After yesterday's marathon game in St. Louis, it seemed logical that there were some roster moves coming today. With tonight's 10:05 first pitch approaching, we know what most of them are now, though everything's not perfectly clear. Via the team's Twitter account, we know that Kyle McPherson and Justin Wilson are in San Diego tonight and on the 25-man roster. They're taking the places of Jordy Mercer, who's gone on paternity leave, and Juan Cruz, who's been designated for assignment. There seems to be some surprise to see Cruz get dropped, but he's really been pretty bad since June started and he's looked flat out awful since coming back off of the DL. 

There's nothing about Chad Qualls' return from the bereavement list, so maybe that'll wait until tomorrow. Same goes for Travis Snider's groin. For now, though, Wilson and McPherson appear to be in Pittsburgh to give long relief to Kevin Correia, who's starting tonight despite throw two innings of relief last night. Hopefully this doesn't turn out to be a bad idea; both McPherson and Wilson could have the element of surprise on their hands and they have decent swing-and-miss stuff and could put together a strong spot start. Correia strikes me as the kind of guy that could be very ineffective on short rest. I suppose we'll see; hopefully Hurdle has his trio on a short leash all around tonight. 

First pitch tonight is at 10:05. Edinson Volquez goes for the Padres. This should be awfully interesting. 

This is Josh Harrison's leaping grab to make the second out in the bottom of the 19th inning yesterday. There are so many wonderful things about this that I barely even know where to begin. Let's just all sit back and bask in its glory.

Gif by Cork Gaines of Rays Index, passed along to me by @BuccoFan_4Life.

When/if the Pirates win their 82nd game/clinch a playoff spot, people are going to point to yesterday's game as a key turning point in the season; a game in which the Pirates fought back the tide and valiantly battled through 19 innings to win a key game against a team that they're fighting for a playoff spot. Yesterday's game was a great win, of course, but remembering it as a turning point would be short-sighted. If the Pirates go on to play good baseball from here, the turning point will have been last Thursday's win over the Dodgers; they needed a win badly and the Dodgers kept putting runs on the board, but the Pirates managed to win the game mostly on the bat of Garrett Jones.

After that game I got a request from a reader to talk more about Jones because he felt like the season Jones is having goes underappreciated. I know that that's true in my case; I harp a lot on Jones's failings as a baserunner and a fielder because they're glaring and impossible to miss. Jones's primary value to the Pirates is not as a fielder or a baserunner; it's as a guy that mashes baseballs. Jones has been very good at mashing baseballs this year. 

It's hard to think of a stranger career than Jones's right now. He moved slowly as a prospect; he was released by the Braves after three years and made some strides in the Twins' system, but still stagnated at Triple-A. He got to Rochester in 2005 and except for a brief cameo in Minneapolis in 2007, he stayed there until the Pirates called him up at mid-season 2009. He didn't stay at Triple-A because he was blocked by Justin Morneau; he was there because he just didn't hit well enough as a corner/DH guy to merit a call-up. He didn't really hit all that well in Indianapolis, either (.307/.348/.502) when you consider that he was 28 and starting his fifth Triple-A season. He should've been a Brad Eldred. 

Instead, he destroyed the ball with the Pirates in 2009, with 21 homers in 82 games. Of course, he wasn't quite that good. Most baseball players aren't, after all. He struggled as an every day player in 2010, putting up a 94 OPS+ in 158 games and struggling mightily against left-handed pitching. The Pirates bumped him back into something of a platoon last year and he responded with an uptick in his performance, but he was still pretty frustrating to watch most of the time and he was a very real candidate for a non-tender this winter. 

