Shelf life of Cardinals series about to run out
The most dangerous week of the summer has us surrounded now, and by us I mean that suspect subset of society who depend on baseball’s quotidian comforts to propel their day-to-day biorhythms toward relative sanity.
Deprived of any real baseball for four consecutive days, we might find ourselves veering off the information superhighway, if not an actual highway, distracted by real world data that has somehow filled the temporary void of pitching matchups and Gregory Polanco’s batting average with runners in scoring position and less than two out against left-handed Gemini’s who carry the recessive gene for eye color.
’Tis a dark and lonely highway.
Just yesterday I was reading the legal news on the web site of the Pennsylvania Milk Marketing Board (see?), where I found out that today is the last day when you can legally milk any significance from the Pirates’ final two games before the All-Star break.
So clearly I won’t be wasting this opportunity.
When the Pirates brought baseball’s unofficial first half to a close with twin show-stopping extrainning victories and sliced the seemingly eternal National League Central Division advantage of the St. Louis Cardinals to 2½ games, speculation on the ultimate viability of manager Clint Hurdle’s team got itself slammed into overdrive.
It was the very kind of adrenaline flash flood that sometimes carries all careful and meaningful Steelers analysis to the boundaries to clear space for two words: Super Bowl.
Thus a part of Pittsburgh has spent the week pondering the baseball corollary: World Series. And save for the people who’ve found something on the Pirates landscape to complain about every step of the way since they turned into the best team in baseball May 9 (they’re 40-19 since), no one was exactly hitting the breaks on Series talk regardless of how prudent that might be.
The previous odds I’ve seen put the Pirates’ odds of winning the World Series at 14-1, or right about in the middle of the 10 or 12 teams with the talent to do it: St. Louis (7-1), Washington (71), Kansas City (8-1), Los Angeles Dodgers (8-1), San Francisco (10-1), Chicago Cubs (16-1), Detroit (18-1), Houston (18-1), Baltimore (20-1), New York Yankees (20-1) and Toronto (20-1). So can they? Sure. Will they? Well, there are plenty of hurdles, not incuding the one wearing No. 13 in the dugout, and the principle hurdle hasn’t changed — the Cardinals.
The Pirates have won 20 of the past 28 meetings with St. Louis and eight of the previous nine series (splitting the other one), but all that happened at PNC Park. St. Louis still leads by 2½ and has six of the nine remaining games against the Pirates at home.
But even at that, there’s a wild card in the relationship, and not the one you would think. Since the start of the 2012 season, one Pirates hitter has stung the Cardinals worse than any hitter in baseball in that span. He has drilled 14 homers and driven in 46 runs, and he is none other than Pedro Alvarez, who in the five-game playoff series between the teams two years ago went 6 for 17 with 3 homers, 6 RBIs and a 1.362 OPS (on-base plus slugging percentage).
None of those numbers, interestingly enough, compelled Hurdle to put him the lineup Sunday night for the national TV game, the one that gave all this Series talk the momentum it’s to carry into Milwaukee for the weekend.
If beating your most important division rival three times in three nights, the final two in 14- and 10-inning games in which you trailed after the ninth, is going to sustain its own significance, it will be from a potentially permanent sense that these Pirates — the 2015 Pirates — are never out of any game.
In the gradual and painstaking development of champions, that’s important not just in what it means to the collective team psyche, but to the collective psyche of the opponent. It’s the quality that makes opponents feel like they’re behind when they’re ahead, the quality illuminated for me again a year ago upon the 35th anniversary of the previous time the Pirates won the World Series, illuminated by the man who was on the mound when that happened, Kent Tekulve.
“I remember we’d sit in the dugout and look across at the other team,” Tekulve said, “and we’d say, ‘Look at them; they think they’re winning.’ ”
And, of course, there’s the other possible quantification of those final two victories, the one offered by Cardinals manager Mike Matheny. “It’s just two games.” And so it is, but it seemed to have its own little place in history, did it not? In the history of Pirates baseball, there has never been a 36year wait for a world champion, a wait like this.
So sure, maybe they’ll win it all, and maybe for no better reason than because it is time they did.