I know that I occasionally lean on the "this is my life as an out-of-Pittsburgh Pirate fan in 2012" anecdotes a little heavily, but I'm kicking this recap off with one tonight. Despite my Debbie Downer routine earlier this week, I was pretty legitimately excited about the biggest Pirate game of 2012 being televised on ESPN. There wasn't any particular reason for it; I have MLB.tv and a Roku box and a nice computer screen and so I watch almost every Pirate game. I just liked the idea of the ESPN broadcast as validation that things are different with Pirate baseball this year. 

And so of course my work in lab this afternoon piled up and things didn't go quite like I expected them to (I'm going to be back in Pittsburgh for a long weekend over the holiday, so I have quite a few things on my to-do list in lab this week) and I found myself going back into lab as the first pitch was being thrown. Finishing up in lab and running a couple of quick errands left me in the car with Garrett Jones at the plate and Travis Snider on third base in the third inning. Greg Brown and Steve Blass wondered if Joe Kelly was going to pitch to Jones or Pedro Alvarez in that situation. I thought it seemed like a funny question with the havoc that Alvarez has wreaked on the Cardinals this year, but the Cardinals pretty quickly started working around Jones. Kelly got ahead of Alvarez on the first pitch, but then the count swung back in Pedro's favor. 1-1, 2-1, 3-1. I pulled into my driveway just as ball three crossed the plate, and knowing that the delay on the phone app meant that whatever I was hearing was probably a minute in the past already, I knew that I had to stay in the car for the rest of the at-bat. There was just a split second between when Brown announced that Kelly was delivering his 3-1 pitch and his home run call, but in that split second I heard both the crack of the bat and the crowd roar. I knew what was coming next before the home run call even started. It was an incredible rush. 

I've felt for a long time that Pirate fans give Pedro Alvarez a pretty hard time based on all of the drama that surrounded his contract signing and that I'm not entirely certain it's deserved. When I was at spring training in 2010, I remember watching Pedro struggle in a game in Bradenton, getting in the car with my family, driving back to Fort Myers (over an hour) and realizing while I was working on my recap post for the day that Pedro was still in the cages at McKechnie taking batting practice with Clint Hurdle. What's always struck me about Alvarez is that it always seems like he takes every single out that he makes hard. That means that it seems like he beats himself up when he makes an out whether it's in the first inning of a 0-0 game or the ninth inning with the tying run on base; whether he's gone 4-for-4 and he strikes out in his fifth at-bat or he's caught in an 0-for-12 slump. Alvarez wants to be the guy that comes through for the Pirates, but to this point in his career he's had trouble hitting his stride. It always seems to me like he takes that way harder than any Pirate fan ever could. 

That means that I'm not sure I ever remember being happier for an athlete over a performance than I am for Pedro Alvarez right now. With their loss on Monday, the Pirates were backed up to the wall and playing bad baseball and facing what was, for all intents and purposes, elimination from the playoff race. James McDonald and Wandy Rodriguez responded with two huge starts that kept the Cardinals off of the scoreboard for two straight nights, but it was Alvarez's bat that lead the 14-run barrage over those two nights. Since 2008 everyone has been waiting for Alvarez to become The Man; Pirate fans and the Pirates and Alvarez himself all put huge expectations on #24, and it creates a pretty harsh feedback loop when he's not succeeding. With the 2012 season on the line, though, it was Alvarez that delivered. His performance last night was what kept my in the car listening to my phone this evening and his subseqent homer is what really re-ignited the 2012 Pirates' playoff chances, as far as I'm concerned. There's a lot of season left and a lot of evaluating to be done with Alvarez when we get to that point, but when I think back to August 15, 2008, and the way that Pirate fans sat hunched over their computer waiting for news of Alvarez's signing and rejoicing when word came that he'd signed, I'm pretty sure that his performance in these two games is exactly what we were all envisioning that night. 

And for a second night in a row I feel like I'm making a big deal out of Alvarez when there's a whole team that needs discussed. Wandy Rodriguez's Pirate career got off to a tough start, but he gutted out six shutout innings tonight to help Alvarez's homer stand out as a key moment. Rodriguez hasn't been great as a Pirate, but his two best moments (this start and his two inning relief stint to close out the 19-inning game) have been absolutely huge performances when the Pirates need him. Hopefully a start like this will help him settle in as a Pirate and we'll see more of this Wandy as September starts.