The Pirates offered Jones a contract, though, and he's rewarded them for it. He's hit 19 home runs in 106 games (two shy of his career high) to go with 21 doubes and somehow even three triples. His .536 slugging percentage isn't all that far off of the .567 he had in his crazy rookie season. His plate patience has disappeared entirely (.315 OBP to go with his .284 average), he still can't hit left-handed pitching (people seem to think he's doing OK against lefties this year, but his .564 OPS against lefties show this is a complete falsehood), and his defense at first base is borderline hilarious, but what's really important is his power. This Pirate offense isn't good at many things. They're 15th in the NL in OBP and 10th in runs scored. They're 15th in stolen bases and first in caught stealing. They're 12th in hits, 15th in walks, and second in strikeouts. The only thing that keeps them from being very, very bad is their ability to crush baseballs in the general direction of and over fences. Their .405 slugging percentage is seventh in the NL and their 135 home runs are third. Andrew McCutchen and Pedro Alvarez have done the heavy lifting while Neil Walker and Mike McKenry get a lot of press as fan favorites.

Garrett Jones is a huge part of this improbably homer-heavy offense, though, and he took a pretty crazy career path to get here. As much as he sometimes gets lost in the weeds, as frustrating as his baserunning and defense can be, it'd be a mistake to forget just how important his bat has been to these 2012 Pirates.

I got in the car this afternoon in Rockville, Maryland at just a little after 1 PM. Since three of us were driving from Maryland back to Chapel Hill, I didn't figure that I'd be able to get to even listen to much of the Pirates' game; the Google Map outlook showed bad traffic almost all the way from the DC area to Richmond and since I wasn't driving I didn't want to put things on the radio that my friends didn't want to hear. Indeed, the traffic was pretty bad for a huge chunk of our drive and since I was in the navigator seat with the GPS, I didn't have much of a chance to even check the score for the early part of the game. I knew the Pirates were down 2-0 early on and that it seemed like Jaime Garcia was on. I worried that that 2-0 deficit would be insurmountable. 

We finally got clear of the traffic just a little north of Richmond and I checked the score again; 2-2 in the ninth inning with ... Kevin Correia on the mound? We rotated seats and I went to the back of the car and started paying closer attention to the game as the innings passed; nine, ten, eleven, twelve. Finally at some point around the 13th inning, we all agreed that it was time to put the Pirates on the radio. We crossed the Virginia/North Carolina border and joked that the game would still be going when we got back to Chapel Hill. I marveled that Joel Hanrahan was going to pitch in the 14th in a tie game and worried about Jared Hughes taking the mound after throwing 2 1/3 last night. We got back to Chapel Hill. 

Between the time that it took to get my bags into my apartment and turn the game on, plus the slight delay with the internet broadcast compared to MLB.tv, I missed all of the weird shenanigans in the top of the 16th. I stayed glued to the computer; the Pirates took the lead, but I knew Juan Cruz was waiting. He did what I was worried he was going to do. The eighteenth inning came. Wandy Rodriguez took the mound. The nineteenth started. I thought about The Game from last year; I worried that I was going to have to write a post talking people down off of the ledge, explaining that last year's team didn't collapse because of the Jerry Meals game. I thought about having to fly from St. Louis to San Diego after a game like this. I tried to figure out who might start tomorrow with Kevin Correia and Wandy Rodriguez both pitching in relief this afternoon/evening.

Then I watched Pedro Alvarez, 0-for-6 on the afternoon, crush a line-drive home run to right center field. I watched the Pirates load the bases up so that Andrew McCutchen, 1-for-7 with four strikeouts and a terrible play in the outfield that helped the Cardinals tie the game in the 16th, could lace a single up the middle to give the Pirates two more runs to put things out of reach. I watched Wandy Rodriguez, who's been much-maligned in his short Pirate career, somehow pick up a win in relief in the nineteenth inning a day before his scheduled start. 

There are so many things to unpack in a game like this that I'm not really even sure where to start. Every reliever that pitched today that deserves a mention. Kevin Correia and Chris Resop were both great, scattering just four hits and no walks over their combined five innings. For two guys that can occasionally have trouble getting outs, their work to get this game into the 14th inning was huge. Jared Hughes was great, too, on short rest and obviously the rest that his demotion got him did him some good. It's also hard to say enough about Wandy Rodriguez's in this game; he started warming up in the seventeenth inning, came in in the eighteenth and got a huge strikeout of Skip Schumaker after walking Adam Wainwright and letting Carlos Beltran get to third, and he put the Cardinals down in order in the 19th. He hasn't really pitched all that well for the Pirates and it's not at all easy for a starter to come in a day early, warm up like a reliever, and throw two innings, but the Pirates needed Rodriguez today and he gave them exactly what they needed.

