The Pirates are always bad, but not as bad as this
Revisiting the 4 most important questions from the start of the season and... it ain't pretty
Finishing this as the Pirates are actually ahead 4-1 on Friday, but that doesn’t really change anything…
When it’s 9:38 p.m. on a Wednesday five months into a still-raging pandemic and you’re parked in front of a laptop watching the Pirates about to fall to 4-16 in their most lifeless effort of this cursed season and JT Riddle of all people steps to the plate for reasons unknown to any human, the Pirates are losing 6-0 in the bottom of the 8th, haven’t put a runner past first base yet and it’s easy to examine your life choices and get all David Byrne and think to yourself… my god. What have I done?
That’s basically what it’s like to be a Pirates fan always, but particularly during this cursed/fake season. Coming into the weekend the Pirates were 4-17 and that is an honest reflection of their talent and quality of play. There have been a handful of games within those 17 losses where you can say, “Man, they really should have won that game,” but you cannot have a reasonable expectation that they actually should have won any of those winnable games because at no point this season have they shown the ability to execute like a winning team. It’s embarrassing but it’s also gotten to the point where it’s funny and morbidly fascinating.
Like on Thursday night, down 1-0 with runners on the corners and nobody out, did anybody expect the Pirates to tie it up? Of course not, we know better. Would Josh Bell throw wide of the plate on a routine force play at home to allow a run to score? Of course he would. This is a terrible team that is barely even trying to win games and we are all worse off watching them.
Now that the mercifully abbreviated season is a third over, why don’t we check in with the main questions I said were worth tracking in the inaugural newsletter. As a refresher, those questions were:
Is Mitch Keller any good or not?
Well he pitched like Tim Alderson for a couple of starts and then got hurt. An outright disaster except for the fact that his injury wasn’t an arm injury, although that would have at least explained his putrid results.
Is Bryan Reynolds a cornerstone piece or just a nice enough 280/340/460 corner outfielder?
Imagine how happy we’d be if Bryan Reynolds was hitting anything close to 280/340/460 right now. He was at 174/278/290 after Thursday and the advanced stats are only slightly more optimistic.
His at bats aren’t disasters in the way that, say, Gregory Polanco’s are (the Hindenburg of Pirates at bats this year). Reynolds’ approach is still disciplined, but he’s striking out at an alarming rate. His throws from the outfield have been one of the only good things about watching games this season. He still somewhat resembles the solid starter from last season, but he sure doesn’t look anything like a budding superstar.
Is there anybody else on this roster who could be an above-average player at his position?
Hmm, that’s going to be a not even ] close from me. And there’s a typo in that above tweet, Frazier is actually in the 30s. This fact is worth repeating in bold, caps and italics: THE PIRATES DO NOT HAVE A SINGLE ABOVE-AVERAGE PLAYER ON THEIR ENTIRE OFFENSE.
How is Derek Shelton as a manager?
I say this with the full understanding that he has nothing to work with and that he was clearly given a mandate at the beginning of the season that was something like “winning games is not the priority”: it sure looks like he sucks.
One the one hand it feels somewhat contradictory to call this season a farce (which it assuredly is) while also drawing the absolute worst conclusions from what we’ve seen so far. Except it’s not like any of this is completely unexpected. This newsletter was started because it seemed like a chance to document what had a chance to be a historically irrelevant season. It’s gotten to the point where the Pirates can lose on a completely blown home run call in extra innings and the most we can muster is a shrug.
We’re all sick of Adam Frazier but it’s only partly his fault
Adam Frazier, while being absolute garbage this year, is not a bad player. He’s what some people might call a professional hitter with a little bit of pop and a little bit of speed (who doesn’t know how to steal a base) and somehow fooled people into thinking he was a Gold Glove finalist at second base last year. He’s no star, but if you’re putting together a 25-man roster, he’s not a bad guy to have around.
But if you’re the Pirates, and you have trouble developing any high-end offensive talent, he becomes your leadoff hitter and someone t̶h̶e̶ ̶g̶e̶n̶e̶r̶a̶l̶ ̶m̶a̶n̶a̶g̶e̶r̶ David Freese (thank you @gone_postin) goes on the record saying he might win a batting title someday. (Frazier is 28 and a career .274 hitter in 1661 at bats; maybe he could win a batting title in my 30+ league when he’s eligible in a couple of years.) Like the majority of their minor leaguers, Frazier was developed as something of a super-utility guy and on any serious team that’s how he would’ve stayed, giving you maybe 3-4 starts a week rotating between 2B and the outfield corners, valuable in a pre-DH National League in double switches and as a pinch-hitter. A winning team would use him the way he should be used, saving him from overexposure. As a second-year arb player in 2021 he might be too expensive for whatever the Pirates are trying to do; a smart club could pick him up cheap and find themselves a useful piece.
We’re all sick of Dovydas Neverauskas and that’s everybody’s fault
If Adam Frazier is a decent player forced to masquerade as a very good player because he’s on a team lacking talent, Neverauskas is a very bad player forced to masquerade as a major league player because he’s on a team lacking talent.
Four straight years we’ve been through this shit with Neverauskas. When he came into a 0-0 game on Wednesday there was not a Pirates fan alive who thought that game would be 0-0 for long.
After Neverauskas gave up his inevitable three-run home run to Carlos Santana, Bob Walk delivered a clear subtweet of Dovy the next inning when Geoff Hartlieb took the mound the following inning and said he was a “very usable” guy out of the bullpen. We know exactly what you are saying, Bob.