Me, in a sleepy haze around 11:30 last night: Wait, did they say Rosales hit that monster homer off of Arquimedes Caminero? As in, Adam Rosales? As in, that guy that the A’s and Rangers DFA’d like three times between them in one week that one year? Is still in baseball? And hitting towering homers off of Caminero?
[A few seconds pass]
Me: Welp, guess it’s time to brush my teeth and go to bed.
I feel like a broken record at this point, but here it is: the Pirates aren’t going to win enough games if Francisco Liriano is missing starts and can’t pitch out of the fifth inning. They aren’t going to win enough games if he gives out home runs like Tootsie Rolls in the Buhl Day Parade to offensively inept teams like Padres. They aren’t going to win enough games if Caminero continues to clip along walking batters and serving up homers like crazy.
In my mind, the biggest criticism of the Pirate off-season plan of hoarding relief pitchers and building a just-maybe-barely-good-enough-for-now rotation wasn’t that the plan couldn’t work, but rather that it gave them a very narrow avenue for success for at least the spring part of the season. With Juan Nicasio and Jeff Locke occupying rotation spots, the Pirates need more certainty from Liriano, and with only one starter (maybe two, if you count Niese) able to eat innings on a regular basis, the Pirates need the key components of last year’s bullpen to function at top capacity.
We are very literally only talking about two weeks of baseball, and about seven total losses in a season in which even the most optimistic of Pirate fans assumed they’d have something like 55 more losses coming their way. But of course it’s troubling to see them struggling in the exact way that anyone who pays even the slightest attention to the club could’ve predicted over the winter.
Photo by Denis Poroy/Getty Images
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