We can also flip the script here and talk about the two guys that came through with the big hits in the 19th inning. It's impossible to quantify something like this, but since the start of the Reds' series the Pirates have looked to me like a young team that's suddenly realized that they're in a playoff race. Andrew McCutchen hasn't been terrible, but he's sure looked like a guy that's pressing a little harder than he did earlier in the year. The same goes for Alvarez; he looks disjointed in the field and he's not quite flailing like he occasionally does, but at the same time he's struggled enough that Clint Hurdle's taken to platooning him against tough lefties. The Pirates have been keeping their head barely above water the last couple of weeks and they've mostly done it on the backs of guys like Garrett Jones and Neil Walker. It's been frustrating to watch Alvarez and McCutchen struggle when the Pirates have really needed them to step up. When the Cardinals finally broke down and put Barrett Browning in in the ninteenth, it was Alvarez and McCutchen that stepped up with the big hits that doubled the Pirates' run total and sealed the deal. 

I'm not sure what the Pirates will do to get the roster into shape for the San Diego series (I'd guess that either Kyle McPherson or Justin Wilson will be making their big league debut tomorrow night to start in place of Rodriguez, that Chad Qualls will be back off of bereavement, and that roster space will be created by either re-demoting Hughes/DFAing Cruz, and putting Travis Snider on the DL with his recurring hamstring problem) and I'm not even really thinking about that sort of thing right now. On Thursday afternoon, the Pirates had lost five of six games to the Dodgers and Padres. They were staring a four-game sweep at home in the face, they had watched their wild card lead evaporate to nothing, and they were facing a weekend trip to St. Louis that could've put them way behind in the wild card race. Over four days, they had an offensive explosion, they got a great start from James McDonald, and they won a 19-inning marathon. Three wins in four games and a series win in St. Louis makes last weeks' struggles seem pretty far back into the rear view mirror.

They're still not playing great baseball, but they're shoring things up and putting tallies in the win column and that's what's most important. As bad as the Pirates have been at points over the last 2 1/2 weeks, two wins against San Diego puts them at 9-11 in their vital 20-games-in-20-days stretch, which is respectable if not ideal. We can worry about the bullpen and tomorrow's starter tomorrow; for now let's just sit back and savor a special win and a Pirate team that looks like it's starting to bounce back from some of their worst baseball of 2012. 

I'm heading out of town for a couple of days for a wedding this weekend, so I'm not sure how much I'll be writing; I'll be paying as much attention to the Pirates as I can over the weekend, of course, and I'll be back on Sunday afternoon and will write up my recap of the Cardinal series then. Until then, lets hit a few important links and things that need to be talked about before this huge weekend series in St. Louis. 

First off, Michael Weinreb wrote a piece in Grantland yesterday about the Pirates emerging from the depths of their 20-year funk and how a generation of Pirate fans that have never really experienced winning baseball have dealt with everything. It's a pretty great read, and I swear I'm not just saying that because I'm in the article. 

Now let's talk about the Cardinals. The Cards lost last night, which means that the Pirates enter this series back in the driver's seat for the final wild card. The reality of this series is that one game is separating two teams with 44 games left on the schedule; if the Pirates sweep here they have a nice but by no means insurmountable four-game cushion, if the Cardinals sweep here they only have a two-game lead on the Pirates (of course we need to keep the Giants/Dodgers in mind, but for now let's pretend like the Pirates and Cardinals are the only two teams in this race). 

