The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Well, here we are at, give or take, the half-way point of the baseball season.

So in the immortal words of Kenny, "Meet me halfway".

ESPN has a great stat sorter here for hitting, here for fielding, and here for pitching. So let's take a look at some stats (as of today, 4 games past the half-way point) and what not.

The Good:

- The Pirates are 11th out of 30 ML teams in batting average. They're 11th in doubles and 4th in triples. Lastly, they're 15th, in the top half in all of baseball, in total hits.

And those numbers are all after a horrible series in Houston and the final game against Florida (a shutout), which technically falls into the second half of the year. Actually, when I first looked at this on Wednesday, they were 10th in hits, 9th in doubles, and 2nd in triples.

- The Pirates are dead in the middle in pitching team ERA at 14th. So we'll call that a good, especially based on the question marks entering the season.

- The Pirates rank 5th in all of baseball when it comes to quality starts for the pitching staff.

- The defense has been fantastic. The Pirates are 27th in the league in errors committed, which ranks them 4th in fielding %.

The Bad:

- The Pirates rank 20th in both runs scored and extra base hits. Now though, for how critical we are of the offense, they're not quite in the bottom third of the league and for a team picked to be the worst in baseball at the start of the year, that's not too shabby, but certainly not good, nor ugly.

- The team OBP ranks 19th. Another not good, but not quite ugly stat.

The Ugly:

- The lack of power in the lineup is glaring. The Pirates rank 29th in home runs hit. That leads to a drop in their team OPS (being that their OBP isn't too shabby), ranking them 24th in the league.

- The offense also strikes out too much, they have struck out the 13th most times in the league, while walking the 25th least amount.

Seems that their pitch selection and patience at the plate needs worked on.

- For all the quality starts goodness, the pitching staff ranks 23rd in team WHIP. That's not good.

- Also not good is there ranking of 23rd when it comes to BAA (batting average against).

To sum that up, teams are getting players on base a lot by hits and walks, but with our ERA stat so much higher, it shows that our pitchers are working out of a lot of jams and not allowing those runners to score. Play with fire like that enough, and you get burnt. It could be only a matter of time until the other shoe drops and teams score more runs.

- The Pirates' pitching staff ranks 30th, dead last, in strike outs. Ugly.

- The Pirates rank 19th in RBI's. So for a team to be 1th in batting average, yet 19th in RBI's, shows that they just aren't knocking those runners in.


Add it Up:

So what does it all mean?

It means that the Pirates are a wildly inconsistent team, one that still may end up being dead last in the league, as predicted by preseason publications. As of now though, I feel ok saying that they are better than we thought they'd be.

So stay tuned as the second half should promise some more changes to the Buccos.

And in case one was curious, the Pirates scored 101 runs in April and 113 in May (both with McLouth) and 123 in June (without McLouth), so the trade of Nate didn't hurt the on field production in scoring runs (which is the bottom line).