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. 

The Pirates finally got back on track last night with their 4-0 win over the Brewers. The next step now is to actually stay on track. A win this afternoon wins them only their second series of August and it ensures that the Cardinals will be in town with no more than a one game wild card lead over the Bucs. That's obviously not an ideal situation, but it's also not a bad one. Of course, all of this relies on the Pirates winning a second game in a row. They've only won two in a row twice this month and they haven't beaten the same team two games in a row since the trade deadline (they beat the Cubs on August 31 and September 1). I guess we're shooting for baby steps here; win the game, win the series, worry about the Cardinals when it's time for the Cardinals. 

First pitch today is 1:35. Erik Bedard goes against Mark Rodgers 

The Pirates are playing bad baseball and losing a lot of games. Stop that, Pirates. 

Shaun Marcum returns from the DL tonight against Jeff Karstenst at 7:05. 

The Pirates were pretty busy for a Friday afternoon in August today; they sent Daniel McCutchen back down to Triple-A and brought Jordy Mercer back from paternity leave (this brings the roster back to 13 position players and 12 pitchers, which makes sense given that the Pirates were both off yesterday and will be off again next Thursday), they sent Yamaico Navarro down to Triple-A for Jeff Clement, and they claimed Hisanori Takahashi off of waivers. Clement will presumably be with the club in Pittsburgh tonight and they'll have to make another move when Takashi gets into town whenever that may be. 

There were a lot of Pirate fans clamoring for Clement to get called up, but my interest in him has waned quite a bit since the Pirate offense came to life in June. The reality is that Clement is 28 and he's not even matching his Triple-A numbers from 2003. It's a cool story that he's come back from so many injuries to have a big league career again, but I don't think he's any more likely to help the Pirate offense right now than Yamaico Navarro was. Takahashi, meanwhile, seems like a decent claim. He's a lefty, which the Pirates need in the bullpen if they're not planning on calling Justin Wilson up (which ... next topic), and he had a 4.1 K/BB ratio before being demoted by the Angels for his 4.93 ERA. At the very least, that K/BB ratio may indicate some hidden value, though he does tend to give up a bunch of homers and that makes him like the lefty the Pirates already have in the bullpen in Tony Watson. I don't know who the Pirates will remove for Takahashi, but I do know that if it's not Chad Qualls that I'll be pretty upset. 

The Pirates are back at PNC tonight to play the Brewers. Wandy Rodriguez looks to make his first good start as a Pirate. Mike Fiers goes for the Brewers. He's given up 12 runs in seven innings over his last two starts. First pitch is at 7:05. 

The Pirates are 7-13 in their last 20 games. Andrew McCutchen hit worse in those 20 games than Gaby Sanchez. The pitching staff is cracking at the seams, the bullpen is a smoking crater that the team refuses to acknowledge or fix, and the Pirates are out playoff position for the first time since June 27th, sitting a full game behind the Cardinals for the NL's final wild card spot. 

This is a crossroads. If the Pirates are a good baseball team, they really can't play much worse than they've been playing and they keep doing this for much longer. Despite their struggles over the last three weeks, the Pirates don't really need to be an exceptionally good baseball team from here on out to take a wild card spot; they just need to stop being a bad one. With 38 games left, the Pirates play the Brewers (57-66, 17-21 since the break) nine times, the Cubs seven (47-76, 14-24), the Astros six (39-86, 6-33), and the Mets (57-68, 11-28) four. That's 27 games against teams that are medicore, bad, or downright awful. If the Pirates just go 15-12 in those games, that puts us at 82 wins without even considering the six games against the Reds, three against the Cardinals, and three against the Braves. If the Pirates win five of those 12 games, that's 87 wins, which will at the very least keep them in the thick of the race for the last wild card spot right down until the last week and it could even be enough to sneak into the wild card play-in game if the Dodgers and Cardinals don't start playing better baseball. 

If we just look at the season from the viewpoint of the last three weeks, 20-18 seems like an incredibly tall task for this group of players. If we look at what the Pirates have accomplished over the course of 123 games, it seems much less improbable. That's the crossroads we're at: is this a good team in a slump, or a mediocre team that played way over its heads in June and July? Are the problems we've seen from James McDonald and AJ Burnett and Wandy Rodriguez of late mechanical things that can be fixed down the stretch or are they fatigue issues that won't go away as the season goes on? Can Andrew McCutchen pull himself back together and get hot to finish the season, or is he out of gas again? Seriously, what the hell is going on with the bullpen?

None of these questions have immediate answers. The team's poor play of late has certainly sewed enough doubt in my mind that it's hard to see this group of players getting back to the pre-All Star break hot streak that they were on. Even with lots of Cubs and Astros dotting the landscape ahead, it's really tough to envision this team reeling off an 8-2 streak to put some of these fears to bed. They don't really need that, though, to stay afloat. They just need to stop being awful and move back towards something resembling average. At the very least, that'll be a good start.

