete look at all things Pittsburgh Pirates.

Gerrit Cole Looks up to the offense because they let him down

The Pittsburgh Pirates lost 1-0 to the Chicago Cubs last night. Just to show fans that 14-3 losses are not the must frustrating way to lose a ballgame. Gerrit Cole pitched an absolute beauty of a game, however. He went seven innings, allowed one run (zero earned) on two hits and struck out eight. It may have been one of the best starts of Cole’s career and easily his best since the 2015 season. It was all for not as the offense could only muster five hits and couldn’t match the Cubs’ one run.

Baseball can be the most annoying game on earth sometimes. Games like last night are the kind that sticks with you way longer than the blowouts. It’s easy to move on from a game you never really had a chance to win but it’s quite another when you know you were basically just one or two hits away from winning a game. I think it’s important to focus on the fact that once again we saw a dominant pitching performance from the Pirates. The offense will not stay this bad forever. The only hope is that once the offense picks up we don’t see a regression of the starting pitching.

Depth or lack of it

One criticism I’ve seen of the Pirates this season is their supposed lack of depth. There is one issue with that. Yes, the current crop of Pirates do not have a lot of depth and that’s because you are seeing the depth in action. In a perfect world, Starling Marte would be this team’s Center Fielder, Jung Ho Kang would be this team’s third baseman and John Jaso, Adam Frazier, and David Freese would simply be bench options. In that world, you likely don’t see Philip Gosselin getting at-bats in key spots, you don’t see Alen Hanson getting starts and you surely aren’t angry at the apparent lack of depth this team has.

This isn’t an excuse because injuries and suspensions happen but they are increasingly hard to plan for, especially for a smaller market team. The Pirates do not have the luxury of having Big League starters going deep into their organizational depth as few teams really do. Not many teams would be okay losing one marquee player, much less two different ones. The absence of Marte and Kang have vastly altered this team and you are seeing it unfold on the field. They will get better but how much is really the key questions.

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