When you can't hit, playing sloppy defense is not an option. The Pirates played sloppy defense tonight. The outcome was predictable.

The Pirates face knuckleballer RA Dickey and the thought of this lineup facing off against a knuckleballer is truly frightening. Josh Harrison is back in right field, despite some disastrous defensive play out of him last night and his inability to not swing at pitches (I know I advocated getting him into the lineup more in the post directly below this, but that was in replace of Clint Barmes and not against a knuckleballer), which could provide some hilarity. 

James McDonald goes for the Pirates. They're re-finishing the floors in my lab tonight, so we won't have a repeat of last Thursday's incident should McDonald bring his no-hitter stuff back to the party. The first pitch is at 7:05.  

Through 40 games, Clint Barmes is hitting .171/.200/.285. Last night, he drew a walk and doubled his season walk total. It's true that he was mostly signed to play defense, but it's hard to say that his defense has been anything better than about average at shortstop this year. Still, he's started more games than any Pirate other than Neil Walker this year. So how long of a leash does Barmes get?

The Pirates aren't exactly overflowing with good shortstop options right now and I'm far from a Josh Harrison or a Jordy Mercer fan, but at least Harrison has hit some balls hard this year to go with his inability to take a walk and Mercer's plate discipline at Triple-A has improved quite a bit in the early part of 2012 (he's got 17 walks in 171 PAs to give him a .374 OBP, though his power breakout from last year hasn't quite carried over). Harrison's 24, Mercer is 25, Barmes is 33.

I get that Barmes is a veteran and he deserves some respect and that he'll almost certainly have to hit better by default as the season goes along and that Clint Hurdle probably likes him a whole bunch and that Harrison's defense would be awful and Mercer might not be much of a better hitter, etc. etc. I don't really care. Barmes is old and his skillset doesn't fit PNC Park and he's not getting better. Signing Barmes never had any upside, really, and after a quarter of the season things don't look better. So how many starts does $11 million buy a player when a team has younger options? I guess we'll find out.

Back in my earliest days of being a Pirate fan, I had a pretty well-defined daily routine during baseball season. If it was a school night, I'd watch the earliest part of the Pirates' game (on KBL!) and go to bed at whatever time my parents deemed appropriate for school nights. If it was summer, I'd be allowed to stay up a little later and fall asleep with Lanny Fratarre or Kent Derdivanis on the radio, calling the game as it faded into my dreams. 

School night or summer, the next morning would always begin the same way: I'd wake up, hop out of bed, and run down the hall to find my dad shaving in the bathroom to ask him the same question. "Did we win? Did we win?" Most mornings I'd seen enough of the game from the night before to know what the answer would be. As much as any baseball fan loves baseball and it's unpredictability, you learn pretty early on that the game has its rhythyms. Some nights, I'd go to bed with the Pirates ahead or behind by enough to be fairly certain of the outcome. Some nights, I'd go to bed knowing that I had no idea how the game was going to end, genuinely curious of the outcome. 

The best mornings were the ones when I'd wake up certain that the Pirates had lost the night before, only to learn that something dramatic an improbable had happened and the Pirates had actually won. If it was late in the year, I'd mentally adjust the magic number down in my head, one game lower than I'd expected it to be when I woke up. There was something magic, though, about forming an opinion one way and just not knowing if I was right or not until the morning. 

Of course, that part of my life didn't last long. Baseball games on the East Coast don't usually run all that late and so it wasn't long until I was old enough to stay up for the end of most Pirate games. Throw in the ESPN scroll, and eventually the internet and smartphones, and it's hard to be surprised by the outcome of a baseball game. I'm not complaining about this; I've been away from Pittsburgh for five years now and without technology, I couldn't follow the Pirates at all. It's an amazing boon to be able to follow the details of a baseball game from anywhere. 

I don't every night, though, mostly for my own sanity's sake. I worked late on Monday and had the game on in lab long enough to see the Pirates fall behind 4-0. I forgot about the summer bus schedule, so I had to walk home. I listened to the game on my phone for a bit, before talking to my brother about how we somehow went to Montreal 18 months apart but both ended up hanging out at the same bar without coordinating. I got home and found out that the reason that I couldn't find a ride home from lab after the buses stopped was that of the three people that I called for a ride, one was in an airplane and the other two were out, killing time waiting for the first. Since they were at a place with cheap Monday pizza and I hadn't eaten yet, I figured it was logical to join them. 

Even though the Pirates had crept back to 4-2 by the time I left, I didn't think twice about the game. Casey McGehee had just struck out to strand Neil Walker on second and it was the seventh inning. This Pirate team doesn't come back from four-run or two-run deficits, because they don't score that many runs all that often. The weekend, between Justin Verlander and Max Scherzer, was pretty hard to take and I just wanted a night off from fretting over the Pirates' impotent offense.