On Monday night, the Pirates were three games out of a playoff spot, needing two big performances against the Cardinals to keep their playoff hopes alive. They responded with two wins by a combined total of 14-0. There's a lot of important baseball left to be played in 2012, and now we can be sure that some of it will involve the Pittsburgh Pirates. 

After yesterday's Most Important Game of the Year, the Pirates are playing today's Most Important Game of the Year on ESPN (at least, for those of us not in Pittsburgh; I believe you still have the game on ROOT if you're back on the home front) as they wrap up their season set with the Cardinals. As the McEffect points out this afternoon, this game has implications beyond the Pirates either being one or three games back of the Cardinals with the playoff race; it decides the season series with the Cards (the Pirates and Cardinals are 7-7 against each other this year) and that will play a role tiebreaker seeding, should the two teams end the season with the same record as part of two or three-way tie for a wild card spot. Bottom line: this game is important for a bunch of reasons. 

That means that it'd be a good time for Wandy Rodriguez to step up with his first good start as a Pirate. Of course, if the Pirate offense shows up like it did last night, maybe it won't matter how good Wandy is. Last night's 9-0 win was cathartic; another drubbing of the Cardinals this evening on national TV would be downright hope-inspiring. 

First pitch tonight is at 7:05. Joe Kelly, who is the guy that dominated the Pirates in long relief during the 19-inning marathon, is Wandy's mound opponent. 

Pedro Alvarez had 11 total bases last night. Just how many total bases is 11 total bases? Pedro Alvarez entered last night with 116 games and 448 plate appearances under his belt. He was hitting .240/.321/.462. After last night, Alvarez's season line bumped up to .247/.327/.484. That's an OPS jump from .783 to .811 after 116 games. 

The .800 OPS point is an arbitrary distinction, but it's interesting to me to that a look at Alvarez's gamelogs shows that his OPS hasn't been over .800 since May 9th. In fact, Alvarez has taken some flack for not tearing the cover off of the ball in August (not pointing fingers because I've done it a couple of times), when really, he was having a pretty solid month before last night's explosion. Despite the still-high strikeout total (31 in 89 PAs), he hit .257/.382/.378 in August's first 21 games. That's on the strength of 15 walks in that span and while it's fair to note that he only had five extra base hits (three doubles, two homers), being able to take a walk is a huge thing for a power hitter. Pedro's power outage has been obvious because it's coincided McCutchen's slump and with the team losing a bunch of games, but what he's done in August is much, much better than the Pedro Alvarez slumps that we've seen in the past. 

Of course, Alvarez's biggest utility to the Pirates will always be his power. We saw it last night and we've seen it a few other times this year (Cleveland jumps right to mind); when he catches fire there's no pitch that he can't hit out of the ballpark. I don't know exactly where the "El Toro" nickname came from, but man, you can see it on nights like last night. Once he gets a head of steam going there's just no stopping him in the batter's box. Still, I've been saying all year that it's almost as important for him to find a way to be better when he's not on fire as it is for him to find a way to be on fire more often. He's still got a ways to go (his strikeout rate for 2012 is still an obscene 32%), but there are plenty of places to find progress for Pedro inside of this 2012 season.

Every baseball game -- every single win and loss -- is made up of a million tiny moving parts that are inextricable from each other. Some of these parts stand out, some of them fade into the background. As a season wears on, wins and losses do the same thing. Who remembers Erik Bedard beating Luke Hochevar back in June? Who remembers Homer Bailey and the Reds whacking the Pirates 8-1 in Charlie Morton's last start of the season? I don't, and I don't think that I'm alone in that. 

I don't know that a lot of people will remember this Pirate win for anything more than another game in August when this is all said and done; it's possible that the Pirates make the playoffs and we all think of this game as the game where they finally woke up and lurched forward after three weeks of slumber. Even if that happens, though, it's most likely that this game will just be one win of eightysome wins for the Pirates. If they do go on to make a playoff run, there are more memorable wins waiting somewhere ahead of us. If they don't, this is just another win in a bad August that didn't have quite enough of them. All of the stuff from this game that feels so memorable and important in this very moment -- the great start by James McDonald just as you were ready to give up on him and just as the Pirates needed it most, Josh Harrison's huge collision with Yadier Molina, Pedro Alvarez's diving stop at third base and the ridiculous night that he had at the plate -- will fade, replaced with something that's either better or incredibly frustrating.

