It is relatively easy to want to instinctively refer to certain baseball games as “bad” losses or “good” wins. This is a natural and understandable response, given that sometimes baseball teams lose games they probably should’ve won (like, for example, the Pirates yesterday) and sometimes the win games they probably should’ve lost, but I’m not sure that assigning a value to wins and losses really helps all that much. You know all the tropes; baseball seasons are long and bad teams win 65 games and good teams lose 65 games and both are bound to tie up both good wins and bad losses into those bundles, regardless of their actual talents. The Pirates entered the All-Star Break last year with a whole weekend of amazing wins at the expense of the Cardinals, who suffered three agonizing losses, and within a week or so the status quo of the NL Central, with the Cardinals comfortably on top, reasserted itself and any and all inherent “goodness” in the wins or “badness” in the losses was wiped away.
So yesterday. The Pirates made someone named Tim Melville throw 30+ pitches in the first inning of his Major League debut, but didn’t score. They had nine hits and they drew six walks and they didn’t hit into even one double play, but they only scored a run on Chris Stewart’s first home run as a Pirate in his first at-bat of his third season with the club. They went 1-for-14 with runners in scoring position and that one hit resulted in Josh Harrison being thrown out at the plate in the top of the eighth inning. It was agonizing to watch/listen to/follow along with. Jeff Locke wasn’t great — he allowed seven hits in his six innings of work and was constantly in trouble — but he threw strikes (two walks, no nibbling, an efficient 53 pitches through five innings before getting into trouble in the sixth) and got ground balls that turned into double plays and pitched well enough to win a game in which the Pirates constantly had runners on base. As I wrote before the season, no one asks for greatness out of their fifth starters, they only ask for good-enough-ness. Locke was good enough yesterday.
It is tempting, I guess, to worry about the Pirates’ “clutchness” or whatever, because they’ve left several boatloads of runners on base to this point in the 2016 season. It is, to me, much more important that the Pirates have a .387 OBP through six games, which leads all baseball teams including ones that are not forced to make their pitchers bat. They’re walking at a 12.0% clip and striking out at a 19.4% clip, which gives them a BB/K ratio of 0.62, third best in baseball. These numbers will obviously normalize (no one walked more than 9.2% of the time last year, and the best BB/K ratio in baseball was the Blue Jays at 0.50), but the Pirates were 21st in baseball in BB/K ratio last year. I care much more that the early returns for their re-worked offense look good. If they’re putting people on base more and striking out less and putting a ton of pressure on pitchers by working long at-bats, hits with runners on base will come. There was a lot of sturm und drang about the Pirates hitting with RISP last year when the season opened, and the Pirates finished fourth in the NL in OBP, fourth in runs scored, and third in average with RISP.
Remember this: it’s easy to say something like, “I’ll remember this game when the Pirates finish one game [out of first place] [out of the Wild Card],” and you might, but if that happens, someone else will point out every time the Pirates lost when Jeff Locke started as a reason that that happened, and that game yesterday had nothing to do with Jeff Locke. It’s a long season, the Pirates will win games they should lose and lose games they should win. Six games in, all you can look for are very broad trends. Bad hitting with RISP might feel like a broad trend at this point, but that’s partially because the Pirates always have runners in scoring position, and that’s a pretty promising root cause for an issue.
Last bit about the weekend, since the Pirates have a game scheduled in about three hours and I gotta get something together about that this morning, too: I think Gerrit Cole was probably fine on Saturday. He looked a bit rusty in that first inning, but he breezed through the lineup the second time through and his velocity was fine and he threw some good looking change-ups. It was cold, he got a late start to his spring due to a rib issue, it looked to me like he took an inning or so to get warmed up. Obviously it wasn’t an ideal debut, but I don’t think it’s worth getting worked up over. I’m sure that some day Gerrit Cole will figure out how to pitch to the Reds.
Photo by Kirk Irwin/Getty Images
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