And then I checked my phone at 10:45 and saw, "Pirates 5 Mets 4." All I was looking for was the confirmation of a loss; I had no expectation that the Pirates would come back to win and I was genuinely surprised to learn that something else had happened. It's been a long time since I've had that sort of feeling. Sometimes, it's the little things about baseball that are the best. 

On April 2, 2007, Erik Bedard and Johan Santana faced off on Opening Day in the Metrodome. Both pitchers were 28 years old, with Santana coming off of his second Cy Young Award and Bedard coming off of a breakout year that would help vault him to a career year in 2007. They were among the best the American League had to offer. 

In 2012, the duo will meet up in PNC Park tonight and 2007 feels like it was a million years ago. Santana missed all of 2011 with various arm problems, but is back in pretty great form so far this year. Bedard was never really healthy again after that 2007 season, but he's off to a pretty great start for the Pirates, striking out hitter after hitter after hitter, even if his durability's no longer there. Neither pitcher had the career that anyone would've forseen for them back in 2007, and yet here we are. 

I think that Santana provides a pretty difficult matchup for the Pirates' offense, but then I'm the sort of person that thinks that if you have an arm that can throw a baseball you prevent a pretty difficult matchup for the Pirates' offense. Bedard should at least keep them in the game. 

The first pitch tonight is at 7:05.  

The Pirates' offense is bad this year. That's an understatement: they've got 118 runs in 41 games, which is an average of less than three runs per game. They're on pace to score 466 runs. As a franchise, the Pirates have never scored fewer than 567 runs in a 162 game season. Even the brutally bad Pirates of the 1950s never dropped below the 500 run mark. So yes, the Pirates are really bad offensively and without Andrew McCutchen they'd be significantly worse. 

After Justin Verlander's almost-no-hitter on Friday, there was a rousing round of "Who's fault is the offense?" on Twitter. I was a little surprised to see that; Neal Huntington's in his fifth year as GM. He inherited a barren system with almost no offensive talent, yes, but we're past the point that Dave Littlefield deserves credit or blame for anything. Huntington's trade for a lot of offensive players that were supposed to be helping by now that didn't work out (Andy LaRoche, Lastings Milledge) or don't look like they're going to work out (Jose Tabata, Andrew Lambo). Some of them were longshots, sure, but that's the path Huntington took. His high profile draft picks haven't fared well, either, with Pedro Alvarez struggling and Tony Sanchez stuck in Double-A. 

I'm not interested in who's fault it is, though. I'm interested in the path forward. In a lot of ways, the Pirates were committed to the path they're on this year well before the season started: they had to play Jose Tabata, they had to play Neil Walker, they had to play Alex Presley, they had to play Pedro Alvarez. There's lots of consternation over the signings of Barajas and Barmes, but in the National League last year, catchers had a .708 OPS and shortstops had a .688 OPS. The Pirates were never going to find external help at those positions without serious trades that they weren't quite in position to make over the winter; they were only going to find placeholders. The placeholders haven't been terribly effective thus far, but they're not what I'm worried about. I'm far more concerned with Alvarez and Walker and Tabata, and I think those three not hitting is the team's biggest concern, both presently and down the road.

The problem with fixing this offense is that it's a very layered question. The first question is "What can be done RIGHT NOW?" which is immediately followed by, "What is WORTH DOING right now?" which is followed by, "What can we risk DOWN THE ROAD that's worth doing right now?" and the final question, "What NEEDS to be done down the road?" When it comes to the currently assembled Pirates, the answers go something like this, "It's May, so basically the only thing that can be done is dumpster diving and promoting from within, neither of which is likely to be helpful," followed by, "The only reason to go out and make a big trade would be if you think the Pirates can contend this year; how much can you really count on Erik Bedard and AJ Burnett and James McDonald to be this good over the course of a full season? Because while the bottom may not fall out of this pitching staff like it did last year, I'm not sure it's THIS GOOD over the course of a season," followed by, "Jameson Taillon and Gerrit Cole are flat-out as untouchable as the surface of the sun and we're not even listening to offers on them, which means that our most desirable tradable prospects are Starling Marte and probably Robbie Grossman, who are hitters. Which means that if the Pirates are trading prospects for offense this year, they're talking about guys like Rudy Owens and Jeff Locke and Justin Wilson, who are fringe prospects at best and not likely to bring much of a return," and finally, "Holy crap, the Pirates have no slam dunk offensive prospects anywhere at the moment, shouldn't we be more worried about THAT than anything?"