I'm not writing any of this to be a downer, or to sell the Pirates' win tonight short. This is a huge win for the Pirates; it ensures they won't end this series five games back and it gives them a chance to get to within a game of the Cardinals for the last wild card spot with nine games against the Brewers and Astros and Cubs waiting in the wings. This win is as big as August wins come, really. That's the nature of baseball, though; this win is as big as August wins come, except that someone will win the Pirates/Cardinals game tomorrow and either the Pirates will be hot on the Cardinals' heels or the Cardinals will have a three-game cushion on the Bucs. With 33 games left on the schedule, a two-game swing is a huge swing and so while it's a true statement that today's win is as big as August wins come, it's also true that tomorrow's win will be even bigger for either the Pirates or the Cardinals. 

The reason that I mention all of these things is because it's truly special when something happens inside of a baseball game that you instantly know will stay burned in your memory for a long time. It's even more special when that moment isn't something like a walkoff hit or the out that clinches a playoff spot or a pennant or a no-hitter. In the third inning tonight, the Pirates were nursing their 1-0 lead while a bunch of people were fighting on Twitter about Josh Harrison's collision with Yadier Molina. Was it a clean play at the plate or was it dirty? Are collisions like that part of baseball or are they avoidable? Things were getting pretty heated (and I say this with the full knowledge that I was in the middle of the heat, not really doing a whole lot to help it dissipate; these things happen sometimes). Almost a full inning after the collision, Pedro Alvarez stepped up to the plate with Andrew McCutchen on second base and two outs. He took ball one, then Jake Westbrook threw a good 1-0 sinker that started in on Pedro's hands and dropped down so that the ball crossed the plate pretty much smack in the middle of the lower-left square in the traditional nine-square strike zone map. It was a pitch that Pedro Alvarez will occasionally get the meat of the bat on and send towards the grandstand in right, but the way that the pitch started in on his hands and stayed on the inside part of the plate made it look like the sort of pitch that Pedro either yanks way foul down the first base line or swings way over. Instead he squared up and got the bat head out just a little bit and hammered a line drive that looked like nothing if not an iron shot with a golf club.

When you watch the replay for the tenth time, you realize that the ball had so much slice on it that the cameraman behind home plate couldn't even follow it; he's got the camera centered on Jon Jay and the bullpen  and the ball lands probably 30 feet more towards left-center, directly over the notch. When you're watching it live, though, you're not noticing those sorts of things at all and thoughts are rushing towards you one at a time. "Is that over the Notch? Pedro? What was that swing? How did he DO that?" You think about all of the balls that you've seen right-handed hitters CRUSH into left center that have died in Andrew McCutchen's glove before even making it to the warning track in front of the 410 sign. You think of all of the balls that right-handed hitters have crushed that have rattled around in the Notch itself. You realize that you really can't think of many balls at all that have taken on that 410 sign in the Notch directly and won the battle. In your mind you turn over the incredible combination of strength and bat speed and coordination and raw power that it takes to make that swing and to hit that specific pitch in that specific spot that far in that direction and you know that inside of this very moment that this Pedro Alvarez is the Pedro Alvarez that you'd hoped for on draft day in 2008. Now that you've been thinking about it for a few seconds, the context of this specific game multiplied with Pedro's August power outage dawns on you and the impressiveness of the home run grows even more. Now one part of your brain is telling you that this is the sort of thing you've been waiting for all month -- an Andrew McCutchen double followed by a Pedro Alvarez homer -- and despite all of that the other part of your brain is still screaming, "DID YOU SEE WHERE THAT BALL WAS PITCHED? DID YOU SEE WHERE IT WENT? HOW DID HE DO THAT?"

And suddenly you realize that no Pirate fan anywhere is concerned about whether Josh Harrison laid out Yady Molina intentionally and that no one watching this game is wasting any breath on futile discussions about home plate collisions in baseball because no one has any breath left after that swing. That you have no idea right now how you're going to remember these 2012 Pittsburgh Pirates or Pedro Alvarez when you think back on the baseball teams you watched during the time in your life that you lived in North Carolina in ten or twenty or thirty years. That the details of this baseball game will be lost to the folds of your memory in much less time than you're willing to admit to yourself. But you also know that you're going to remember that swing and that for now, that's enough. 

