#LetsGoBucs: A Summer With the 2012 Pittsburgh Pirates

By Scott McMurtry

A season-long chronicle of the 2012 Pittsburgh Pirates' thrilling rise and sudden fall, presented from the view of a 22-year old, lifelong Bucco fan and his tweeting comrades-in-suffering. #LetsGoBucs captures the heartbeat of a fanbase during one of the most tumultuous years in franchise history, and sheds light on the modern baseball fan experience in the smartphone age. Through Twitter, sabermetrics, and good ol' fashioned sarcasm, #LetsGoBucs offers a telling panorama of the Pirates' twentieth consecutive losing season.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jan 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483501314

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Soapbox: Why Sabermetrics Are Awesome

Baseball is a game of statistics. There’s no getting around it. Baseball players’ value has always been defined by their numbers, and it always will be. Even the staunchest of traditionalists cannot possibly describe a player without citing some statistic, simple as it may be. It’s not good enough to say, he’s a good hitter. How do we know he’s a good hitter? Because he’s a .300 hitter. Ahh, okay then. It would be impossible to evaluate players without statistics—even arithmophobes would have to concede so. Imagine a value debate without numbers:

How do you know Halladay’s a good pitcher?

Uh, well, he gets the opposing hitters out a lot by making them swing and miss, and they don’t seem to score very many runs while he pitches.

Hmmm, alright. Well, who do you think is better, Halladay or Lee?

I don’t know, they both seem to be pretty good at not giving up runs.

You watched each of them start dozens of times last year—do you know who gave up fewer runs?

No, I wasn’t keeping track.

Oh.

Statistics are nothing but the facts of what happened. They’re invaluable. We need them. Our eyes alone simply aren’t good enough. And since we’re going to use statistics either way, we might as well use the most accurate ones we can find. We shouldn’t be content to know a hitter’s batting average (which doesn’t tell us what he did while he wasn’t getting hits, nor what type of hits he was getting) and roughly assume his offensive worth based on that. If you think the involvement of statistics takes something away from your enjoyment of the game, fine—but don’t tell me one player is better than another without facts to back it up. Analysis requires facts, and good analysis requires relevant facts. This is what sabermetrics is all about. It’s not about geeks whipping out their pocket protectors and trying to reduce the game to spreadsheets. It’s about people who love the sport so deeply that they want to know as much about it as they possibly can, and constantly search for ways to better understand it. It’s not something to be afraid of, despite what Joe Morgan and Murray Chass might have you believe. Disparaging the usefulness of the RBI is not an affront to the history of baseball—it’s a positive step toward a more complete understanding of the sport, with logic and research behind it. These numbers and statements aren’t the esoteric outputs of a brigade of computers bent on taking over the game I, Robot style—they’re perfectly commonsense attempts to quantify the things that the human eye sees play out on the field.

Anyway, here are a few of the CRAZY SCARY CONFUSING MADE-UP (read: simple, beneficial, logical, fact-based) statistics you’ll see throughout the book, along with context. If you’re saber-friendly, most of these will probably be familiar, and you can skip to the next chapter where I talk about how good Justin Verlander is at pitching baseballs for 22 pages.

•OPS: On-base percentage Plus Slugging percentage. A more complete picture of a hitter’s offensive skills than batting average, or either of the two percentages alone. Still a bit flawed because it overvalues the slugging component, but, again way better than batting average or most any counting statistic. Often listed also as a triple slashline, in the form AVG/OBP/SLG. Example: Ted Williams’ career slashline is a breathtaking .344/.482/.634 for an OPS of 1.116. The league average OPS these days sits somewhere in the mid-.700s. Anything south of .700 is poor, anything between .800-.900 is quite to very good, above .900 is outstanding, and an OPS greater than 1.000 is stand-and-applaud brilliant.

ALSO: There’s OPS+, which accounts for ballpark factors and league quality. 100 is average—easy enough, right? An .800 OPS sounds pretty good, but if it was produced largely in Coors Field during the 1990s, it’s only going to register in the mid-90s in OPS+. The same .800 OPS posted by an Oakland A during the early 1970s, on the other hand, counts for about a 135 OPS+. Only fair. Generally, 125 is very good, 150 is great, and anything above is incredible. 85 or below borders on unacceptable for a regular, unless he’s a slick-fielding shortstop or excellent defensive catcher (more on this below).