The reality for the 2012 Pirates is that they can't do anything with Alvarez, Walker, and Tabata but play them. At some point they're going to face a decision on all three and all three are young enough and talented enough that the Pirates shouldn't make that decision without as much data as possible. That means that upgrading the 2012 Pirates' offense falls to first base, shortstop, catcher, and right field. There's never much offense to be had at catcher or shotstop and the Pirates' best course of action there may simply to be to let Barajas and Barmes play back to their career levels, and hope that gets them into the ballpark of league average at their position. There might be offense to be found at first base or right field, but I sincerely doubt that the scrap heap holds much more promise there than Garrett Jones or Casey McGehee (because both of those guys are scrap heap additions, of course) do. We can discuss replacing Jake Fox with Nate McLouth all we want, but that move will never have more than limited value. A Joel Hanrahan trade as the deadline approaches might bring some help for the Pirates at one of those positions, but they'll have to weigh what an immediate return is worth vs. one that might be more helpful when Cole and Taillon are Pirates. 

Here's the truth of the situation: it's May. The only way to really change the composition of this team right now is to do something drastic. Doing something drastic right now would be predicated on the assumption that this team's pitching staff makes them a real contender in 2012. That means assuming Erik Bedard will take the ball every five days, assuming that we'll see the good AJ Burnett more than the bad, assuming that teams will remain as baffled by James McDonald's slider now that they're starting to see it more regularly. All of those things might happen, but then, Neil Walker might have a June that resembles his July 2011. Jose Tabata might find his swing. Pedro Alvarez might catch fire again. Garrett Jones or Casey McGehee might get into a groove. Starling Marte might hit his way up to the Pirates. Any one or two of those things would do more for the Pirates' offense than any trade they could make right now. 

I'm not excusing the Pirates' offense. Truth be told, I hate watching this team this year and on a lot of nights, I just choose not to. I'm not exempting Neal Huntington from criticism for the awful pace this offense is on. That should be considered as much as anything when the Pirates decide later this year if he's the GM to take the Pirates into second half of this decade. But none of those things mean that the Pirates should hit the panic button on May 21st; in some ways, I think that would be the most irresponsible move of all. 

I guess I could say something about Max Scherzer striking out 15 Pirates after a lackluster start to the season (before the game started today, I told my friend from Detroit that Scherzer would go 7 innings, give up one run on three hits, and strikeout 11: his actual line was 7 IP, 2 R, 4 H, 15 K) or Kevin Correia making a surprisingly solid start this afternoon, but there's something else that happened in this game that bugged the crap out of me. 

If you watched the game live, there's a good chance you know what I'm about to say before I even have to say it: it's Prince Fielder's "double" to open the Tigers' three-run seventh inning.  What really happened is that Fielder hit a very catchable pop-up between Clint Barmes and Nate McLouth. Neither player called for it or went all-out after it and it fell in between the two of them. Barmes then booted it down the right field line. That hit started a chain reaction that ended with the Tigers scoring three times in the seventh, turning a 2-1 Pirate lead into a win for the Tigers. 

I don't know if Gorkys Hernanez would've made that play instead of Nate McLouth. I suspect that he may have, but that's not the sort of thing that anyone can really say for certain. What really irked me about it, though, is that it was a play that involved Clint Barmes and Nate McLouth. We're sitting here in Year 5 of the Neal Huntington era, suffering through one of the worst offenses that anyone can remember and here with the game on the line in the bottom of the seventh inning the Pirates have Clint Barmes and Nate McLouth out in the field. I can accept a bad team if it's a bunch of young guys finding their way in the world with a front office evaluating what they have, but no one can say that's true of Clint Barmes and Nate McLouth. 

Maybe that play was the play that turned the game, maybe it would've happened anyway. But I'd much rather see a pop-up fall in between Gorkys Hernandez and Yamaico Navarro than between McLouth and Barmes.  

Kevin Correia is taking the mound for the Pirates again this afternoon, even though it seems like everyone everywhere thinks this is a bad idea except for Clint Hurdle (and maybe Neal Huntington, who knows?). The Pirates have better options, most of Correia's starts have generally resembled ticking time bombs, and the Tigers' lineup is absolutely capable of just destroying Correia today. Seriously, Prince Fielder is just starting to heat up. Unless Correia walks him every time up, Prince is going to eat him alive today. 

The Tigers are sending Max Scherzer to the mound. He's had a rough go of it on occasion this year, but his K/9 is 10.4. Get ready to hear about how he's back on track in about four hours! First pitch is at 1:05.

I didn't get a recap of last night's game up, but I think that this post will suffice in its place because it's going to say about the same thing that the recap would've. The Pirates won last night because Andrew McCutchen took Drew Smyly deep twice early in the game to give the otherwise lifeless Pirate offense four runs and AJ Burnett was good enough to hold that lead for the bullpen to shut the door on. 