By virtue of playing good baseball earlier in the 2012 season, the Pirates have been lucky enough to play a bunch of Important Baseball Games over the course of the last month. The Pirates have lost most of these Important Baseball Games. If they can't stop doing that, they won't get very many more Important Baseball Games. In fact, tonight is pretty much the dividing line. It's been fun and it's been nice, but if the Pirates can't scrape a win against the Cardinals tonight their playoff hopes are going to be on some pretty serious life-support. 

I suppose it's fitting then that James McDonald takes the mound for this game. His first-half breakthrough was a big reason why the Pirates got as far as they did in the playoff race and his second half breakdown is a big reason why they're falling out of it. There's been a lot of focus on the bullpen and on the trades made in August lately, but the reality is that the Pirates' key performers have not been good of late and it's really hard for a baseball team to win games when that happens. McDonald pitched a nice game in St. Louis a week and a half ago and his Jekyll-and-Hyde second half has had an every-other-start flavor to it; let's hope the good J-Mac shows up at PNC Park tonight, let's hope that those Andrew McCutchen line drives from last night find some more gaps, and let's hope that this crazy thing continues for one more day. 

McDonald goes up against Jake Westbrook. First pitch tonight is at 7:05. 

Just as I was going to bed last night, word broke that the Pirates were releasing Erik Bedard. This morning, the team's confirmed Dejan Kovacevic's report; the lefty's short Pirate tenure is over. Pretty much any way you slice it, this is a move that had to happen. Bedard hasn't been very good in 2012. His 5.01 ERA is higher than his 4.07/4.05 FIP/xFIP, but I think that's a little misleading. His line drive rate was up quite a bit this year and his HR/FB rate was creeping up, too, despite making half of his starts at PNC Park, which is generally friendly to left handed pitchers and their home run rates. He was getting hit hard most of the time, especially recently. Since his back problems, his ERA was 5.96. Since the All-Star break it's 5.49. He failed to get out of the fifth in his last two starts. I could keep going on, but that'd be piling on. Bedard was a risk for the Pirates pre-season, but he was a good risk. He started off the season strongly, he faltered, and there didn't seem to be much the Pirates could do. It's hard to argue this decision; I think everyone involved probably wishes it would've worked out better, but here we are. 

The more interesting question now is what the Pirates do to replace Bedard in the rotation. It's tempting to say something like, "The Pirates can't waste time with someone like Kevin Correia now; they need to do something bold." This isn't an untrue statement, but the reality is that the time do something bold was a month ago. The Pirates got halfway there at the trade deadline; they revamped two-thirds of the outfield and they turned over a key utility spot and they added a starting pitcher. They didn't go far enough, though; they left Bedard in the rotation thinking that he could rebound, they stuck with Kevin Correia as their sixth starter when they needed an extra guy in the rotation, and they completely failed to address the hole that trading Brad Lincoln left in the bullpen even though they (in theory at least) have the arms to do it at Triple-A. I don't know if doing any of those things would have prevented the fall that this Pirate team is experiencing right now, but the holes that went unaddressed (and that could've been tackled without additional trades) seem pretty glaring in hindsight.

What's particularly frustrating to me is the timing here; Bedard started on Sunday and the Pirates have an off-day on Thursday. That means that he wouldn't be asked to start again until September 1st. That means that whoever they call up, they could call up without having to release Bedard and lose his playoff eligibility. That means, basically, that the Pirates have recognized that there's a problem and that things need to be shaken up ASAP; it's just that the problem has been apparent for two weeks and they waited until they were three games out of a playoff spot with 34 games left. 

All of that being said, we're well past the point that plugging Kevin Correia into the rotation has any useful functionality. The Pirates are fading in the playoff race and Correia's a treading-water kind of guy; innings given to him are wasted right now because there's no real chance of him coming in and winning a game by himself and starting him tells us absolutely nothing about 2013 because Correia's a free agent that won't be back next year. The Pirates need to put Jeff Locke or Chris Leroux or Kyle McPherson into the rotation not just because their ceiling is higher than Correia's, but because they need to know if Leroux can acquit himself as a starter at the big league level and if Locke's minor league strides will translate to more Major League success and just how far along McPherson is. 

