WARNING: May contain baseball-like product.
One-hundred twelve wins! That’s roughly how many games the Pittsburgh Pirates will win this year if they manage to maintain their current winning percentage of .690 for the balance of the season. Of course, they almost certainly won’t, but it’s a fun thought to entertain. As of this writing the Pirates are 20-9. It’s quite early in the season, yes, but it’s not that early; by the end of the weekend they’ll have played a fifth of their entire season.
And here they are, playing well and feeling good about themselves. It’s been a long time coming; this team has been rebuilding for several seasons now, and they lost 100 games each of the last two seasons. But for those of us that have still been paying at least a little attention, the Pirates have been diligently obtaining and developing prospects over that time, so there’s been a forlorn kind of sports hope going on that maybe the kids would turn out to be good ballplayers and maybe the MLB club would start to be competitive in another year or two.
Well, here they are, winning.
No, it probably won’t last. A baseball season is long, and there are a lot of ups and downs. Nobody just blows through it all untouched. (Well, sure, the 1998 Yankees did, but that was a special case.) The Pirates will have slumps and they’ll lose games they should win and maybe they’ll finish under .500. Maybe.
But for now? The Pirates aren’t just “not awful”. Right now they’re good. And that’s something.
Having written about the Pirates almost every September for years, I’ll have to bookmark this and see if they’ll actually make the postseason, or finish above .500, at least. At least they’ll (probably) not lose 100 games.