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.  

The Pirates head into tonight's game protecting a 1/2 game lead in the wild card race. That doesn't quite mean that a loss drops the Pirates out of the playoffs; the Dodgers are tied with the Giants and so a Dodger win coupled with a Giant loss (they're tied 2-2 with the Nats in an afternoon game as of this writing) and a Cardinal loss would still put the Pirates a 1/2 game up in the wild card race (the Cardinals are a full game back at the moment). All of that being said, the Pirates really need to stop playing terrible baseball in the near-to-immediate future, if only because the Pirate bandwagon will ignite in flames and Pirate fans will literally start clawing each other's faces off if the team doesn't start playing better soon. 

Unfortunately, Clayton Kershaw starts for the Dodgers tonight and Clayton Kershaw is awesome. He's also left-handed, which means the Pirates will have to try and beat him with Josh Harrison and Gaby Sanchez in the lineup (somehow, Gaby Sanchez has seven hits as a Pirates in 28 at-bats; he also has a .326 OBP and his OPS is still .573 since all of his hits are singles). This feels like kind of a long shot to me. Wandy Rodriguez, who has been neither particularly good nor particularly bad as a Pirate, looks for his first win in black and gold. This would be an awfully good time for it, that's for sure. 

The first pitch is at 7:05. 

Clint Hurdle told reporters last night that the Pirates will "more than likely" return to a five-man rotation next week after the Pirates have an off-day and more or less implied that it's possible that James McDonald will end up in the bullpen with Kevin Correia staying in the rotation. I'd imagine that's more up in the air now after Correia's start last night was less-than-sparkling and McDonald has another outing before that off-day comes up, but given McDonald's struggles it's obviously something the club has to consider. 

What I'll say is this: I wouldn't be upset with McDonald going to the bullpen if I thought fatigue was causing his problems, but I'm not at all convinced that fatigue is what is causing his problems. I'm working on a post about this right now, but the reality is that he's been inconsistent even since before his complete game in late June (obviously it's a much worse problem now than it was in June) and I think that there's an underlying problem to his struggles that isn't just general fatigue, though I haven't been able to pin it down yet. 

What would concern me about moving McDonald to the 'pen and keeping Correia in the rotation is that it seems to me like this might be something that occurs to the coaching staff as a way to kill two birds with one stone -- it pares the rotation back to five guys without worrying about McDonald every outing AND it puts McDonald and his good stuff in the 'pen to curb the bullpen meltdowns -- while the real danger is the tiger lurking behind them. I've been saying repeatedly that I think the Pirates have potential cures to their bullpen problems already in the system, though they seem reluctant to try them. The downgrade from McDonald (when he's effective) to Correia is steep. 

I'm not saying the Pirates aren't exploring all of their possible options with helping McDonald because I'm sure they are. I'm just saying that if they're going to move him to the bullpen, they'd better be completely sure that fatigue is his problem. Otherwise, this sort of move would have a huge potential to backfire. 

This game started out as a pretty typical-seeming "when you're down you never get the breaks" kind of game. The Pirates hit the ball hard and had it go right at people, while on the flip side of things balls bounced out of gloves and umpires made weird calls. Things weren't quite out of control, but they were clearly not going in a good direction for the Pirates. Finally, they unraveled and the wheels came off of Chad Qualls and the Pirates lost 11-0. 

This is loss five of six, this is a loss that puts the Pirates six games behind the Reds and puts the Dodgers in position to take the wild card lead from the Pirates tomorrow. Clayton Kershaw is waiting to take the ball tomorrow. This is not good at all. 

I've been preaching "patience is a virtue" for a while now with this recent Pirate slump. The fact of the present, though, is that if the Pirates don't start playing good baseball in a hurry here at the end of August, they're going to have to play really good baseball in September to make up for the ground they'll lose to the Dodgers and Cardinals this week. That means better baserunning, that means unexpected relievers stepping up, that means better hitting and pitching in general. Even with two wild cards, playoff spots aren't just handed out for free. 

Tonight that means getting a strong start from Kevin Correia and parlaying that into a win. The Pirates have won Correia's last six starts, which seems pretty improbable to me. He goes up against Chad Billingsley, whos' been a bit better than his 3.84 ERA indicates this year and is the type of pitcher that gives the Pirates trouble when they're not hitting well. I've got a bad feeling about this, as the fictional space opera characters are saying these days. First pitch tonight is at 7:05. 