•FIP: Fielding Independent Pitching. Ever think a pitcher is getting super unlucky, as he seems to dominate but falls victim to a ton of bloop hits? Or getting super lucky, loading the bases all the time and miraculously getting out of jams without runs scoring? Check out his FIP. FIP is designed to eliminate the luck components of pitching—namely, strength of defense and patterns of stranding runners—in order to show how well he’s really pitching, not how the luck gods have treated him. It’s results over process. FIP takes a pitcher’s strikeout rate, walk rate, and home run rate (the three best predictors of future success) and puts them into an equation to show what his ERA should’ve been in a luck-neutral environment. Believe it or not, really good pitchers generally aren’t too much different from average or below average pitchers at preventing hits on balls in play. It’s a terrific way to identify lucky and unlucky pitchers over the course of a season, and see who is a good bounce-back or regression candidate going forward. There are some pitchers who don’t fit neatly into fielding independent models (normally flyball-prone guys who can naturally reduce their batting average on balls in play, or pitchers who simply don’t meet the major league skill threshold component of the formula), but the overwhelming majority of the time it tells you how a guy is actually throwing the ball, results be damned. It’s on the same scale as ERA, so 4.00 is about average, 3.50 is good, 3.00 is excellent, and 2.50 is usually about as good as it gets. 4.50’s not that great and anything over 5.00 is poor.

UZR/DRS: Ultimate Zone Rating/Defensive Runs Saved. These are two ways we can estimate how many runs a player saves or costs his team in the field over the course of a season. They both record every ball hit in or near a fielder’s defensive zones and determine how many plays he made above or below the league average. Because, at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how many errors a guy made on balls hit right at him (fielding percentage, the old metric)—it matters how many plays he makes in total. And each play has a value attached to it: if Manny Ramirez lets an easily catchable ball drop in front of him, that only costs his team one base, but when Jim Edmonds leaps high above the wall to take a homer away, that saves at least one, if not multiple runs. They also include points for outfield throwing arms, propensity to turn double plays, and pretty much anything else measurable you could imagine. DRS is slightly more subjective (which is why I prefer it, to be honest), as it relies in part on people watching the game to override the system and say something like, hey, even though the model says this was an out-of-zone bonus play, the team was in a shift, so Pedro Alvarez shouldn’t get extra credit for fielding a ball that was hit right at him, for example. DRS and UZR provide the fielding component for WAR, which….

WAR: Wins Above Replacement: The Holy Grail of statistics. An estimation of how many wins a player provides to his team above a bench player or minor league replacement. Sound crazy? It’s not. It’s an aggregation of the amount of runs a position player provides at the plate, on the basepaths, and in the field, and how that compares to the usual alternative. For pitchers, it’s an estimate of how many runs they prevent, with attempts to mitigate for defense and ballpark. There’s also a positional adjustment—a catcher who puts up a .700 OPS, for example, is a heckuva lot more acceptable than a first baseman who OPSes .700, because very few catchers hit at a league average clip, while almost all starting first basemen do. It’s really not that complicated. The medium of baseball is runs, and runs are created by accumulating bases. Given the amount of information we have today, we can estimate how many bases and runs a player generates, and convert it to WAR for an apples-to-apples comparison between players of different positions. There are some discrepancies between the various WAR formats, because Baseball-Reference, FanGraphs, and Baseball Prospectus all weight different factors differently, but you can triangulate the three in order to estimate a player’s true worth. An average everyday player produces about 2 WAR for a full season. A good player puts up between, oh, 3 and 4.5 WAR, and a very good player sits somewhere between 4.5 and 6. Anything greater than 6 WAR a year places you in perennial MVP debates and merits well over $15 million in salary. Yes, a player can have a negative WAR, and no, this is not someone you want in your lineup. Just for fun: the best season in baseball history by WAR was Babe Ruth’s 1923 campaign, which Baseball-Reference pegs at 13.7 WAR and FanGraphs counts as 15.6 WAR. The only thing to draw from those figures is that Babe Ruth was not human.

Conclusion: some of these acronyms might sound arcane, but they’re grounded in coherent observations. In the next 300 and some pages, I’ll explain more clearly why they’re better than the traditional stats. But for now, that’s probably a good primer. Good enough to get you through the first few chapters without mentally overheating, at least.

May 18:

Venerated Verlander Vexes Vapid Visiting Victims

Tigers 6, Pirates 0.

On May 18, the Pirates traveled to Detroit for the first interleague series of the year. That night, they were nearly no-hit by Justin Verlander.

Ho, hum.

No-hitters are obviously a very rare event. There have only been 274 in the history of Major League Baseball, which comes out to around two each year. It is not accurate (or responsible) to predict that any pitcher will throw a no-hitter on a given day, due to the combination of factors that must come together for one to occur.

All this being said, I was about as surprised to see Justin Verlander flirt with a no-no against the Pirates as I was when I heard the announcement that President Obama had decided to run for re-election.