The Pirates have an off-day today for the first time since August 2nd. I had hoped that they would make it through this last 20-game stretch with a record of 12-8. Had they pulled that off, they'd have a commanding lead for the second wild card spot, and they'd be 2 1/2 games behind the Reds in the NL Central (I'm assuming that one of the five extra wins that I'm trying to find for them would have come against the Reds, so it'd be a six-game swing and not a five-game one). Instead, the Pirates went 7-13. This has not been as disastrous as it might seem; the Pirates only just now dropped out of the second wild card spot and they're still a half-game behind the Cardinals, who they play next week. 

The Pirates were shut down by an unimpressive rookie last night who was in the Frontier League in 2010. They need this off day. I kind of think us Pirate fans need it, too. Regroup, regroup, regroup. There's still baseball left to play.  

The Pirates and Padres will blessedly wrap up this accursed series this afternoon at 6:35 at Petco Park, which seems like a very strange time to play a getaway game for an East Coast team in San Diego, but then the Pirates actually have an off-day tomorrow so maybe it doesn't matter. 

The Padres are starting a young gentleman by the name of Andrew Werner tonight; he actually spent all of 2010 pitching in the independent Frontier League (think Washington Wild Things) before being signed by the Padres. He moved pretty quickly through their minor league system and is making his big league debut tonight. This is a great story, of course, even if Werner isn't a great prospect. He's only made five starts in Triple-A Tuscon this year and he's got a 5.79 ERA there. In Double-A he was only a little bit better over 18 starts.

Still, it looks like he keeps the ball on the ground and the Pirates will likely have almost no book on him at all since he's only got five starts above Double-A. Hopefully the Pirates won't have much trouble with Werner, but it sure seems possible to me that he keeps them guessing and they don't hit many balls hard, at least the first time through the lineup (you may recognize this line of reasoning: It's called, "Why I Thought Starting Kevin Correia on Monday Was Dumb"). 

The Pirates could really use a win here though (this is the case pretty much every night when you're in a playoff race!), and so an equal amount of pressure is on James McDonald tonight to make a second straight solid start. I've been pretty adamant in thinking that McDonald's problem was something tangible and fixable beyond fatigue. Even though I've had zero time to do the research to back that claim up, I will continue making it in hopes that it's true and that J-Mac's strong start in St. Louis is proof the Pirates have addressed it. If I'm wrong, well, Petco's a nice place to pitch when you're struggling. 

First pitch today is at 6:35. A win today makes the Pirates 8-12 over their last 20 days. I was hoping for 12-8, but given where things were a week ago, I'd happily settle for 8-12. 

After last night's bullpen debacle, Clint Hurdle talked to the press about his weird bullpen management (you can find some of the quotes on Bill Brink's twitter account and some in his game recap). They were mostly insane and infuriating; his reasoning for not using Joel Hanrahan with Chase Headley and Carlos Quentin due up in the tenth was, "then it's Daniel for the rest of the night" after that and that he figured McCutchen would be fine in the situation because "[he] went through one of those last year." That means that Hurdle's reasoning for using McCutchen ahead of Hanrahan is basically that he'd rather lose the game in the 10th than the 11th. 

That's not even what bugs me the most. What bugs me the most is what he said about Chad Qualls after Qualls was scored on for the third time in his last six outings. Brink's tweet is a bit garbled, but what it boils down to is Hurdle isn't worried because they like what they see from Qualls. They like what they see from a pitcher who's allowed seven runs (six earned) in 6 2/3 innings. Who has just three strikeouts in those innings. Who was dumped by the Phillies this year, despite having no bullpen to speak of in Philadelphia and who was dumped by the Yankees in exchange for a utility player without much utility. Who hasn't really pitched well since around the time Clint Hurdle was managing the National League All Star team. What is Hurdle seeing here? More importantly, who cares? It's not like Qualls has shown anything like the upside Jason Grilli showed late last year that obviously made someone think that he had utility as a high-leverage reliever. Qualls is getting a bunch of ground balls, but he's getting them at a rate higher than his career high in a tiny sample size and getting ground balls has never been a problem for him, even when he struggles. So what are the Pirates messing around with here? 

