The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next. – Ursula K. LeGuin
Opening Day is a day of beginnings, and as such, there is very little place for a statistic like this one:
Since 2013, only the St. Louis Cardinals have won more games than the Pittsburgh Pirates.
The Pirates have precious little to show for those 280 wins, course, thanks in part to the Cardinals’ 287 wins, and in part to running into the buzzsaws of Madison Bumgarner and Jake Arrieta in back-to-back Wild Card Games. Today, those 280 wins mean pretty much nothing; the Cubs beat the Pirates and Cardinals in the playoffs to assert their ownership of baseball’s best division, then signed away the Cardinals’ best position player (Jason Heyward) and pitcher (John Lackey), as well as a player that was a key mid-season addition for the reigning World Champions (Ben Zobrist). The Cubs are the universal pre-season NL Central pick because they should be. For the most part, the Pirates are being picked to be the seventh-best team in a National League that has seven good teams this year (in rough order of pundit prognostication: Cubs, Mets, Dodgers, Nationals, Giants, Cardinals, Pirates). At most, the Pirates are being picked to be “the blood sacrifice tossed into the wild card volcano again. It’s nice to have a defined role, I guess,” (those were not my words, please don’t hurt me).
It’s Opening Day, though, and so it’s our job — NAY, IT IS OUR DUTY — as fans to be optimistic. And so here is some more real talk courtesy of a guy that’s been blogging about the Pirates since the 2005 season: This is the best Pirate team I have ever seen take the field on an Opening Day (although I suppose you could quibble with the 1991 club, though I could also pull a procedural card and say that I don’t really remember Opening Day that year).
John Jaso looks like a minor move, but I’ve got a hunch that he’s going to be more of a Francisco Cervelli minor move than an Ike Davis minor move. I love the way the lineup rebuilds itself around him leading off, with McCutchen second and Marte fourth and solid hitters all the way down to the seven spot. The Pirates haven’t had a good first baseman or a great leadoff hitter in a while, and I’m not sure how many teams would have looked to plug both holes at once; the fact that the Pirates did is part of what’s made them “the Pirates” over the last three seasons. The Pirate lineup looks different without Neil Walker and Pedro Alvarez in it, but I would hesitate to conflate different with worse. At its best (which it can’t be without Jung Ho Kang, but David Freese makes a fine makeshift replacement for a team that would normally be putting someone like Cole Figueroa in that spot) this could be a relentless group of eight hitters capable of interspersing plate patience, doubles in the gap, and the occasional home run in an exhausting fashion for opposing pitchers. Andrew McCutchen destroyed the Grapefruit League and obviously understands what’s at stake in 2016 — I spent much of this winter worried about him, but today I’m relatively sure that I’m going to feel stupid for having done so. Honestly, since the Jaso signing I have spent almost zero time worrying about this Pirate offense.
I am as worried about the rotation as any right-thinking Pirate fan, but I think that we often forget that Cole and Liriano make a heck of a 1-2 punch. Cole has a ceiling that could best be described as “vaulted gothic cathedral” and he hasn’t hit it yet. A number of people that watched Jon Niese pitch for the Mets immediately thought that he was a great Ray Searage project. I also think that Juan Nicasio making the rotation recasts the process by which the Pirates filled in their existing rotation gaps; they didn’t just pick up Vogelsong and call it a day, they acquired a couple of arms for relatively cheap to eat up some innings in the Charlie Morton slot of the rotation while waiting for Glasnow and Kingham and Taillon, and at least one of those arms has a lot more upside than any of us would’ve guessed even a month ago. Like Jaso, it’s a boring approach, but like Jaso, the potential for it to pay off is probably higher than we guessed.
The bullpen looks similarly unimpressive, but the Pirates have entered the last few seasons with some odd spring training bullpen decisions and some unexpected names in the mix, and yet the bullpen is almost certainly the one thing most responsible for the Pirates’ unexpected performances the last three years. It’s hard not to have at least some trust in the front office to put a strong bullpen together.
And, of course, it’s easy to forget in all of the pomp and circumstance of Opening Day that last year’s Pirates won 98 games and that on Opening Day we had questions about Cole’s durability and Kang’s ability to compete in Major League Baseball. JA Happ was a punch-line that pitched for the Mariners, it was a joke the Royals had signed Joe Blanton, and Aramis Ramirez was still a thing from the past that we got angry about. By May 1st the Pirates looked lethargic and Andrew McCutchen was hobbling around on a bad knee with no signs of when it would improve. Around May 15th most of us were beyond frustrated with the team. By June 1st, they’d turned around without looking back. None of the opinions we hold or the projections we make on Opening Day are permanent; they’re just a framework through which we’ll start to interpret this season.
I can’t tell you today that the Pirates are the favorites to win the NL Central, because they are not. I can’t tell you that there’s no place for this season to go off the rails, because it could, nor can I tell you that the Pirates are a lock to make the playoffs, because out of that excellent seven-team group that I mentioned earlier (Cubs, Mets, Dodgers, Nationals, Giants, Cardinals, Pirates) at least two of those teams will miss the playoffs this year no matter what. What I can tell you is this: On Opening Day, you don’t need a sure-fire favorite or a ZiPS projection of 95 wins. You need a team with a chance, a team you can hang your hopes on, a team that you can dream on a little bit, a team with a vision of how to reach the promised land in October and the players capable of executing that vision. The Pirates have all of those things. I don’t know where 2016 will take us, but I know where it could take us, so paint the lines, hang the bunting, post the lineups, and let’s get this season started. It was a long winter after an ugly Wild Card loss, but I’m ready, and I think the Pirates might be, too.
Photo by Jared Wickerham/Getty Images
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