76-79 wins
76 wins
Posted by Pat on Aug 24, 2013 15:11
Good morning. It is August 24th, 2013.
With last night's win, the Pirates are 76-52. Since 1992, the Pirates failed to win 76 games in the following seasons*: 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1998, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011.
I've told this story a thousand times before, but my primary memory of the Pirates' 1993 season is this: my dad spent the winter preparing me for my first really bad Pirate team (some of my absolute earliest and foggiest memories of anything are of watching baseball during the 1989 season, but much of what I think of as the foundation for my life as a PIrate fan was laid during 1990), then he went to the home opener in 1993, and the Pirates beat the Padres 9-4. I think that I intellecutally knew that things had to be different for the Pirates without Barry Bonds and Doug Drabek, but I was also eight years old. I figured that they'd rebounded from losing Bobby Bonilla in 1992 and come closer to the World Series than ever. Why should 1993 be any different?
As it turned out, 1993 was only different because the Pirates won 75 games that year and in doing that the 1993 club would be better than 15 of the 19 baseball teams that would follow it. Think about this: the Pirates lost he best player of a generation and went from a 96-win team to a 75-win team, and that 75-win team was still one of the very best Pirate teams to take the field between 1993 and 2012. Honestly: outside of Royals fans, there are very few people that understand the depths of despair that Pirate fans have been through.
One of the reasons for the absolute depths of that despair is 2003, which is the other season that was checked off of this list with last night's win. I talked at length about the Drive for 75 on Friday, but the real reason to remember 2003 is this: "Aramis Ramirez traded by the Pittsburgh Pirates with Kenny Lofton and cash, to the Chicago Cubs for a player to be named later, Matt Bruback (minors) and Jose Hernandez. The Chicago Cubs sent Bobby Hill to the Pittsburgh Pirates to complete the trade."
There was no way of knowing it at the time, but the club had accrued a bunch of debt in moving into PNC Park and the Nutting family was moving behind the scenes to wrest power from Kevin McClatchy (UPDATE: I semi-remembered the details wrong here; prior to 2003 the Nuttings floated the team a big loan so that they could make MLB's mandated debt/equity ratio, but they still needed to slash salary in 2003 and, as Tim Williams pointed out to me, with Kris Benson on the disabled list, their options were limited). Ramirez was a 25-year old third baseman entering his prime, but the Pirates felt that they couldn't pay him the $6 million he was due in 2004 or the arbitration raise he'd get in 2005 before he hit free agency.
Really everything about Aramis Ramirez is a microcosm for how the Pirates failed to capitalize on the Freak Show of 1997 and turn it into any sort of contending baseball team. They failed to protect Joe Randa in the expansion draft and lost him, which lead to Ramirez making his big league debut in 1998 at the age of 19. Ramirez wasn't really, truly ready for the majors until 2001, but by that point the Pirates had burned just about a full year's worth of service (Ramirez played a total of 163 games for them between 1998-2000), which shifted his pay scale by a year and lead to the awful trade in 2003.
There are only three seasons left on this list, but that doesn't mean that there's not work left to be done.
*The strike shortened 1994 and 1995. The '94 Pirates were on pace for 75 wins, but the '95 Pirates were terrible and only on pace for 65 wins.
77 wins
Posted by Pat on Aug 29, 2013 12:06
Good morning. It is August 29th, 2013.
With last night's win, the Pirates are 77-55. Since 1992, the Pirates failed to win 77 games in the following seasons*: 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1998, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011.
There are no new seasons left on the list, so let's spend today's post remembering the Shawon Dunston Game. It is inevitable that when a late-season Pirate trade acquisition makes his debut, someone will mention Shawon Dunston. Dunston, you will no doubt remember, was traded to the Pirates on August 31st of 1997 after Kevin Polcovich's injury really depleted the Pirates at the shortstop position (Polcovich replaced Kevin Elster early in the '97 season). Dunston showed up and hit two home runs and drove four runs in in his Pirate debut on September 2nd, practically single-handedly dragged the Pirates to a 6-4 win over the Indians. That win put the Pirates just 1 1/2 games back of the Astros with 23 games left to play, though ultimately the Pirates wouldn't catch them.
