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First Pitch: The Spark the Pirates Needed to Turn Things Around?

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For tonight’s article, I was planning on writing about how the Pittsburgh Pirates were pretty much out of the playoff race. Then they came back in the ninth inning with two home runs, winning it on a walk off homer by Starling Marte. The new topic? The same topic.

I’d write about how that might be the spark the Pirates need to turn things around, but that might be making too much out of one really good win, which was three outs away from being yet another poor loss. We don’t know if this will be the spark to allow the Pirates to turn things around, or if that home run and yesterday’s day at the plate for Marte is a sign that he’s turning it around.

What I know is that the Pirates need this to be the spark to turn things around. They’re currently 11-18. By most simulations of playoff odds, it will take 86 wins to make the Wild Card game this year. If the Pirates want to make 86 wins, they need to go 75-58, which is a .564 winning percentage.

That’s not impossible. The Pirates were 79-56 from the start of May until the end of the season last year, which is a .585 winning percentage. So they have won at a similar rate before. But the Pirates this year have not been playing anywhere close to the Pirates from last year.

I also believe that this team is better than they’ve shown in April. I wrote this week about how Neil Walker and Pedro Alvarez are bounce back candidates. Those aren’t the only two. There have been several position players and pitchers on this team who have played below expectations, and several of them have advanced metrics that say they will bounce back.

It’s not just me saying that the Pirates should have been better. Dan Szymborski, the creator of ZiPS, had a stat today showing that the Pirates have seen their playoff chances drop by 42%.

That shows that the Pirates had a much better chance of reaching the playoffs at the start of the year. They were seen as a team that had a good shot of making the playoffs. And now their odds have plummeted after a horrible month in April.

That’s pretty much the story of the season so far. The Pirates came in as a team that could contend, and they were very disappointing in April. Now they’re in a situation where they have very little room for error. They need to flip the switch. They need the opposite of their recent 4-15 stretch.

In short, tonight’s game might not be the spark they needed, but their season is at a stage where they desperately need this spark to turn things around.

Links and Notes

**Prospect Watch: Alen Hanson Heating Up, Wyatt Mathisen Hits First Homer

**Draft Prospect Watch: Trea Turner Scores Five Runs in Carlos Rodon’s Win

**Prospect Highlights: Homer From Alen Hanson, Ngoepe Continues to Hit

**Minor League Schedule: Doubleheaders For Altoona and Bradenton on Saturday

Tim Williams
Tim Williams
Tim is the owner, producer, editor, and lead writer of PiratesProspects.com. He has been running Pirates Prospects since 2009, becoming the first new media reporter and outlet covering the Pirates at the MLB level in 2011 and 2012. His work can also be found in Baseball America, where he has been a contributor since 2014 and the Pirates' correspondent since 2019.

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