I said this before last night’s game, but I’ll repeat it here briefly: the reason that the Pittsburgh Pirates will not win the NL Central this year doesn’t lie solely on last night’s loss, because if I asked you to pick through the season and name a dozen losses that stick out in your mind they probably wouldn’t even half-overlap with my dozen infuriating losses. This is because the Pirates are very good, which means that on most nights that they lose we Pirate fans feel that they could or should have done better.
None of this makes what happened last night any easier to stomach. The Pirates drew ten walks, they chased Lance Lynn after five innings, they loaded the bases four times, and they scored zero runs due to base-running mistakes and bad at-bats at the wrong time in a night mostly full of good at-bats, and just generally all-around poor luck. Their inability to cash in on their endless opportunities both truncated and wasted a brilliant start from JA Happ, who had to be pulled after six shutout innings in which he faced 18 hitters and only threw 56 pitches, because Clint Hurdle rightly (in my opinion) played the game like a playoff game and did his best to take the lead when the opportunity presented itself in the bottom of the sixth.
And then, the Pirates finally lost when Jon Jay hit a slow ground ball through the right-side shift, Gregory Polanco flubbed it, Andrew McCutchen flubbed it, and Matt Carpenter scored from first. Three pitches later, Mark Reynolds hit an 0-2 Mark Melancon fastball over the fence, and the NL Central race ended for all intents and purposes.
I haven’t read any of the post-mortem stuff, but I assume that there are people that are trying to draw larger meaning from this game about whether the Pirates have whatever it is that it takes to win big games. I think that’s a mistake. I think that if that version of Lance Lynn faces that version of JA Happ 100 times, the Pirates find a way to win that game easily 98 of those times. The problem when you’ve left yourself no room for error is that sometimes baseball takes us in strange and frustrating directions, and last night was one of those nights. This is both the ultimate horror of the Wild Card Game, and the one saving grace of facing Jake Arrieta: in the vacuum of one night, literally anything is possible.
The Pirates and Cardinals play again tonight will probably play again at some point once the torrential downpour ends. The Cardinals’ magic number is two, which means a Cardinal win lets them celebrate the NL Central on Pittsburgh soil. Their division title is fait accompli now, so I don’t see any point in getting upset over this should it happen. I mean, I won’t watch the Cardinals pop the champagne in their locker rooms and I’ll do my best to make sure I don’t see the images when they pop up on Getty afterwards, but now I’m much more concerned now about who will be celebrating on the field at PNC on October 7th. It’s the only thing that matters at this point.
Image: Jared Wickerham, Getty Images
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