This is the thing that gets me about Shawon Dunston's Pirate career: you'd be hard-pressed to find a Pirate fan that remembers 1997 but somehow doesn't remember that game or four homers he hit in his first five games as a Pirate or the ridiculous tear that he was on for basically his entire Pirate career, but Dunston's Pirate career only lasted 18 games. Think about this for a second: one of the hands-down most memorable Pirates of the last 20 years, and the player that I think is probably most associated (or maybe the fourth-most associated, behind a three-way Francisco Cordova/Ricardo Rincon/Mark Smith tie) with the Pirate team that made it later into the season as contenders than any other Pirate team of the last generation didn't even play 20 games for the Pirates.
Think about what that says about the Pirates and what being a Pirate fan has been like over the last 20 years.
There are only three seasons left on this list, but that doesn't mean that there's not work left to be done.
*The strike shortened 1994 and 1995. The '94 Pirates were on pace for 75 wins, but the '95 Pirates were terrible and only on pace for 65 wins.
78 wins
Posted by Pat on Aug 31, 2013 13:08
Good morning. It is August 31st, 2013.
With last night's win, the Pirates are 78-56. Since 1992, the Pirates failed to win 78 games in the following seasons*: 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1998, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011.
There are no new years to cross of the list today, either, but we are in the final stretch of this countdown. That's because the only three seasons left (1997, 1999, and 2012) saw the Pirates win 79, 78, and 79 wins, respectively (remember; the season only gets added to the list when the Pirates surpass the win total from that season). That means that if the Pirates beat the Cardinals tonight, they will have matched their win total in every single one of the last 20 seasons by the end of August. That is how good these Pirates are. That is how bad those Pirates were.
There are three seasons left on the countdown. There is so much work left to be done.
79 wins
Posted by Pat on Sep 1, 2013 14:17
Good morning. It is September 1st, 2013.
With last night's win, the Pirates are 79-56. Since 1992, the Pirates failed to win 79 games in the following seasons*: 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011.
Let's not mince words: 1999 is the year that ruined everything. The Pirates took a step back after 1997's Freak Show, but in 1999 they had a lineup that featured Jason Kendall, Brian Giles, and yes, Al Martin and Kevin Young at the peak of their careers. The rotation had some young promise with Jason Schmidt and Kris Benson, and even Todd Ritchie and Francisco Cordova. With young players like Jose Guillen in Pittsburgh and Aramis Ramirez in the minors, this was supposed to be the group of players that lead the Pirates out of their post-Bonds-slump and into a new winning era of baseball at PNC Park.
For a while, it seemed like that's what would happen. They started 8-5 and they hung around .500 the whole first half of the season, getting as high as five games above it in June. That was good enough to keep them in the division and wild card race through most of June. They were still on the periphery of the race on July 4th. That's when disaster struck. Running out a bunt single, Jason Kendall turned his ankle over on first base and horrifyingly displaced it, popping the bone out of the skin and shearing all of the ligaments. Kendall was in the process of blossoming in 1999; he came up as a high-average guy without much power, but he homered 12 times in 1998 and already had eight homers at the time of his injury in '99. He was slugging .511 at that point, and heading towards a season that would make Andrew McCutchen jealous (his triple-slash line was .332/.428/.511).
Instead, the Pirates lost him entirely and panicked. They traded the massively talented but difficult Jose Guillen to Tampa for catching help — Joe Oliver and Humberto Cota. Guillen had been badly mishandled by the club (they jumped him from Single-A to the Majors in 1997, which could have made him arbitration eligible in 2000 at the age of 23), but he was still one of their best young talents. That trade coupled with the Jon Lieber-for-Brant-Brown trade that had happened over the winter prior to the 1999 season. This all signified something terrifying: Cam Bonifay had put together enough talent to build a winning club, but he had no idea how to polish into something more.
Instead of having a young core of Ramirez and Guillen and Kendall and Giles to lead them into PNC Park, they ruined the development of both Ramirez and Guillen by calling them up at incredibly young ages. They'd given up on Guillen already and they'd irreparably started Ramirez's arbitration clock. Because the 2001 team was a listless wreck floating at sea with an incredibly young manager that was in way over his head (Lloyd McClendon was 42 in his first year on the job), Kendall was allowed to play through a debilitating thumb injury that sapped his power for the rest of his career. Lieber was in Chicago putting up great numbers, and the Pirates were in the process of giving up on Jason Schmidt and sending him to San Francisco to do the same.
The pieces were all there in 1998 and 1999, but the Pirates let them slip through their fingers. Looking back, it was the Kendall injury and the Guillen trade that should've made that apparent. Instead of getting better, there was nothing but worse days ahead for these Pirates.
There are still two seasons left to cross off of this list.
This job is not yet done.