McCutchen missed games sporadically early in the month of May with a wicked bout of stomach flu, but when he came back on May 8th he drew a walk and homered and I noted that I thought he was poised on the brink of a breakout. Here are McCutchen's numbers since he came back from the flu, including that May 8th game: .452/.510/.986 (that's a 1.486 OPS), 7 homers, 1 2B,  13 RBI, 11 R. The Pirates are 7-5 in those games, despite being shut out twice, scoring three runs or less six times, and only scoring 37 runs total. A lot of credit obviously goes to the pitching for that, but I'd say that plenty goes to McCutchen as well, for scoring or driving in 17 of those 37 runs. 

This hot streak brings his season line up to .346/.405/.566. His isolated power is at .221, which would be a career high. The bad news is that this probably isn't sustainable over the long-term: his BABIP is .377, which is high even for a guy like him that ropes line drives and can fly around the bases. His strikeout rate, which I tagged as an important stat to watch for him this year, is down quite a bit at 16.3% (it was a career high 18.6% last year), but it's not quite as low as it was in 2010. His walk rate is a career low 8.5%, though I suspect that has something to do with the balls looking like grapefruits these last two weeks. If the rest of the offense doesn't step up, that walk rate will accelerate in a hurry. He's not hitting many more line drives this year (20.4% vs. 20.0% last year) and he's actually not hitting many flyballs at all, which makes his homer spree over the last 12 days feel pretty unsustainable. 

Now that we've gotten the realism out of the way, though, let's take a second to admire this hot streak. McCutchen hit 11 homers total in 2007 with Altoona and Indianapolis, then followed up with just 9 in 2008. His career has gotten off to an excellent start, and this is almost certainly the best sustained strech of play that we've seen from him. He's definitely been prone to the occasional slump in the past. I'm no hitting coach and I don't have the charts in front of me, so this is a bit anecdotal, but it's always seemed to me that when he's slumped in the past, it's been because he started trying to pull too much. Early in this season, when he was getting a ton of hits but with almost no power at all, my dad remarked to me that he was really happy to see 'Cutch going with the ball as it was pitched to him even if it just meant a lot of singles. I grumbled at that (there's no actual statistical evidence to support the oft-repeated assertion that some players "choose" to hit for average when they can hit for power) a little bit, because that's what I do. Yesterday afternoon, though, McCutchen's second homer was a flat-out screamer to right field that reminded me of the missiles that Vlad Guerrero used to hit at me and my dad up in the right field grandstand at PNC. 

McCutchen has two homers to almost dead right field so far this year and another to right-center. Last year, he had three all year (with a few more on the right/right-center border). He didn't have any in 2009 or 2010. It's pretty obvious to say, but Andrew McCutchen is evolving into a dangerous hitter. I'm awfully glad he's on the Pirates' side.

The Pirates and Tigers were originally scheduled to play a 7:05 game tonight, but it's been moved to 4:05 this afternoon, presumably because of FOX's "Baseball Night in America," which puts a few of FOX's broadcasts this summer in primetime. I literally have no idea how this affects MLB.tv blackouts; I kind of assume the reasons the games have been shifted is to avoid that exact situation, but I can't say that I know that for certain. I also don't know what happens if the Pirates' 4 PM game runs late into FOX's broadcast window; there's a decent chance that the game will suddenly be blacked out at the end of it if that happens. Of course, this only affects you if you're outside of Pittsburgh, like me. If you're in the viewing area, you presumably have nothing to worry about. 

The Pirates' ridiculously terrible offense will face off against Drew Smyly tonight. Smyly isn't Justin Verlander, but he is a lefty that strikes out a ton of hitters and his career is off to quite a good start. Yesterday's pregame post notwithstanding, I'm not in the business of predicting no-hitters since they're one of baseball's more unpredictable events. That being said, I think that pretty much any pitcher with a high strikeout rate has a better than normal chance to throw a no-hitter against the Pirates this year. Smyly does have at least one tough matchup tonight in Andrew McCutchen, who's hot enough right now that Verlander practically admitted after the game that he pitched around him in the seventh with the no-hitter on the line. 'Cutch is killing lefties right now, so the Pirates' best chance against Smyly tonight may simply to be to get someone on base in front of him and hope that something good happens. 

The Pirates have AJ Burnett on the mound tonight. He and Smyly are both from Arkansas, which is vaguely improbable (there are only seven Arkansans in baseball right now) and I'm sure you'll hear about it quite a bit. The first pitch is at 4:05. The Pirates will probably get a hit tonight, but not definitely.