There is no team in baseball that fully understands the stakes of a division title vs. the Wild Card Game quite like the Pittsburgh Pirates. In 2013, the Pirates won 94 games and opened the post-season with a rousing 6-2 defeat of the Reds in the Wild Card Game. It was incredible — an emotional high as high as Everest. The Pirates played the Cardinals evenly in the ensuing NLDS, but lost in five games. Because they didn’t win the NL Central, they only got to pitch Francisco Liriano once and they played Game 5 at Busch Stadium and not PNC Park. Last year, the Pirates steamrolled through the second half of August and September and into their second straight playoff berth in an underwhelming National League, then got buzzsawed by Madison Bumgarner on his way to post-season immortality.
As if the Pirates needed more evidence that the Wild Card Game is an anti-competitive crapshoot that they should want no part of, they now have last weekend’s series at Wrigley Field to file away for future reference. Gerrit Cole and Francisco Liriano both shut the Cubs down on Friday and Saturday, the Pirate bullpen got out of some big jams, the Pirate offense did enough against Jon Lester and jumped all over Jason Hammel, and for two days the Pirates looked like a better team than the Cubs. And then last night, Jake Arrieta took the mound, and all bets were off. If the Pirates win the NL Central, their worst-case scenario against the Cubs is a best of five where Arrieta can only pitch once. I like their chances in that series. If they don’t, they get him in a winner-take-all one-game. I’m significantly more scared of that.
This is the bizarro world of the Wild Card Game, where a team can steamroll their way to eight straight wins, lose the ninth in a bad matchup against a good pitcher, and come out of the stretch feeling almost every bit as bad about their playoff chances as they did before the eight-game winning streak started. This is what the Pirates are playing to avoid at PNC Park against the Cardinals this week, no matter how long the odds. The Cardinals can say that they understand this and I’m sure that they do intellectually, but they have not experienced it in the same way that the Pirates have.
After the Pirates lost four in a row to the Cubs and Dodgers and sat five games behind the Cardinals, what I asked for was this: cut it to three to at least give yourselves a chance to play for the division at home in the season’s final week. The Pirates did that, last night’s results notwithstanding. Really, they’d be looking at needing a sweep against the Cardinals this week either way, because leaving this series down one game and counting on the Braves would not have been where the Pirates needed to be for the season’s final series.
And to be clear: a sweep in this series is not assured nor is it even particularly likely. I don’t think we should be expecting it and I don’t think we should be disappointed if they don’t get it. If the Pirates don’t win the NL Central, the reason will be because they started the season a little bit slow, because they struggled with the Reds and the Brewers, and (most of all) because the Cardinals had an exceptional season in 2015 and it’s at least partially out of your hands when 98+ wins isn’t enough to win you a division. It won’t be because Charlie Morton and Joe Blanton and Arquimedes Caminero couldn’t beat Michael Wacha on a Tuesday in late September (and we can talk about this game in particular tomorrow if the Pirates should happen to win tonight).
What we can do, though, is hope that the Pirates sweep this week. I’ve watched a lot of baseball in my life and in the eleven (ELEVEN!?!) seasons that WHYGAVS has existed, and if there was ever a Pirate team to pull off the improbable feat of erasing a three-game division deficit against the best team in baseball over the course of one week, this is that Pirate team. Back when the Pirates were terrible, I’d end a lot of seasons thinking about a passage from Bob Dylan’s poem “Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie” about needing hope and not being able to understand what hope is because unless you’ve felt it, it’s just a word.
In this particular case, hope is knowing what Andrew McCutchen did to these Cardinals at PNC Park in July. It’s seeing what Aramis Ramirez has done in last six weeks, and watching Starling Marte heat up just in time for a stretch run. It’s a bullpen that’s gone above and beyond the high expectations we all had for it before the year started. It’s the way Pedro Alvarez obliterates Lance Lynn, no matter what sort of season either one of them are having. It’s Ray Searage magic combined with JA Happ. It’s a stadium full of fans that makes PNC Park as intimidating to play as anywhere in baseball. It’s Gerrit Cole waiting for his start on Wednesday, begging for the club to hand him the first two wins so that he can try and get them the third.
I don’t know if this Pirate team will win three games this week and I’m not willing to say that they should, but I’m positive that they can. That’s the most we can ask for this morning. We’ll deal with the aftermath if they don’t, but for now, all that matters is tonight’s game and that sliver of hope. If the Pirates win tonight, they’ll end the day closer to the Cardinals than they’ve ended any day since April. Win tonight to give meaning to tomorrow. This is what late-September baseball is all about.
Photo by Justin K. Aller/Getty Images
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