All of that being said, it'd be really nice to see the Pirates step up and play good baseball in a meaningful series. The Pirates have had plenty of meaningful baseball to play over the last two weeks here, and they haven't really stepped up to the occasion. They weren't bad against the Reds, but they certainly weren't good enough to win two of three games. The same is mostly true of their series against Arizona. They were flat-out awful in most of the recently-concluded series against the Dodgers. The Pirates might be able to make the playoffs by kicking the crap out of the Astros and Cubs and Brewers and Mets in September and having that separate them from the rest of the wild card pack, but it'd be much, much easier for them to simply put some space between themselves and their competitors by beating them. It'd make me feel better about where this season is headed and how the Pirates stack up against the rest of the NL in general, too. 

The big thing to watch this weekend is James McDonald, of course. He starts tonight and will try to snap out of his second-half funk. I've been pretty adamant that I don't think fatigue is his problem, but then I'm still not sure what his problem is and so I'm just hoping it's something that he and Ray Searage have isolated. Bedard and Karstens follow him, with Jake Westbrook, Lance Lynn, and Jaime Garcia going for the Cardinals. The Pirates' schedule gets easier from here on out, but it'd be nice for them to start putting some wins on the board with this series.

The Pirates got out to an early lead in this one (like I requested) and they put people on base and hit the ball over the fence in this one (like I requested), but this was hardly an easy or ideal win for the Pirates as AJ Burnett struggled quite a bit in his 6 2/3 innings and Clint Hurdle had another slow hook. All of that being said, I thought there were a few things to like in this afternoon's Pirate win (beyond the fact that it was a win and wins are good when you're losing your grasp on a playoff spot). 

The Pirates needed a win today and they came out firing with Garrett Jones's three-run first inning homer. They gave that lead back pretty quickly and could've folded up and mailed things in after Hanley Ramirez's homer put the Dodgers ahead 4-3, but instead they went out and tied the game up and then got the lead back an inning later with Jones's second three-run homer and Pedro Alvarez's solo shot. Then Burnett struggled to get out of the seventh and the Dodgers clawed back to 8-6, and the Pirates tossed two more up on the board to put it out of reach for good. In short, they had an answer with the bats every time the pitching staff slipped up on a day when the offense needed to have an answer. The Dodgers pulled a ton of weird shenanigans with home plate umpire Angel Campos, but the Pirates bludgeoned the ball into oblivion against a bad starter (Joe Blanton) and a bad reliever (Jamey Wright) and ended a disappointing homestand on a high note. 

One win isn't worth a whole ton without the context of some more wins to back it up, but the Pirates really needed this win today and thanks to Garrett Jones, they got it. 

I'm not sure that a 4-7 homestand is that much better than a 3-8 one, but functionally a win this afternoon ensures that the Pirates will at least head to St. Louis for this weekend's three-gamer tied with the Cardinals for the National League's final playoff spot and could theoretically even give them a leg up on the Cards (who are playing Arizona at home tonight). In the long run this one game might not mean anything, but if the Pirates go in tied or a game up on the Cardinals, the chances that the come out of the other side of this rough week tied or within a game of the Cardinals increases exponentially. 

And here I am talking about the playoffs when all I really want is to see the Pirates play a game in which they don't completely suck. A game where they don't make dumb errors or miss cutoff men or run the bases like tee-ballers. A game where they actually score first and get an early lead and keep it. If they win today while continuing to play bad baseball, ultimately it won't matter where they were in the playoff race on August 16th because that counts for nothing. Play better baseball today, worry about tomorrow tomorrow. 

As you probably would've expected after last night, the Pirates have done some roster shuffling before this one. Jeff Locke, the 13th pitcher, was sent down to the minors in exchange for Yamaico Navarro. Navarro will presumably give some depth while the Pirates figure out how long Neil Walker will be out with his (apparently not too serious) finger injury. Chad Qualls was also moved to the bereavement list (he has an ill family member) with Jared Hughes taking his place. I think the bullpen needs more work than that, but putting Hughes back in (who can at least hypothetically throw some high-leverage innings, even if he faltered a bit before his demotion) is at least a start.

