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First Pitch: Pirates Are Eliminated in 2016, But Still Plenty to Like For 2017

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The Pirates were eliminated from the playoffs tonight, after the combination of losing to the Cubs and the Giants winning their game to deliver the final blow. This isn’t a new development. The Pirates have been hovering around .500 for most of the summer. They might end up south of .500, but they are basically a .500 team this year that was only in the race this long because none of the other Wild Card teams pulled away from the pack.

It has been a few years since the Pirates didn’t make the playoffs, or had a losing season. The last time it happened, things were just chaos. The Pirates were coming off an epic collapse in the second half of 2012, and that led to the biggest overreaction to everything involving the Pirates’ organization, applying the poor second half MLB results to things that were actually good, like the farm system at the time. Fortunately, I don’t think we’ll have that type of hyperbole this time around, even if they have a losing season. But one thing will be brought up over and over: How can the Pirates improve from being a .500 team?

This team will mostly be together next year, with some key off-season additions needed, specifically the need for an established starting pitcher. And one flaw that always comes from off-season evaluations is looking at the previous record, and assuming that is the baseline that the team will start from the following season.

If the Pirates finish with a record around .500 this year, that doesn’t mean they’re a .500 club going forward. It took a lot of bad fortune to get them to this point. Andrew McCutchen struggled the first four months of the year. Gerrit Cole didn’t have his best stuff, and dealt with multiple injury issues. Francisco Liriano went from one of the best pitchers in baseball the last three years, to a replacement level pitcher. They had injuries throughout the season to Francisco Cervelli, Josh Harrison, Starling Marte, Jung Ho Kang, and their entire catching situation was a disaster for about a month in the middle of the season.

Some of the struggles definitely fall on Neal Huntington, as he didn’t do enough to upgrade the team this past off-season. And it didn’t help that those rotation additions not only failed to exceed projections, but they also fell way short of their projections, joining the many players on the team who fell below projections. Adding a better starter this off-season probably wouldn’t have accomplished much when considering all of the injuries and struggles listed above. It probably would have just delayed this article and the official elimination until later in the week.

Despite all of this, the Pirates will finish around a .500 record. That’s pretty incredible when you think about all that went wrong this year. There has been this feeling that has existed with Pirates fans for a long time that the only way they can contend is by having everything go right, having certain players exceed projections, and having absolutely no weaknesses. That was mostly fueled by the losing streak, when it seemed like they would never have a winning season or a playoff appearance unless all the stars aligned. But the feeling remained through the winning seasons, despite some big flaws and weaknesses during those years.

The Pirates will be improved next year just by keeping the same roster. That’s going to be read as an optimistic view. It’s not. It’s a realistic view. Look at everything that went wrong above this season, and ask yourself what the odds are that all of that will go wrong again.

Will Andrew McCutchen struggle for two-thirds of the season again?

Will the Pirates see injuries to half of their starting lineup?

Will the entire Opening Day rotation be a disaster, whether through injuries, poor performance, or both?

And yet, with all of this stuff happening, the Pirates will still finish around .500. It won’t take much for them to improve above .500 next year and have a much better shot at contending. They don’t even need every single person above to rebound or stay healthy. Just by keeping the same team, and by most of those guys having a normal season, the Pirates will see improvements.

But the goal here has never been to just be good enough to contend. It’s not good enough to settle for a shot at the Wild Card, or even the Wild Card. And that’s where the improvements come in. It’s fair to say that the injuries and under-performing players played a bigger role in the 2016 struggles than the off-season Neal Huntington had last year. The numbers back that up. But that doesn’t mean the players are the only ones who need to improve. Huntington’s improvement from last off-season to this off-season would go a long way to boosting the Pirates from a team contending for the Wild Card, to being a strong contender for the top Wild Card spot, and maybe even challenging for the NL Central if the Cubs ever fall back to Earth.

Some of the upgrades were already made in 2016. They brought Josh Bell up as a starter for the final two months, and a full season of Bell projects to be better than four months of John Jaso and two months of Bell. They brought Jameson Taillon up around mid-season, and Chad Kuhl up a month later, and both have been better than the guys who started the year in the rotation (which isn’t setting a high bar). Add in an established starter, and hope that Gerrit Cole comes back healthy, and the rotation projects to look much better next year than the results we saw this year.

The biggest thing Huntington can do is avoid last year’s mistake and add a rotation piece to give the prospects and young pitchers an extra boost. It would also help to add a bullpen arm to the mix for the middle-to-late innings, as he did last year with the additions of Neftali Feliz and Juan Nicasio (except the addition of a good rotation option would keep Nicasio in the bullpen all year).

Once again, it’s important to keep perspective about the results this year. This is a team that had one of the worst pitching staffs in baseball, finishing in the bottom third of the league, hovering around the 25th place mark in the majors. They had an offense that was around the top 10 in the majors, and top five in the NL, and that was with plenty of injuries and their star player struggling most of the year. And yet with all of this, the Pirates will finish with a record around .500.

It won’t take a lot for this team to upgrade, and not everything has to go right for them to make the playoffs next year. We saw them get close in a season where nearly everything went wrong. Upgrading the pitching staff this off-season will go a long way toward upgrading the 2017 team and improving their chances of getting back to the post season. And just seeing the bad luck 2016 season replaced by a normal one next year in terms of expected performance and injuries will also go a long way toward upgrading the 2017 team. The Pirates are eliminated in 2016, but their chances of making the playoffs still look good in 2017.

**I got some good notes from instructs today, which I’ll start rolling out tomorrow morning, beginning with an update on left-handed pitcher Taylor Hearn, who was acquired in the Mark Melancon trade.

**Pirates Officially Eliminated From the Playoffs After Loss to Cubs, Giants Win. Alan Saunders talks with a few of the injured players who saw their seasons end before tonight.

**Pirates Notes: Clint Hurdle Discusses the Upcoming Off-Season. Even before the Pirates were eliminated, Hurdle was asked a lot about the upcoming off-season.

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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