May

May is over, so the question is, after the April Showers, what do the flowers look like?

After an 8-14 April, we went 15-13 in May. As nice as this seems, I think it could've been a lot better. I will elaborate...

Jack Wilson batted .260 this month, just about in line with every year of his career except last year and his first year. Since May 18th he's hitting .339. I think we can stop worrying.

Jason Bay hit .292 and slugged .632 this month. He hit 9 homers but only had 18 RBIs, mostly due to the two hitter, as discussed by both the Stats Geek and myself yesterday.

Daryle Ward hit .277 with an OPS of .898. He hit 8 homers and had 19 RBIs. He has proved that he deserves to play just about every day, even when Craig Wilson comes back. Really, someday very soon I'm going to post about how wrong I was about Daryle Ward.

Rob Mackowiak had an amazing month. He hit .391, got on at a .494 clip, and slugged .625 for an amazing OPS of 1.119. He only hit three homers, but all came after May 17th, he had 15 RBIs, 10 of which came after May 17th. Despite all this, he only got 64 ABs (76 plate appearences), only 8 more PAs than Tike Redman (who did hit .286, but only got on base at a .333 pace and only slugged .397 with 1 homer and 7 RBIs... of Tike's 18 hits this month 13 were singles, maybe these numbers aren't much different than Jack Wilson's but Tike's defense is atrocious while Jack's D makes up for his offensive deficincies).

Since his return on May 2nd, Jose Castillo hit .352 and had 10 ribbies, a solid comeback month.

Lawton's average and on base numbers were down, but his slugging was about the same and he hit 4 homers and had 15 RBIs.

Cota and Ross gave us just about what we should expect from them, in my opinion.

Hill, Wigginton, Sanchez, and Restovich didn't really play enough to have numbers to analyze for May. But you know how I feel about each of them.

The pitching was good, damn good. Aside from Mesa's meltdown, the bullpen was good too. Dave Williams has been a revelation, Mark Redman has been better than we could've imagined, Josh Fogg was Josh Fogg, Oliver Perez began mounting his comeback, and aside from his last start Kip Wells also had a solid month.

So looking at the stats, that begs one simple question. Only 15-13? To take some stats from Dejan's Q&A today (recommended reading as always, but I don't think it mustered a full post this week):

...the Pirates finished first in the National League this month in total bases (451), first in slugging percentage (.466), first in home runs (39) and second in OPS (.796). Those are some stunning numbers.

They're so un-Pirate-like I don't even know what to qualify them as. And we're talking a full month of baseball for a full team, that means that maybe not every month will be like May was, but we're certainly beyond the dark days of April and don't plan on returning. But why only 15-13? Dejan thinks it's a lack of clutch hitting, but offers no numbers to back this up. He thinks it's because we can't move runners over, but if you hit like that you shouldn't need to move runners over. I'm going to back the Stats Geek on this one (see above for link to yesterday's column). Even in Jack Wilson's best year (last year) his OBP was only .335. That's fairly low for a 2 hitter. We don't score runs because we don't bunch our best hitters together. When you start with Lawton and Wilson, chances are no one is on base for Bay and Ward. They can both get hits and still, no runs. We still insist on trotting Wigginton and Restovich and Tike out several times a week. Inserting one of them in the top 6 of the lineup puts an out or a single in that slot most of the time. We leave Freddy Sanchez and Bobby Hill on the bench more often than not. Each of them is a solid bat to insert into a grouping of good hitters. Mackowiak, despite his amazing month, just sat three games in a row.

May in summary: We put up some great numbers, and yeah we had a winning record for the month. And yes, if we go 15-13 every month the rest of the way out we'll be over .500 and that will be nice. But we could (should) have been a lot better this month. And don't tell us it's the players, because the numbers just don't back that up anymore.