“Love’s pure free joy when it works, but when it goes bad you pay for the good hours at loan-shark prices.”
― David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks
The Pirates were not better than the Cubs tonight. I could (and will) go on. Gerrit Cole did not hit his spots tonight and as talented as he is, he’s not a better pitcher than Jake Arrieta in 2015. The Cubs made the most of their opportunities while the Pirates didn’t. The Pirates lost their cool and the Cubs kept it together. This is the system that baseball has cast its lot with, and so the Pirates’ season is over. We as Pirate fans know this well enough by now that a small part of us would’ve been able to recognize the plight of the situation for the Cubs and their fans tonight, had the game turned out differently. We would’ve danced and celebrated and taunted the Cardinals, sure, but once you land on the wrong side of this game, you don’t forget what it feels like. You especially don’t forget what it feels like when the universe foists a yearly reminder upon you.
That’s why all of honestly-spoken the good-sportsmanship-platitudes aside, it’s really tough to get past the idea that both the Pirates and Cubs end this game with 98-65 records. The Pittsburgh Pirates won 98 games this year, they finished with the second best record in baseball, they put together a team that was the best Pirate team in a generation, and the only chance they had at the postseason was one game against a team with both a worse record than them and also the best pitcher in baseball in 2015. They didn’t play their best game tonight, they lost, and they deserved to lose, but dumping baseball’s second best record in the ditch three batters into the third inning of the first playoff game feels wrong to me. I’m obviously biased and I don’t have a great solution, but playing a one-game playoff between teams that didn’t finish the season with the same record won’t ever feel right, even if this stupid, blighted playoff system ever breaks in the Pirates’ favor.
When the Cardinals won two straight to take a spot in the NLCS from the Pirates two years ago, it hurt, but it felt like 2013 could be the beginning of something. Who complains about a playoff loss after 20 years in the Grand Canyon? Last year’s Wild Card was a great late-season surprise from a Pirate team that was barely over .500 in mid-August. Their late-season burst to get to 88 wins and the Wild Card was great and felt like a validation of 2013 as more than a crazy dream, but there wasn’t much time to imagine the Pirates as anything other than a Wild Card. When both seasons ended, a logical conclusion for a Pirate fan would be to think that there were better days ahead.
It’s hard to feel that way tonight. I don’t mean that in a fatalistic “Woe is the Pirates! They’ll never compete again!” way, either: the core of this team isn’t going anywhere, the minor league system is still stocked, and the Pirates will find a way to compete in the NL Central going forward, Cubs and Cardinals be damned. What I mean is this: the Pirates were a great team this year, they won 98 games, and they got one god damned playoff game. The Pirates will be good for the forseeable future, but will they be 98-wins good? The Pirates have won 280 games over the last three seasons, which is the second most in the NL (the Dodgers are at 278, the Cardinals are at … whatever, they have to be ahead of the Pirates, I don’t want to do the math) over that timespan. Being the second best team in the National League over a three-year span has gotten them eight playoff games, and two one-game exits against phenomenal pitchers.
I understand that this sounds like sour grapes and I suppose it probably is (maybe you can forgive me for that, given the circumstances), but it’s pretty crushing to wait 20 years for your favorite baseball team to be good, then wait three years for them to be possibly great, only to have to finally come to terms with the concept that on top of being good and possibly great, they also have to be lucky. Maybe next year a 90-win Pirate team will get a gem from a slightly-older Gerrit Cole and knock a 93-win Mets team out of the playoffs in front of a depressed group of fans at CitiField when Josh Bell goes crazy at the plate, but then, maybe they won’t. After years of watching bad Pirate teams, trying to figure out how to build a good Pirate team, seeing a good Pirate team assembled before our eyes, and watching as that good team matures into something even better, now all we can say is, “maybe the stars will line up better next year.”
That sucks. I wish I had something better to offer that tonight, but I don’t. Maybe next year, the Pirates will win 98 games and not find themselves in a division with a 100-win team. Maybe next year, the Pirates will be the team that’s at their best on the 163rd night even if they’re not the best over the first 162. Maybe next year their exceptionally talented pitcher will ascend onto a different plane of existence, while their opponent’s ace comes up just short. Or maybe they’ll come up with the punishing home run against the opposing pitcher that can’t quite locate his pitches, or maybe they’ll get some dumb, random baseball luck that makes the eyes of the other team pop out of their heads in disbelief and maybe on that night we’ll be the fans saying, “That’s just how baseball is; don’t be so salty,” except that honestly we won’t even care what the fans of that other team think, because we’ll be too busy celebrating.
There’s no way to predict that, though, because it’s just something that happens. It’s something that only happens to good teams, sure, and at least the Pirates have that part of the equation down. What that means, though, is that all the Pirates can do is keep on putting together good baseball teams, hoping that one year they manage to find whatever it is that’s been eluding them for the last three. If that happens, I guess nights like this one will feel like they were worth it. Until then, I’ll stare at sentences like that last one for ten minutes, agonizing over whether it’s right to use “if” or “when.” I don’t know which one it is. I don’t even know how to know.
Photo by Justin K. Aller/Getty Images
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