There's nothing...wrong, per se, with peaking in April. It's worse if you never peak. But if you peak in April, you give the fans the tensest tease of what could be. 'This is how the season could go if we had our shit together'. And then poof, back into the ether.
Honestly, once Oneil Cruz got hurt you sort of figured that the Pirates were gonna aim slightly lower than anticipated. And once Vince Velasquez got hurt, that was the sort of 'alright, the magic hat's been taken away' kind of moment, and everything after that sort of skidded and plopped down. Y'know, they couldn't recapture any of the April stuff, and then all the pieces started falling off. And now we're at the point where Cutch has leveled, Reynolds is purely alright, Suwinski's barely over .200, Keller's got his ERA under 4 again and a bunch of rookies are starting.
So it's like we've cycled back to where we were last September with the Pirates. The dust hasn't even settled on all the people that left or got hurt, and we just have a barrage of different ideas swirling around trying to at least finish with some dignity.
I don't think the Pirates are losing 100 games this year, because they've won 62 and they're only 10 games below .500. So by that respect, it'll be an improvement over last year. But at the same time, they're not a playoff team, they really only got great seasons out of Ke'Bryan Hayes and Mitch Keller, and most of the rookies they brought up didn't really wow them. Henry Davis got hurt, Endy Rodriguez is extremely okay, Alika Williams can't hit, and Jared Triolo, despite doing well, doesn't have a place on this team if Hayes is active and surging. Even with all these great prospects they have, they haven't moved forward.
Honestly, the Pirates' biggest takeaways from this season were how well its organizational products did when reuniting with the system. Andrew McCutchen's great year has been written about, but Connor Joe was drafted by the Pirates and never played for them, going on a wild goose chase of teams that didn't know what to do with him until landing in Colorado and becoming a team hero. It is very fitting that Joe finally gets to play for Pittsburgh, even if it is during another losing year. Joe's at least a solid extra bat, and he's got 9 homers and 33 RBIs this year, which is decent enough.
I hate that the Pirates were one of the big disappointments of this year, especially considering their start, but with all things considered, 2023 was a step in the right direction for this team. If they get Cruz, Brubaker, Davis and Marcano back next year, they'll be a lot sturdier, and will have a ton more great pieces as these rookies figure out the majors. I don't know how long the competitive year is for them, but hopefully members of this team will be there for it.
Coming Tomorrow- It's hard to be a closer for a last place team, but he's done a decent enough job of it.
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