I honestly don't know if I should be excited or terrified

Somehow, the Pittsburgh Pirates are only three games below .500. They're 15-18. This is mind-blowing to me. A part deep inside of me suspects that if you took film of this season's 33 games, spliced them up into individual innings, and showed them to an unbiased observer, they would have to think this team is closer to 10-23 than 15-18. Another part of me wants to say, "Holy hell! 15-18! And that's scoring 3.45 runs a game! If the offense gets better, and it can't be worse, the team has to get better!" That part of me is much smaller, but the truth is that I'd like nothing more than semi-relevant baseball to write about this summer, no matter how unlikely it may be to happen.

I know it's possible to out perform your pythagorean record over the course of the season just like the Pirates have done for 33 games, but it seems to me that teams that do that generally do something very well, hit, pitch, field, SOMEthing that gives them an advantage their runs scored/runs allowed doesn't account for/ This Pirate team seems to do very little well, and maybe that's why I'm still holding my breath waiting to be whacked on the head with the other shoe in the form of a 10-game losing streak. Just as Freddy and LaRoche's bats are likely to come around, Gorzelanny and Snell are likely to come somewhat back to earth.

Does this really feel like a team that's a couple of improved bats away from being decent? Because it doesn't to me.