Microcosm

Last night's Win Probability Plot, via Fan GraphsIf that doesn't summarize the whole season right there, I'm not sure what else does.

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82 wins

  This is how it starts: in 1989 in a living room in front of an old cathode-ray tube TV, the kind with the power button that pulls out into a little knob to adjust the volume and the individual buttons for channels running down the side, with a four-year old asking his dad a non-stop stream of questions about the Pirates/Phillies game on the TV. Or maybe this is how it starts: in a parking lot at Three Rivers Stadium where the same little boy is tailgating before his first-ever Pirate game, eating food out of the back of a car, then watching the Pirates dismantle the Expos 6-1 with his favorite player hitting a home run.  Or maybe it starts in the second floor hallway on the morning of October 15th, 1992. That's where he finds out that the Pirates blew the 1-0 lead they when he went to bed the night before in the most painful way possible and that, for the third season in a row they will not go to the World Series. The worst is yet to come, though, and no one has any i...
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80 wins

  Good morning. It is September 3rd  2013. With last night's win, the Pirates are 80-57 Since 1992, the Pirates failed to win 80 games in the following seasons*: 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997 , 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012 . There is another way to write that list up. It could be written like this: 1993-2012. It's fitting that the final years on the countdown are 1997 and 2012, because there are not two more memorable years that the Pirates have had during their 20 year losing streak. The 1997 season was, of course, The Freak Show. As previously discussed , the Pirates jettisoned their entire post-Bonds core of talent over the end of the 1996 season and the following winter. The 1997 Pirates were supposed to be a lousy baseball team that would lose a bunch of games in the interest of laying a foundation for the 2001 Pirates, who would usher in a new era of Pirate baseb...
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Keeping Snell Up

With all of Snell's struggles this year there's been a lot of speculation about demoting him to AAA, especially since Tom Gorzelanny got sent down in early July. It was reported that he had no options left, but today's PG says that he does , in fact, have one left: It had been widely believed for nearly two years that starter Ian Snell was out of options, even by some in the organization, but that is not the case, a team official confirmed this weekend: He has one left. I don't think Snell's going anywhere for a couple of reasons. First off is that it seems incredibly unlikely that the people that are actually running the team and making those decisions now just learned that. Second is that Snell doesn't have anything to prove in AAA. His velocity's fine this year and his biggest problem is his inability to locate his pitches. John Van Benschoten's biggest problem is his inability to locate pitches and he puts up solid lines in AAA with stuff that's...
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