It just made too much sense. Verlander might be the best pitcher in baseball, and the 2012 Pirates might end up being the worst offensive team of the century. If you’ve ever watched Verlander pitch, you know he has arguably the nastiest stuff in the game: an explosive fastball that he revs up from the 92-95 MPH range up to triple digits in the late innings¹⁰, a wipeout 12-6 curveball that dives like a jet in a Blue Angels show, and a plus changeup that seems to disappear between the start of the infield grass and the plate. His repertoire is daunting even to the best big league hitters, and when you catch glimpses of him in action, it’s easy to see how he dominated his way to the first Cy Young/MVP season since Dennis Eckersley in 1992. The Pittsburgh Pirates, outside of Andrew McCutchen, do not feature anything close to the best of big league hitters. Or average big league hitters, for that matter. Here’s the lineup we trotted out against the guy who might be the best pitcher on Planet Earth:

Josh Harrison, DH, a .256 singles hitter with the plate discipline of a six year old who’s a dozen Mountain Dews deep. To borrow an overused Stuart Scott joke, he has as many walks this season as I do.

Neil Walker, 2B, a solid and reliable bat for his first two seasons, but off to a slow start in 2012 marked by a noticeable lack of power (.628 OPS).

Andrew McCutchen, CF, one of the best players in all of baseball, even if only a few dozen people outside the 412 and 724 area codes know it. In the midst of a scorching hot streak that’s driven his OPS up 203 points in the last 10 games—so, Verlander’s only formidable opposition for the night.

Pedro Alvarez, 3B, the guy who, along with McCutchen, is supposed to lead the Bucco resurgence of the 2010s. Since a promising offensive explosion from April 25-May 3, though, has looked like the strikeout prone, overmatched 2011 version of himself.¹¹ He should be an easy 3 Ks for Verlander.

Garrett Jones, RF, who hasn’t been anything but a platoon starter at best since his magical .938 OPS rookie year in 2009. The league has since discovered that he can’t hit offspeed pitches or baseballs thrown by left-handed persons, and his usefulness has since waned.

Casey McGehee, 1B, the ex-Brewer who we bought low last offseason following his dreadful .223/.280/.346 2011 campaign. All he has done so far this year is convince the Pirates that slash line was not a fluke: he enters the night barely north of the Mendoza line and OPSing an anemic .573.

Nate McLouth, LF, another preseason free agent acquisition who returned for his second tour of duty with the Bucs. McLouth lost the ability to hit major league pitching shortly after we traded him to the Braves in 2009, so he was another bargain buy for Neal Huntington. Comes into the game hitting a svelte .167. Very quickly, any feelings of nostalgia for McLouth’s 2008 All-Star season with the Pirates have already given way to the clamors of Why the hell did we bring this guy back?!

Clint Barmes, SS, who holds the distinction of a possessing an even lower batting average than McLouth at .162. He’s slugging .208. Everyone knew that Barmes was signed more for his glove than his bat, but he has looked downright dreadful at the plate for the first month and a half. After he gets behind in the count, he starts hacking away at a rate that would make Harrison blush. Once Justin Verlander dies and goes to baseball heaven, his reward for a long career of delightful hurling will be to pitch against a lineup of alternating Harrisons and Barmeses for eternity. And he will enjoy perpetual bliss.

Michael McKenry, C, the darling of casual Pirates fans everywhere due to his cute nickname, stocky build, and one dramatic, game winning home run he hit off Carlos Marmol last year on a night that a lot of people were watching. All of this obscures the fact that he has a basic inability to hit above the Triple-A level and doesn’t do anything spectacular behind the dish. Despite this, he currently has a .688 OPS in 47 plate appearances, good for fourth on the team to this point!

Not exactly Murderer’s Row, is it? I hope it doesn’t surprise you that the Pirates rank dead last in runs scored. They’re a full 13 runs behind the San Diego Padres, who start a combination of Chase Headley and a bunch of nobodies. The Pirates’ 18-20 record to this point is attributable to (a) remarkably good pitching, (b) remarkably good fortune (their Pythagorean W-L—an estimation of what a team’s record should be based on run differential—suggests they’ve played closer to 16-22 ball), and (c) possible divine intervention.¹² It’s an offense that is physically painful to watch on a daily basis.

And remember, they’re up against Justin Verlander. Verlander already has two career no-hitters and seems to take one into the late innings, oh, five times a year. He has the CYA/MVP distinction, two AL strikeout crowns, and he’s pitched in the World Series. I watch highlights of him mowing down hitters, see the insane radar gun readings, and read his final box scores only to conclude, "How does anyone hit this guy? The Pirates stand pretty much no chance tonight, because even if Charlie Morton overcomes his recent struggles with the longball, anything short of a shutout isn’t going to be good enough. The tight-knit Pirates Twitter community affectionately refers to Charlie’s raw pitching talent as the Electric Stuff," but if he has Electric Stuff, Verlander’s the chairman of GE.

