The Pittsburgh Pirates: A Tragic Coincidence

Jack Merlino 

 

This week, Major League Baseball wrapped up its 2015 season. Tuesday will feature the AL Wild Card game, and Wednesday will feature the NL's counterpart. For many teams, this result is about as good as they could've hoped for. The Cubs, who clinched a spot in the NL game, weren't even expected to contend for another season. Same goes for the Astros and Twins, who until the final few games were sandwiched around the underperforming Angels in the fight for the final AL wild-card spot. However, for the Pittsburgh Pirates, who finished with the 2nd-best record in the MLB, this will be the third time in the three years that the WC game has existed that they will find their season coming down to a single game.


Now, to clear this up for any Bucs fans who are reading this: this article is not going to be an argument for realignment or doing away with the divisional structuring. If anything, it's leaning against that solution. It's simply laying everything out on the table from an objective viewpoint.

Just as the title of the article says, the Pirates' situation is just a tragic coincidence.  To explain why realignment for the sake of spreading three teams out across the league is simply shortsighted, imagine, if you will, that the Philadelphia Phillies had a semblance of competition for the NL East title from 2009-2011. The Braves were a wild-card team for a few of those years, and let's imagine the Mets didn't pull off the lethal combination of under-performing and having key players hurt themselves every other inning. Well, that's three decent teams all confined to one spot. Say you switch things up around 2010 or 2011. You'd be here, four years later, watching the Phillies come away with the worst record in baseball. In four years, they went from first to worst. That wouldn't change how the divisions were realigned to mediate the amount of talent in different divisions.

In the real timeline, since the Pirates didn't pull off the improbable comeback that it would've taken to win the division, they now need to turn their attention to Chicago. First, and this should already be widely understood, the Pirates would be in 1st place if they were in any other division. Not just because of record, but because they are top-to-bottom one of the best teams in the game. They have an excellent pitching staff, a lineup full of power, speed, and average, and players who feed off of one another (in the positive sense; Jonathan Papelbon on the other hand feeds off of his teammates' despair and missed opportunities). But again, they aren't in a different division. They're in the NL Central, and that division happens to contain the St. Louis Cardinals, who finished as the MLB's only 100-game winner this season. And things only going to get worse for Pittsburgh.

It was always going to be tough to take the division crown away from the Cards, and there's no shame in coming short there. After all, St. Louis seems to churn out a new budding star every other month. They're the one team better than Pittsburgh at wringing out another good year out of veterans and players who haven't performed well for the majority of their careers.

This is key, because neither team is considered a 'large market', in terms of team salaries. While both organizations have shown a recent willingness to lock up players to long-term, expensive deals, neither will ever be on par with the Yankees or Dodgers in terms of budget. That's where it comes down to who has the more fruitful farm system and knack for successful low-risk, high-reward signings. So far, advantage: Cardinals.

Another issue looming on the horizon for Pittsburgh stems from the majority of its key players ascending to the big leagues at the same time. Neil Walker, Andrew McCutchen, and Pedro Alvarez all debuted in the late-2000s, and others such as Gerrit Cole, Starling Marte, and Gregory Polanco joined the team more recently. That's still a window of about six or seven years where the majority of their impact players are beginning their financial clocks. That means that in a few years from now, Pittsburgh is going to find itself with multiple key players leaving for free agency at a time.

It's already easy to predict who Pittsburgh will go all-out to retain; Andrew McCutchen should be in black and yellow for his entire career, and if Neil Huntington can convince the ownership to pony up the big bucks, he should be able to keep Gerrit Cole, who would be an invaluable combination of ace talent and veteran leadership for the triage of pitching prospects that the Pirates will be unveiling in the next few years or so. But everyone else? It can't be stressed enough that Pittsburgh doesn't have the resources to bring its players back like other teams can. That'll add extra pressure to their farm system, particularly the top names like Tyler Glasnow, Josh Bell, and Austin Meadows, to perform at a high level almost immediately.

And coming up from behind with the subtlety of a freight train is a third team that nobody imagined they'd be thinking about for another year or so: the Chicago Cubs. Chicago could be blown out on Wednesday by the Pirates and this season should still be considered a staggering success. It's unprecedented to see so many high-ceiling prospects all click both overall and so immediately. They also happen to have a few more still in the minors, all waiting, and all with the same sexy potential. Whether that equals more home-grown talent or a package to trade for an already-successful major leaguer remains to be seen.

If the Pirates are the 2nd-best team in baseball, the Cubs are the 3rd-best, at least in terms of record. This is an infantile squad that hasn't experienced the intensity of a playoff game or series yet. Next year, though? They won't be infants, and obviously they'll have experienced the playoff atmosphere. This collection of young studs is mediated by veterans in the primes of their careers in Jon Lester, Anthony Rizzo, and Jake Arrieta, who alone could lead Chicago to a deep postseason run.

If that doesn't have warning bells sounding off in the minds of Pirates fans, nothing will. Pittsburgh is elite right now; no team comes to PNC Park and logically deduces that they have a favorable matchup for that day. But again, Pittsburgh is in the NL Central. And the NL Central has the two other best teams in the sport.



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