The bottom line is that the if the Pirates are going down in this playoff race (and it looks like they are), then they should at least go out with guns blazing. Bring up Leroux. Bring up Locke. Bring up Morris. There's nothing left to lose in 2012. 

If you really want to get down to brass tacks, this whole game turned on one play. After the Pirates took a 2-0 lead in the bottom of the fourth inning, Yadier Molina lead off the fifth wiht a single. Skip Schumaker followed that up with a ball hit to left-center that seemed to hang up in the air for forever. It looked like Jose Tabata was going to be able to make a play on it, but he couldn't get to it in time. Andrew McCutchen came in from center to cut the play off and had to kind of re-route himself around Tabata, who kept running out to the fence. McCutchen appeared to twist his ankle in the grass, and Molina scored all the way from first. Watching the replay again now, I'm just not sure how Tabata didn't get to that ball; he had plenty of time and it even seemed like he had a good line on it. He just didn't get there. As a result, the Pirates needed a perfect McCutchen-to-Harrison-to-Barajas relay line to keep the game tied in the fifth and the Cardinals tacked two on in the sixth to take a lead they wouldn't give up. 

For most of the night the Pirates seemed to hit the ball pretty hard off of Kyle Lohse. Andrew McCutchen hit a few balls right on the nose but only had one hit to show for it and in the Pirates' two-run fourth it seemed like every hit the Pirates had that inning was a screaming line drive that was directed right at someone to limit it for a single. Instead of a string of extra base hits to break the game open, the Pirates only came out of it with two runs and that wasn't nearly enough.

This kind of loss illustrates what was so bad about the Pirates playing terribly in most of the month leading up to this series; if you go take the field and put together a relatively solid effort against a good baseball team, maybe you're lucky to win half of those games. Suddenly the Pirates are in a position where that's probably not going to cut it; had they split with the Dodgers and taken a game or two from the Padres and actually showed up for the Brewers series over the weekend, this is the sort of game that a team could lose and you'd be able to say to yourself, "Well, that was frustrating but it wasn't so bad; on a different night those hits fall in and the Bucs win this game 6-4. Even the series up tomorrow." That's not really an option for this team, though. They had a lead and they couldn't hold on to it and now they're three games out of a playoff spot. That's bad news.

For almost a month now, I've been saying things like, "The Pirates aren't quite collapsing yet, but they have to start playing better soon if they want to avoid a full-on collapse." Or, "Well, it's not quite time to panic but the Pirates are at some point going to have to stop playing bad baseball."

We've reached "some point," folks. The Pirates are two games behind the Cardinals with the Red Birds in town for a three-game set today. The distinct possibility now exists that the Pirates will end this series without a playoff spot really even being within shouting distance given the number of games left in the season.  The Pirates absolutely have to avoid being swept, they really need to win two of these three, and really, it'd be best for them if they just won all three games and got themselves back into a playoff position as September ended. 

Which is to say that if this baseball team has anything left in it, now is the time to show it. If Andrew McCutchen's going to surge down the stretch, it has to start today. If AJ Burnett has a second wind in his bounceback season, we've got to see it tonight. Same goes for Pedro Alvarez and Neil Walker, James McDonald, and the rest of the group. Tonight is the night that it has to turn around. Friday might be too late.

Burnett and Kyle Lohse take the mound tonight at 7:05.  

It shouldn't surprise you that the Pittsburgh Pirates' Second Annual Playoff Collapse is wearing me out; last year's collapse nearly killed this blog over the course of the winter and this year's team is better, with more wins, more talent, and a stronger playoff position to piss away. That makes the unraveling that much more exasperating to me. 

Here's what I've been dreading all weekend, and thus the reason that I just didn't write and mostly ignored the Pirates: after almost a full season of being a real baseball fan, it's time to go back to being a Pirate fan. That means that games can't be watched just for their individual value and the drama that they create inside of the playoff race; everything that's done now has to be done with an eye towards the future. What made this Pirate team good enough to stay in contention for most of the season? What can be counted on to happen again in 2013? What can't be counted on? What holes does this team have that truly need filled next year? Can they be filled? 

It's not that the Pirates are out of playoff contention right now, just that they probably will be soon and now that that's happening, it's time to move our sights from the present off to some distant, murky, uncertain future yet again. Just thinking about having to do this again makes me tired.