The Pittsburgh Penguins victory last night in Game 1 of their playoff series against the Tampa Bay Lightning was awesome. There is nothing I can say here that you won't read or hear somewhere else, so I'll leave it at that.
What's kind of bothering me today is how much attention has been given to the Pittsburgh Pirates falling below .500 for the first time this year. I get that the town is sick of having a losing baseball team and .500 has come to represent a goal. Something we all dream of and want. But let's be honest. A .500 record mean very little in the grand scheme of things.
Pittsburgh would go nuts in excitement if the Pirates did finish a season .500. There is no denying that. But to be keeping track of it in April is a bit ridiculous. Especially when this team was expected to be bad, as their top pitching prospects are years away. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette had two headlines that emphasized the sub .500 mark. Is there another team in the country that would cause these kind of headlines after falling to 5-6 on a 162-game season?
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| No one on the Pirates will celebrate like this for just achieving a .500 record, so why would fans? |
While this city craves and deserves a winning team, that's not the goal. Making the playoffs and building a contender is the ultimate mission. Not to simply win more games than they lose. I know. It's crazy that I just mentioned playoffs and contender when referring the Pirates, but it's true. The team is on the right track for building a good team that can bring excitement to its fan base. It's just a few (Might be wishful thinking, but I believe it.) years away.
Keeping track of the Pirates race for .500 at this juncture in the season is just silly. Hell, it will be silly if it were September. It would break and embarrassing streak of losing seasons, but it doesn't mean a damn thing if you still miss the playoffs. Find me a professional team or player that is legitimately happy with just winning a few more contests than they lost. I wouldn't want that kind of person running my team or playing next to me, and that is not the culture that should be encouraged.
A .500 record has become a symbol for this franchise. It's a symbol that critics of the team point to first, while being a finish line for others. Either way, it has come to represent too much. A record is an easy way to judge a team, but not the only way. Look the current Pirates roster and there is a lot of good things going on there. The core players young and locked up for four to six years. There are going to be rough patches because the pitching a joke, but that is being addressed.
The Pirates could finish with only 60-70 wins, continuing the losing trend, but be on the rise. On the flip side, you could have a team around .500, but they have no hope for the future (I'm staring right at the Los Angeles Dodgers and Angels of Anaheim.). They were both 80-82 last season but don't appear to have a plan in place for competing in the upcoming years. These teams don't have the losing history of the Pirates, but I'd feel a lot better about a 70-win Buccos team this season than I would an 82-win Dodgers season this year.
So let's look at how the young players are progressing before we look at the team's record. Is Pedro Alvarez developing into the potential 40-homer threat he was drafted to be? Is Tabata going to be a constant threat on the base paths? Will Neil Walker become an all-star second baseman? Will Andrew McCutchen be the five tool superstar he has the potential to be? If the answer is yes to two or three of these at the end of the season, but the team loses 95 games, I'll be OK with it.
The Joy Formidable - Whirring
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