This is a larger problem than Chad Qualls, but he's kind of emblematic of the entire situation here and so I'm going to pick on him. When the Pirates swapped Casey McGehee for Chad Qualls right at the trade deadline, what I thought happened was that the Pirates acquired Gaby Sanchez and decided that they'd rather have Sanchez as the platoon first baseman than McGehee (despite all of the teeth-gnashing about Sanchez, he's been the better player of the two since the deadline and his OPS+ is better than McGehee's was as a Pirate, albeit in an awfully small sample). McGehee's the kind of guy that players really like, though, and it always behooves a team to treat popular, respected veterans well. That means that instead of designated McGehee for assignment and putting him on waivers and letting him dangle in the wind embarrassingly for three days or a week and risk getting claimed by a dumb team in a bad situation and playing out his string in Kansas City or wherever, the Pirates traded him to the Yankees. The Yankees have playing time for McGehee because Alex Rodriguez is hurt and they're a great team. McGehee can always tell his kids and grandkids that he was a Yankee now and he might even get a World Series ring out of the whole thing. Instead of getting the baseball equivalent of a de-pantsing (released for a .202 hitter), the Pirates let him save face. The players left behind, who seemed to like McGehee a lot, probably appreciated that and it was obvious that McGehee did in his post-trade interview. This is the sort of thing that goes almost completely unnoticed, but maybe helps down the road for a team like the Pirates that has a hard time convincing (useful) free agents to play for them. 

So the Pirates decided to send McGehee off to the Yankees and I just kind of assumed that the Yankees insisted on the Pirates taking Qualls back. Maybe the Yankees had the same motivation and maybe not (I tend to lean towards the latter because only teams like the Pirates have to care about this sort of image problem; the Yankees are always The Yankees), but I figured that at that point the key was that the Pirates didn't really owe Qualls anything; they could use him once or twice in blowouts and then dump him to make room for one of their more talented young relievers. I never thought they'd try to use Qualls to replace Brad Lincoln. Not with Bryan Morris and his 4.6 K/BB ratio and ability to throw multiple innings down in Indianapolis.

Here we are more than three weeks later, and not only is Qualls still on the team and pitching important innings, but now Daniel McCutchen is on the team and pitching important innings, too. Morris hasn't budged from Triple-A once and Justin Wilson (who probably represents the Pirates' best shot at a lefty-specialist for this playoff run) only came up to throw one inning on a day the bullpen was really stressed. 

I cannot for the life of my understand this and it's driving me crazy. When the Pirates make any move, the first question I ask myself is if I like the move. If the answer is yes, I ask myself why. If the answer is no, I try to figure out what the Pirates' motivation is. More often than not since Neal Huntington and his crew have taken over the Pirates, I can usually at least see some kind of logic behind what they do. I get why they signed Clint Barmes, even if I didn't like the move then and I like it even less now. Let's try to find the logic in this sequence: 

1. The Pirates played 19 innings on Sunday, with Kevin Correia (2 IP), Chris Resop (3 IP), Jared Hughes (2 IP), and Wandy Rodriguez (2 IP) throwing multiple innings in relief. Correia was throwing on what would've been normal rest for him as a starter (four days), leaving him probably available as a reliever the next day. Rodriguez was working on three days rest, ruling him out of his start on Monday. Resop and Hughes were presumably unavailable due to their heavy work over the weekend (3 IP is about Resop's max and Hughes also threw 2 1/3 on Saturday). Joel Hanrahan may have been ruled out for Monday's game because he warmed up in the ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth innings before pitching in the fourteenth on Sunday. Juan Cruz wasn't supposed to pitch on Sunday since he'd previously pitched two games in a row, so he was also presumably unavailable for Monday. That means after the 19-inning game, the Pirates had no starter for Monday and a bullpen with only Correia, Tony Watson, and Jason Grilli available. 
2. The Pirates designated Cruz for assignment, which was fine, and had an open roster spot for Jordy Mercer's paternity leave, which was a perfect place to stow an extra pitcher in a time of need. They called up Kyle McPherson, Indianapolis's scheduled starter for Monday, and Justin Wilson, who's been a starter all year and who is just now starting to be groomed to work in relief (the only logical reason for this is to help the Pirates down the stretch since the team insists they think Wilson is a starter). These moves make sense, especially if you assume that Correia is maybe available for an inning or two. You can use McPherson and Wilson to piggy-back into a start, have Correia available if things get ugly, and Watson and Grilli can still throw late innings. You could've probably mixed Joel Hanrahan in if things got dicey late with a lead. 
3. Everything makes sense to this point, but now we go off the rails. The Pirates decide to start Correia on Monday. This makes very little sense. Correia is not so overwhelmingly talented that he gives you a chance to start the game off with a few dominant innings before he tires. He's not a sinkerballer that could see a sharpened sinker with a tired arm. He's just a guy. In effect, the Pirates called up two minor league starters only to give 4 1/3 innings to an already-tired sixth starter. The only possible thought process that leads to this is that the person making the final decision (in this case, Clint Hurdle) has absolutely no trust in these young pitchers to start the game. The dissonance between the roster move (call up two minor league starters) and the decision to start Correia seems clear to me. 
4. Monday goes well enough, from a pitching standpoint. Correia pitches 4 1/3 innings, McPherson pitches 2, Wilson one, and they do a good enough job that the Pirates have a chance to win. Now Correia is clearly unavailable on Tuesday, and we can guess that both Hughes and Resop might be after their stressful weekends. That leaves a bullpen of McPherson, Wilson, Watson, Grilli, and Hanrahan. McPherson isn't really being thought of as a relief candidate for now, though, so it's just Wilson, Watson, Grilli, and Hanrahan on Tuesday and maybe we have some questions about Watson (he threw hard four days in a row at the end of last week to the point that he was entirely unavailable even in a marathon game on Sunday) and Hanrahan (long warm up on Sunday). Keeping the extra pitcher's spot on the roster seems like a good idea at this point. 
5. Chad Qualls is due to come off of the bereavement list at some point on Monday or Tuesday. I could be wrong about this, but since Jared Hughes was called up early from his demotion to replace Qualls, it's possible that he could be sent down with a different recall clock (that is, with his ten days dating back to his original demotion and not Tuesday the 21st) when Qualls came back. Instead, the Pirates sent McPherson down and they also sent Wilson back down to bring Daniel McCutchen up. Now Wilson and McPherson are both ineligible for a recall before August 31st and they threw three innings between them, in favor of starting a tired Kevin Correia. Then they were both sent back down for inferior pitchers that anyone can see are inferior. We're not talking about the Pirates giving Joel Hanrahan the ball in the ninth inning in the middle of a slump here; we're talking about Chad Qualls and Daniel McCutchen. Also, by sending Wilson back down, the Pirates also replaced and available arm with an available arm, which means that the Pirates were still running a short bullpen last night with Correia and Resop and Hughes all unavailable. 

