Diary of a long suffering Pirates fan. Games 30-32. Fire Canada! Call up Mason Rudolph! Is KP batting cleanup?
But most of all, everyone please stay positive. It’s the negative thinking that’ll get you.
I wonder who is looking forward to the upcoming Pirates vs. Rockies series more? The Colorado pitchers who will get to face the hitters that have scored the fewest runs in baseball since April 15? Or the Pirates’ hitters who will get to face the pitchers that have given up the most runs in baseball? Hard call.
The Pirates return home to Pittsburgh licking their wounds after a 1-5 California road trip. In the six games in California, the Pirates were a collective 2 for 36 with runners in scoring position and stranded a total of 46 runners in the two series. For context. 2 for 36 is a .055 batting average. It’s like having a pitcher come to bat with a runner in scoring position every time. Only worse. Even pitchers batted .100 in similar situations when they were still batting in the National League. Perhaps the Pirates didn’t get the memo about the National League adopting the DH.
In the Oakland series, they managed only 3 runs. And not once in the entire series did they have multiple hits in one inning. The final insult came on Wednesday afternoon when journeyman pitcher Ross Stripling shut out the Pirates for six innings. Stripling was 0-5 coming into the game and hadn’t won a game in the majors since 2022. Guess he was happy to see the Pirates come to town. And the A’s, as a whole, are probably disappointed to see the Pirates leave town. “Too bad we only play them three times per year,” they’re probably thinking.
The Pirates run production drought is so bad that Pirates fans now know who the hitting coach is…. which, unfortunately, is never a good thing. “Andy Haines? Isn’t that the guy that used to try to sell Mr. Douglas useless stuff on the television show, “Green Acres?” “He’s the batting coach? Oh, no. My bad. That was Mr. Haney. Right. This is Haines, not Haney. This is so confusing. I thought it was Matt Canada who was the Pirates offensive Coordinator. Didn’t the Pirates already fire Canada? Oh, that was the Steelers. Right. Well, either way, they need to fire this Mr. Haney guy. Clearly, the stuff he is selling the Pirates hitters is as useless as the stuff he tried to sell to Mr. Douglas for all those seasons on Green Acres. Arnold the Pig might do better as the hitting coach. Is he available?”
So, there were a lot of dejected and upset Pirates after the game. All of them were disappointed in their performance. All of them stoically pronounce a determination to get better. And all of them trying to stay positive in a sea of negative results. As reported by Joe Smeltzer of Pittsburgh Baseball Now, Andrew McCutchen said after the game: “What happens when everything is about negativity? Your mind follows that as well. How are you going to succeed when you’re thinking negatively, right? So, you have to do your best to stay positive.”
