Pirates Stave Off History with Victory Over Cardinals

the bucs might not lose another game this season…..

Charlie keeps saying variations on this, and I have absolutely no idea why. I suppose he means that the talent on the field is less marginal than the days of Polcovich and Lou Collier, and that the starting pitching seems much more major league than the heyday of Jimmy Anderson and Joe “The Starter” Beimel.

But if you look at actual results, this is plainly the second or third worst team of the streak, and it only does that well because it featured 4-5 additional ML-grade talents for the first half of the season. Going by pythagorean record*, the worst team of the streak was, of course, 2001, with 62 expected wins (identical to actual wins). Behind that, you get last year’s team at 67 ExW, ‘94 at an abbreviated 65 win clip, and then every other team between 70 and 80. Right now, this team is expected to win 66 games; but that number is inflated by their pretty good April, May, and June, during which they racked up 36 wins (3-4 below ExW). Since then, they have played at a .316 pace, with an expected pace of .325. Over a 162 game season, that’s 53 wins. For the whole of this season, they will more likely win 63 than 66.

This is hardly surprising, since during that time they’ve had only 1 position player who is a no-doubt starter for every ML team (setting aside position), plus 2 starting pitchers who could start for any ML team. Now, I agree that there’s some talent on the field right now, and that the talent is on an upswing, but in terms of actual product? They’re terrible.

Last time I made this point, about a month ago, Charlie and WTM and others jumped on me about small sample size and all sorts of other things that seamheads like to say when the stats don’t show what they’d like. But here we are a month later, and the trend is exactly the same as it was then. Since July 1, over any significant sampling of games, this team has played in the .300s (if you cherry pick their peak, right after the late August winning streak, they had played .420 ball since July 1; 2 days before and 2 days later, they were back under .400).

I’m on board with NH’s plan, so this doesn’t faze me (too much). But I’m baffled as to why Charlie keeps insisting that we’re not seeing what’s right on front of our faces.

• Interestingly, the Pirates have underperformed their ExW almost every single season of the streak – except during the Leyland years, in which they generally overperformed, they’ve never exceeded ExW by more than a game, while they’ve often underperformed by 3-4 games.