After I went out of my way to say nice things about Jeff Karstens earlier this afternoon, Karstens gave the Pirates an outing that was Vintage 2010 Karstens tonight. He wasn't bad, but he got hit hard pretty consistently all night and that helped the Dodgers to a 4-2 lead after seven. When he came out, Clint Hurdle elected to go to Juan Cruz for the second night in a row and Cruz loaded up the bases without a hit before coming out of the game. Tony Watson did a nice little escape act, but the Dodgers pushed a fifth run ahead and that was more than enough to hold up what amounted to the Garrett Jones show at the plate tonight (Jones was 4-for-4 with two doubles, three RBIs, and he scored the fourth run himself). 

Of course in a game like this in the heat of a pennant race there are a million little places we can nit-pick. On Jones's two-run double in the third, Mark Ellis made a bad throw to home plate that skipped into the third base dugout while Jones stood flat-footed on second base, maybe thinking that the backup on the play would've resulted in him being tagged out that third. Because he didn't try to take third on the bad throw, the umpires only awarded him third base and he ended up stranded there (the rule on plays like that is that you get the base you would've had without the bad throw plus one; had Jones made an attempt to go to third the ruling most likely would've been that he advanced to third on the error and so the bad throw moves him home, but he literally made zero attempt to move off of second). Jones had a great game tonight, of course; the Pirates' four runs were powered by his bat and his leaping-catch-turned-double-play in the top of the second likely stymied what could've been a huge Dodger rally that inning. His baserunning is something that's constantly an issue, though, and the more it happens the more it stands out during the games to me. 

I'm not solely blaming Jones for the loss here; simply noting all of the things that got the Pirates this result tonight. Using Juan Cruz in the seventh inning was baffling to me. He wasn't one of the Pirates' better relievers before he got hurt, and he's only just now off of the disabled list. Of course, with Brad Lincoln gone it'd be fair to argue that the Pirates don't have an option that's obviously better than Cruz in that spot; Resop has been good lately but he has his own failings, Chad Qualls is Chad Qualls, Tony Watson is generally saved to face lefties, and Jeff Locke is only here to work in long relief. You could read that as an indictment of trading Lincoln, but I'm more frustrated with how the bullpen is structured right now than anything. The Pirates have 13 pitchers on the roster, but with Kevin Correia in the rotation and Locke apparently being saved for long relief only, you effectively eliminate seven pitchers to use in key situations. The Pirates have gone to all of this roster manipulation to save their starters' arms during this 20-games-in-20-days stretch, and Hurdle's essentially using his bullpen like he's got an 11-man staff. This is CRAZY. It's crazy to waste a roster spot on a sixth starter AND an unused long reliever while Juan Cruz AND Chris Resop AND Chad Qualls AND Tony Watson pitch key innings while Bryan Morris and Justin Wilson and Chris Leroux sit in Triple-A without even getting a look.

I don't even know that Morris or Wilson or Leroux would necessarily be cure-alls for the bullpen here (leaving Leroux aside, Morris and Wilson are obviously talented kids with great stuff that could have the element of surprise on their side since the NL hasn't seen them at all right now, but there have been plenty of questions about Morris's head during his long stint in the minors with the Pirates and Dodgers and Wilson's control is obviously a concern). It's just incredibly clear to me right now that besides Grilli and Hanrahan the Pirates have no reliever capable of reliably getting big outs and that it seems like it's time to roll the dice with talent over whatever it is that someone thinks the Cruz/Watson/Resop/Qualls combination is bringing to the table for the Pirates. It seems clear to me that the Pirates are afraid to bring these kids up and throwing them right into the fire, but trading Lincoln basically mandated that they do that. Their reluctance to be bold here is costing them baseball games here. Neal Huntington has no concerns being bold in the draft or at the trade deadline; why the hesitation here? I don't get it. 

Conclusion: one run losses in playoff races against teams that the Pirates are competing for playoff spots with are stressful. 

I don't know how else to say this: the Pirates have a 2 1/2 game lead on the Dodgers and Cardinals for the NL's final wild card spot and their next seven games will be against those two teams. August baseball doesn't get any bigger than this. 

Jeff Karstens and Aaron Harang go at PNC tonight at 7:05.