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Pirates Notes: Clint Hurdle Discusses the Upcoming Off-Season

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PITTSBURGH — With the Pirates facing mathematic elimination from playoff contention as soon as Tuesday night and it seeming more and more like an eventuality every day, Pirates manager Clint Hurdle was asked a lot about his thoughts for the off-season in his daily press briefing. Here are the highlights:

What is needed to catch Cubs and other playoff-bound teams in 2017?

Hurdle: The game will always start with pitching. Always has, always will. If you look at it any other way, I think you’re confused. The rotation strength is significant for the teams that will finish playing in October. I think if you peel back the layers of their rotational strength, it’s real.

You have to win the games that you have a lead in late — bullpen strength. Then you have to have an offense that can find different ways to score runs. We have some of those components in play. We had to retreat our starting rotation this year. As the season went on, we found some pitchers moving forward. We took some chances early on some things that didn’t work out as anticipated.

I think we’re well aware of what we need to do improve and to be a championship-caliber team. We’ll start on that track once the season is over.

It’s always going to take consistent defense. That also is predicated by your ability to pitch, and then when you pitch well you don’t have to score as many runs, which helps your offense. The engine part of it is the starting rotation.

Can you separate pitching from defense?

Hurdle: Outside of the strikeout, they’re married with the shifting now that goes on and us identifying the two-seam fastball as a priority. We weren’t able to have as many two-seam fastball guys in our rotation this year as we did in the past. We’re always learning and looking to learn. Consistency and your defensive reliability is always going to be important.

What we strive here is to be extraordinary at the ordinary. We haven’t had guys that jump out with range. … What we’ve done is by our shifting and our defensive analytics, we’ve put away as many outs as anybody without the same amount of range. I do believe there is a large percentage of the time the pitching and defense are married to each other.

How does having the majority of the lineup in place change this offseason?

Hurdle: There’s some strengths to continuity. As you watch players grow and develop, you can highlight things. You can peel back the layers. There’s been growth in certain areas for guys. There’s been some areas that maybe haven’t been as productive this year as they’ve been in the past.

How do you find ways to getting back to that kind of form and fashion?

Hurdle: The continuity to continue to work to show where we saw the strengths, where we saw the stabilities, where we saw the consistencies play out better whether it’s two-strike approach, whether it’s a little bit more lift in a swing for a certain player, whether it’s ability to hit through the ball and not be so pull oriented.

I do believe there’s also some strength in teams that are built for championships to have a core group of players that stay together and remain together. There are challenges with transition. There’s challenges with moving people in and out and those are always going to happen in this game. So you’re looking for common fabric in the players you do acquire so you’re not starting from scratch all the time.

I like the fact that we’ve got some really good young players in place for some time together. I think it bodes well for us.

The one things that’s certain about our game is that it’s going to change and rosters are going to change. If you look at the World Series champion last year and look at the changes they’ve put in play this year or the World Series champion the year before, it’s a transitory game. How you adapt to change is probably a better question to be answered.

NOTES

Gregory Polanco (facial contusion) returns to the lineup. Both Starling Marte (back spasms) and Neftali Feliz (arm) remain day-to-day. … Ryan Vogelsong, who could very well be making his next-to-last MLB start, is still making adjustments to try and improve after a few below-expectation starts. He said earlier this week he’s “still grinding” and has made no plans for the future.

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