Game 55: Mets 9 Pirates 8

When Xavier Paul singled in Dusty Brown with two outs in the top of the third, the Pirates took a 7-0 lead and had a win expectancy of 97.2%. That’s obviously not a sure thing, but it’s pretty close. It’s hard to blow a seven-run lead, even when the other team has seven more at-bats.

When Carlos Beltran homered in the bottom of the third, I thought to myself, “Well, good; at least Clint Hurdle won’t keep Paul Maholm in the game for too long chasing a shutout or something silly like that.” Hurdle kept Maholm in for too long, anyway. When a pitcher has been staked to a seven-run lead, it’s insane to me that he was allowed to stay into the game to the point that he could face the tying run. It’s even crazier because Maholm lasted through the fifth inning; sometimes managers do crazy things to get pitchers a win. Maholm had one, had Hurdle managed to get him out of the game sooner.

Of course, there’s plenty of blame to go around in this one; Dusty Brown allowed the game-tying passed ball, Jose Veras balked and threw a wild pitch in the Mets’ two-run eighth inning (sidenote: Hurdle left him in way too long, too; he pretty clearly had no clue where home plate was today) and so on. It takes a team to blow a 7-0 and each and every Pirate, from Hurdle on down, did his part. 

I don’t even want to say anything else about this. This is the exact sort of game that I had in mind when I wrote the “build a wall around it” post at the beginning of the season. Blowing a 7-0 lead requires as much bad luck as it does an absence of baseball skill; it’s not something that’s repeatable and because of that, it’s not something worth dwelling on.

I’d be lying though, if I said that pushing this game out of my mind is going to be easy. This kind of loss is the reason Pirate fans are so surprised when the team gets as many breaks at once as the Bucs did last night. Blowing a seven-run lead isn’t something that’s predictable; the real tragedy of being a Pirate fan is that you’d never realize it by talking to one.