AJ Burnett goes today; after trying to break up a two-game losing streak in each of his last three starts, today he's saddled with stopping a three-game losing streak. Hopefully this start goes better than his last start against the Padres. Joe Blanton goes for the Dodgers. He is, last time I checked, still Joe Blanton. Put guys on base, hit the ball over the fence. That's the game plan on offense today. First pitch is at 4:05. 

There are two realities that exist on the morning on 16 August 2012 in Pittsburgh Pirate Land. One is that the Pirates are 64-53 and tied for a wild card spot with 45 games left. Of their 45 remaining games, 16 are against contenders (one left against the Dodgers, six against the Cardinals, six against the Reds, three against the Braves). That's hard reality; the Pirates are in contention and play 29 of their last 45 games against teams of varying levels of badness. They need 18 wins in those 45 games (18-27) to finish above .500. They need 26 wins (26-19) to get to 90 wins and a reasonable expectation of a playoff berth. Based on their season as a whole to this point and their remaining schedule, one of those things seems like a slam dunk and the other seems possible at the very least. 

The other reality is that the Pirates have lost six of their last seven games, that a neck-and-neck race with the Reds for the NL Central has turned into a runaway lead for the Reds and the Pirates desperately clinging to the final wild card spot. This is one year after the Pirates turned 53-47 record and a tie for first place into five games under and ten games back in thirteen games. This is the year 20 AB in Pittsburgh; there is no reason to expect good things for the Pirates because good things never happen to the Pirates. 

I'm not a proponent of waiting for the other shoe. Not in baseball. Andrew McCutchen and Neil Walker and AJ Burnett have as much to do with Kevin Young and Jason Kendall and Steve Cooke as Young and Kendall and Cooke have to do with Barry Bonds and Andy Van Slyke and Doug Drabek. I like to be superstitious, I like to remember and celebrate history, but I don't believe in curses or ghosts. There are only good teams and bad teams, smart front offices and dumb front offices, good luck and bad luck. The Pirates didn't fall apart last year because they're the Pittsburgh Pirates and because that's what the Universe wants to happen to the Pittsburgh Pirates; they fell apart because they weren't a very good baseball team and because 162 games separates good teams from bad teams better than 100 games do.

For the last six weeks, every time the Pirates lose a game or two in a row or three of five, someone asks me if "The Collapse" is starting, and I always say that expecting a collapse like last year's is irrational and dumb because last year's collapse was a historic, once-a-generation kind of thing. No baseball team in history has been in first place after 100 games and then lost more than 47 of their last 62 (well, I'm extrapolating from this, but I feel pretty good about that statement). Sitting around waiting for another collapse like that is an exercise in self-torture. 

But how can you not think about it after the stretch of games the Pirates have just played? When Neil Walker is writhing on the ground in pain two batters into an important game? How can you not guard yourself against another collapse? How can you tell yourself that despite a lifetime of experiences to the contrary, that it'd be really hard for this particular Pirate team to go 17-28 or 16-29 in their last 45 games? I don't have an answer to any of thise.

The Pirates aren't as bad as they've been the last ten days or so, and I don't think that they'll stay in this funk for that much longer. It's just not likely to happen; there's a different talent level on this Pirate team than there was even to last year's team. Baseball cycles up and down; the Pirates were up late June and early July and they're down now. With any luck, they'll be up again before the season ends. Probably not enough to catch the Reds, maybe not enough to hold off the Cardinals, but enough to win 85 or so games. That's what logic and reality tells us is the most likely outcome here, no matter how ugly the last ten days have been. 

Have I convinced you? I'm not sure I've convinced myself. 

Subtitle: Everything Sucked and Neil Walker Got Hurt

Wait, that's not the subtitle, that's the recap.

In the back of my head, there's a voice that is saying that Andrew McCutchen hit a line drive home run to dead center off of Clayton Kershaw and that maybe that's a sign that he's getting hot again, but that would just be blatantly looking for a bright spot where I'm not sure that one exists.