This is being a Pirate fan: in a game in which the Pirates’ offense was almost completely ineffective, my initial instinct for this recap is to say that I think that Pedro Alvarez is almost, but not quite entirely, ready to break out.
Really, the game was more about another strong Paul Maholm start that was wasted by the team’s inability to score runs when he’s on the mound. The Pirates are off to their best start since Maholm joined the club towards the end of the 2005 season and he’s pitching as well as he’s pitched in any span with the club since then, but they’re now 1-7 in games that he’s started in 2011. I won’t try and assign any kind of meaning to that stat; I’m just making a note of it for one of those “as much as people pretend to understand baseball in the greater sense it’s almost impossible to parse any kind of meaning out of smaller samples” points. Maholm’s pitched well all year, but for whatever reason the Pirates haven’t played well when he pitches and tonight was just another example of that.
Which brings us to Pedro. On the night, Pedro Alvarez was 1-for-4 with a strikeout and a double. On the whole, that’s a pretty unremarkable line for a guy that’s supposed to be a middle of the lineup hitter. Pirate fans, though, are well-trained to look for silver linings and pretty much everyone that watched tonight’s game came away thinking the same thing: Pedro’s close. In his first at-bat, he got a grooved fastball from Hiroki Kuroda and just missed it by enough to hit it a mile vertically instead of a mile horizontally. In his second at-bat, he turned on an inside pitch and crushed it foul before striking out. In his third at-bat, he sent a ball towards the Allegheny that was juuuuust foul before hitting a laser-line-out to second base. In his fourth at-bat, he crushed a double into the right-center gap. A few games before his quad injury, it seemed to me that he was starting to see the ball better. His foul balls and outs have been hit harder, he’s not falling behind as much in the count, and he seems to be squaring the ball up better. I’m honestly having a hard time gauging the guy right now; after his first at-bat I was really disappointed, but after taking his performance tonight in as a whole I feel like it’s possible that he’s thisclose to breaking out of his season-long slump.
Is there a better microcosm for being a Pirate fan in 2011 than that?
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