In short, the Pirates called up two minor league starters to pitch three total innings of relief while Kevin Correia started on zero days of rest one day after a 19-inning game, then sent them both immediately away even though they barely pitched and the Pirates still needed fresh bullpen arms last night. This makes so little sense to me that it is literally hurting my head.

Couple this weird sequence with the team's refusal to bring up Bryan Morris, though, and I can at least gather a hypothesis: Clint Hurdle has told Neal Huntington he won't use rookies out of his bullpen in a pennant race unless he's absolutely forced to do it. Think about how late the decision to start Correia came on Monday; we knew Wilson and McPherson were called up early in the day and most websites actually listed Wilson as the starter before the early-evening announcement that Correia would start. You might gain some tactical advantage from not naming Wilson or McPherson as the starter early in the day since the Padres aren't likely to have extensive books on them, but not from Correia. What if the decision was made late to avoid interference from the front office? (Plausible non-conspiracy theory: the Pirates just wanted to know how Correia's arm felt.)

I hate to break out conspiracy theories here that point the finger at Hurdle and not Huntington since it's obvious that I agree with Huntington more than Hurdle most of the time so I'll say this: ultimately the way the bullpen is constructed falls on the general manager and Neal Huntington is not doing his job well right now. But seeing Morris stay down for so long and seeing the way that McPherson and Wilson were both handled this week is really eye-brow raising. Something is happening behind the scenes right now that we don't know about.  

Here is what I wrote when the Pirates called up Chad Qualls and Dan McCutchen this afternoon: 

I get not wanting to throw Morris or Wilson straight into the fire and risk having an untested rookie blow a lead, but keeping guys like Qualls and McCutchen around with Morris and Wilson in the minor leagues is borderline criminal. It will cost the Pirates games in the next two weeks. It makes no sense at all to me.

Chad Qualls entered in the eighth inning down by one run. He gave up a run. Garrett Jones's two-run homer in the ninth inning tied the game instead of putting the Pirates ahead. When the Pirates didn't score in the tenth inning, Clint Hurdle brought McCutchen in. He walked a batter and gave up an absolute bomb of a home run to Chase Headley. Joel Hanrahan sat in the bullpen unused. Jared Hughes? In the bullpen, unused. Chris Resop? In the bullpen, unused. Bryan Morris and Justin Wilson? Mystifyingly still in Triple-A. 

We can talk about how the offense didn't come through often enough tonight. We can talk about the brutal defense the Pirates played in the middle of this game. We can talk about how Hurdle once again had a too-slow hook with AJ Burnett and it caught up to him tonight. We can wonder why it's so hard for Hurdle to recognize that Jason Grilli strikes everyone out and so he should be your go-to guy with runners on base instead of guys like Tony Watson. 

The Pirates are in a playoff race. The general manager is not building the roster like a general manager in a playoff race. That's creating a gimped bullpen for a manager who's not using his bullpen like a manager in a playoff race. Nothing at all makes sense about the way the bullpen has been filled or used since Brad Lincoln was traded. I've said it over and over again: the Pirates have better options than what they currently have in their bullpen. They're choosing not to explore them for reasons that make no sense to anyone that's paying attention to this team. They're losing games because of it.