Talking Baseball: Vol. 14

Another non-playoff and another losing season for the Pittsburgh Pirates, and some random thoughts on everything else happening around Major League Baseball.

Even with some intrigue and pretend contention for about half of the season, and even with a bare minimum “buying” effort at the trade deadline, the Pittsburgh Pirates are going to end up exactly where we thought they would when the season began.

Outside of the playoffs.

With a losing record.

At the bottom of the National League Central Division.

They were officially eliminated from playoff contention earlier this week, and then with their 81st loss of the season on Wednesday night guaranteed that they will finish with a non-winning record for the 27th time in 34 years going back to the start of the 1990 season.

It is looking as if they are going to finish in last place for the third time in five years under general manager Ben Cherington (with fourth place being the high point), who has made almost an entire career out of last place finishes as a general manager.

Perhaps the most stunning development out of this season is that the for two-thirds of the season the Pirates had the best pitcher in baseball in Paul Skenes, while also having a pitching rotation that is going to have five starters finish the season with an above average ERA (Skenes, Mitch Keller, Jared Jones, Bailey Falter and Luis Ortiz ALL have an ERA+ over 100), and they are still likely to win fewer games than they did a year ago.

Or at the very least they are not going to show any meaningful improvement.

That is staggering, especially five years into Cherington’s rebuild, and should be the type of season that leads to full-scale changes across the board.

You can not bring back anybody in a position of power with this team and expect anything to change.

It is not just the overall lack of progress at the Major League level that should force those changes, either.

It is everything.

Let’s talk about that, and some other general baseball thoughts around the league as the regular season winds down and the playoffs approach.