This week, the Cubs come to PNC Park for a three-game series. After the series ends, the Pirates will travel to St. Louis for three games, then go to Cincinnati for three, then to Wrigley Field for three more. It’s only May 2nd and the Pirates are off to a solid 15-10 start, so it’s certainly not time for pronouncements about games being MUST WIN or putting an 8-4 ultimatum on the Pirates. Still, ignoring the importance of these games is equally foolish.
Currently, the Pirates are three games behind the Cubs. Because of slow starts in 2013 and 2014, the Pirates spent all of the summers of both years playing catch-up with the Cardinals. It’s not fun; we’ve been over this ad nauseum, but the Pirates won 98 games last year and they won 80 of their last 122 and they spent zero days in first place. Winning that many games and never catching the team in front of you is a special kind of fan-torture. It was impossible to fully enjoy one of the best summers in recent-and-not-so-recent Pirate history because the Wild Card Game loomed all summer, and our fears were born out in October. The only chance for the Pirates to prevent this from happening again is to beat the Cubs head-to-head; there aren’t many teams in this National League that are going to do that dirty work for them. That’s not to say that the Pirates can’t or won’t be able to reverse a three or four our whatever game lead against the Cubs this summer, just that it’d be nice if they didn’t have to.
There is symbolic and importance here, too. The Pirates spent three years playing second fiddle to the Cardinals in the Central and just when it seems appropriate to think that they’re moving ahead of the Cardinals, the Cubs have leapfrogged them both in people’s impressions of the division and in the national consciousness. It’s not that it’s not deserved, it’s that it’s incredibly frustrating as a Pirate fan to watch it happen. Karl Ravech wondered if the NL Central race over on April 17th, for chrissake.
This series is, basically, the first bulwark for the Pirates against everyone’s foregone conclusion of an inevitable march of a Cub NL Central Championship. I don’t think that the Pirates are anything but an underdog in the Central this year, but I also don’t think that anything is foregone or inevitable. These things have to be proven on the field, of course, and so while it’s too early for anything to be of monumental importance, it’d also be nice to start turning the tide in the proper direction.
Gerrit Cole starts against Jason Hammel tonight at 7:05. The Cubs have Arrieta and Lester on Tuesday and Wednesday, respectively.
Photo by Doug Pensinger/Getty Images
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