I get home from Chick-fil-A (my parents were out, what do you expect me to do, make dinner?) just in time for the start of the action. Given the yearly lack of hitting talent, games against good opposing pitchers are the most exciting Pirates-related events to watch, so I wasn’t going to miss an inning if I could help it. Plus, Charlie’s starting for us, and he’s just about my favorite pitcher in the league. Verlander brushes aside the top of the Pirates lineup in the first, with the minor hiccup of a base on balls to the number two hitter, Walker. He gets McCutchen to hit a harmless pop-up to Jhonny Peralta at short, eliminating his only challenge for the first three innings. Sufficiently relaxed, he lulls Pedro to sleep with three fastballs before breaking off his only curve of the inning to even the count at 2-2, then freezes him on another sizzling fastball to the outside corner. It might’ve been outside, but C.B. Bucknor—consistently rated by players as the worst umpire in MLB—is not going to pass up the opportunity to dramatically ring Pedro Alvarez up with his over-the-top strike three call.¹³ Inning over. Verlander throws 16 pitches, more than I expected. He’s not even throwing his normal velocity yet—he waited until the final heater to crack 95. Further proof that he saves his best fastball for the big pitches.

We find out early that Charlie isn’t up to the task of matching Verlander zero for zero. His first inning is a minor debacle. He gets leadoff man (and onetime Pirate/Pittsburgh native!) Don Kelly to ground out easily to second for the first out, but follows it up by allowing a line drive single to Andy Dirks and ringing doubles to the big boys in the middle of the Detroit order, Miguel Cabrera and Prince Fielder. Dirks and Cabrera both score on Fielder’s two-bagger. After terrorizing us as a Brewer to the tune of 27 homers in 98 games, Prince is back at it as a Tiger. At least I don’t have to see him do the choreographed, boxing-themed home run dance with Braun outside the dugout after he goes deep anymore. Charlie briefly settles down to retire Delmon Young on a soft grounder to Barmes, but skips a 2-1 pitch in front of McKenry that allows all 260¹⁴ pounds of Prince to advance to third. A walk to Avila puts men on first and third for the struggling Brennan Boesch, who Charlie strikes out on a 1-2 curveball in the dirt. The Fort makes the throw to first and the inning is finally over, but the game has all but been decided. My confidence level that we can scratch two runs off Verlander is lower than Josh Harrison’s career walk rate. Might as well sit back, relax, and enjoy the fireworks show Verlander is about to put on.

The second and third innings roll along. Both pitchers face the minimum amount of hitters—Verlander giving the Pirates absolutely nothing, Charlie allowing just a groundball single to Peralta before quickly inducing a 6-4-3 double play out of the next hitter, Raburn. In the bottom of the third, Charlie strikes both Cabrera and Fielder out swinging, offering a glimpse at his potential to develop into a swing-and-miss pitcher. For as good as his stuff is, he doesn’t avoid very many bats. In time, I hope he can take that next step in his development. He’s definitely got the capability.

What could’ve been a pitcher’s duel turns into a Tiger blowout in the fourth. Verlander rolls through the top of the inning with a flyout and back-to-back strikeouts of McCutchen and Alvarez. He’s getting stronger, noticeably starting to amp up the velocity on his fastball. The chances of hitting it are inversely proportional to the speed. Compounding our problems, he’s also smart: locked in another 3-2 count with Alvarez, he chooses to throw a changeup this time, which Pedro swings through wildly. Verlander knew he wasn’t going to take another called strike three, and caught him cheating on the fastball.

Charlie’s outing goes to hell in the bottom. He throws a 1-1 sinker that dives to Delmon Young’s knee level, six inches inside, and Young slams a solo shot to kick off the inning. I can’t believe he got his hands around quickly enough to hit it out. Tim Neverett and John Wehner, the Pirates’ TV announcers for the night, express their alarm that Charlie’s now allowed five homers to right handed hitters this year, compared to just one in all of 2011. Truth be told, Charlie’s home run to fly ball rate (HR/FB) was unsustainably low last year (5.6%), and now it’s unsustainably high (20%). HR/FB rates jump around on pitchers all the time, especially in the early part of a season. It’s just an anomaly that he’s allowed so many to right-handers so far. He didn’t do anything wrong on that particular pitch, either—Young just put a ridiculous swing on a ball he should’ve tapped to third base. Charlie’s bad luck continues as Avila and Boesch both hit grounders that find holes. The dark side of being an extreme groundball pitcher is that sometimes there are days like this, when everything seems to get through. He recovers to get a soft lineout from Peralta and a weak fielder’s choice groundout from Raburn, leaving men at first and third with two outs. But our old friend Don Kelly lines an 0-2 pitch into right field, causing me to slam my couch and groan in frustration.¹⁵ I hate seeing Charlie’s line blow up, especially because he couldn’t put Kelly away ahead in the count. Any illusions of a comeback have officially been ended. My reaction is