The Pirates’ Strong Finish Encouraging If Not Worth Celebrating
The season destined to end on Sunday wasn’t a 100-loss debacle. They’ll have to aim higher moving forward, but they’ve at least taken baby steps over a low bar and in the right direction for a change.
The season’s final week, presumably, brought with it a sense of relief on some levels as well as a hint as to where the Pirates might eventually be headed.
The final road series of an odyssey that started back on March 31 in Cincinnati opened with the Pirates losing to the Phillies, 3-2, in 10 innings, on Tuesday night in Philadelphia.
The Phillies, a World Series participant last season, improved to 88-69 and clinched a wild-card invitation to the postseason.
Mitch Keller got a no-decision and the Pirates fell to 74-83.
Better but not good enough for Keller and the Bucs.
And yet, encouraging for both.
Assuming Keller doesn’t start the regular-season finale on Sunday against the Marlins, he’ll shut it down having allowed three earned runs or fewer in 21 of his 32 starts and two or fewer in 19 of 32, and having set the franchise single-season record for strikeouts by a right-handed pitcher at 210.
The ERA was still unsightly at 4.21, but that can mostly be attributed to a handful of outliers (Keller gave up eight earned runs in a start three times and seven once).
For the most part, Keller was finally what the Pirates wanted him to be in 2023.
His 13 wins are one more than Keller managed in four Major League seasons from 2019 through 2022.
Better still, the Pirates went 17-15 in games in which they handed Keller the ball.
That didn’t prevent them from having another losing season, but for the first time in the four-season Derek Shelton/Ben Cherington era there’s tangible evidence confirming the Pirates’ manager/general manager tandem is capable of overseeing something other than an abject failure.
Where they can take it from here remains a compelling question, and finances, as always, will profoundly affect what happens next.
The payroll is the payroll.
But even with a payroll that presumably will once again be among the lowest in baseball next season, the Pirates will still be coming off of a season that revealed pieces to a winning puzzle, as opposed to a third consecutive one that resulted in 100 losses.
Yeah, that’s a low bar.
But it’s still progress.
Keller’s one of those pieces. So is Johan Oviedo, who started what wound up becoming another one-run loss to the Phillies on Wednesday night.
That’s two-fifths of a rotation moving forward.
And No. 1 pick Paul Skenes should make it three-fifths of a rotation next season.
That’s a lot to build upon.
So is whatever the Pirates had going for them that allowed them to go 33-30 from July 19 through the first two games of the final road series finally in Philly.
They were basically down to two legitimate starting pitchers through the bulk of that stretch.
And they had downsized again at the trade deadline.
But the second-half persistence of Ke’Bryan Hayes and Bryan Reynolds kept the Bucs from falling into the abyss they were staring at upon losing their first five games after resuming play following the All-Star break (they had lost 12 of 14 at that juncture, in the wake of having previously dropped 15 of 18).
This season could have easily degenerated into just another disaster, another signature Pirates’ tribute to incompetence and indifference, but it didn’t.
Jared Triolo, Ryan Borucki, David Bednar, Carmen Mlodzinski, Josh Palacios and Jack Suwinski, among others, had something to do with that, as well.
And Oneil Cruz figures to have a great deal to say about the direction in which the Bucs head from here.
That still isn’t reason enough to pop the corks on the champagne simply because they didn’t lose 90 games (former Bucco skipper Lloyd McClendon actually did that after an 89-loss campaign in 2002).
But … no matter how it plays out this weekend against the Marlins, they aren’t going to lose 90 games.
There ought to be some relief attached to at least to that much.
And, just maybe, some anticipation about what next season might bring for a change.
