162 and Out

October has started off cold and rainy. That feels about right.

Back on April 8, in a post titled “The Boys of Bummer,” I’d chronicled the annual torture of being a rabid (as in “sick” even more than “devoted”) fan of the Pittsburgh Pirates. Toward the end of that piece, I’d noted, “I am not fooled by their record at this writing of 4 wins versus 3 losses. There is every reason to believe the club again will reach season’s end with far more losses than wins.” Of course, I needn’t have been Nostradamus to have made that prediction. I needed only a grasp of history, given the fact that the Bucs’ previous winning season concluded the same autumn Bill Clinton first was elected president of the United States.

The 2011 season of the Pittsburgh Pirates ended this past Wednesday night with a 7-3 loss in Milwaukee to the playoffs-bound Milwaukee Brewers. The Pirates closed out the campaign with 72 wins and 90 losses. The positive spin is that it represented a 15-win improvement on the club’s abysmal (even by its own sad standards) 2010 record, and was good for fourth place in the six-team National League Central Division rather than their standard spot in the cellar. But that spin overlooks the fact that the team was enthrallingly and improbably competitive for more than half the season, and stood proudly at 53-47 in late July, before wresting the word “freefallin’” away from Tom Petty and making it their own.

Did I write “improbably” competitive? Given that the club entered the 2011 season with more or less the same personnel who’d lost 105 games the previous year, I hadn’t exactly been hopeful at the outset that the string of losing seasons at last would end. But—and I won’t bore non-baseball fans with a lot of details here—the pitching far exceeded expectations for days, weeks, then months, while the hitting and defense proved sufficient to vault the Pirates above the .500 break-even mark and even keep them there for a while. Neither I nor most other Pirate partisans took it seriously when the team claimed first place for a day or two in July for the first time in forever. But we, or I at least, foolishly began to hope that a winning record over the course of the entire 162 games might be attainable.

But then the pitching collapsed, the hitting got even worse, and the defense turned offensive. It’s not easy, frankly, to be six games over .500 with only 62 games left to play and still finish 18 under. But damn if my boys didn’t do it. Management’s post-mortem for the past few days has been that the early success proved that the basic talent is there, while the buzz-killing plummet largely was due to inexperience. Sure, the team maybe could use a few more good players in 2012, this bill of goods reads, but now that our young pitchers have thrown those extra innings once, and now that our young hitters know better how to pace themselves physically and mentally over the course of a six-month season, look out for us next year!

The problem with such cheerleading is that the team has no credibility when it comes either to forking over dough or evaluating talent. Pirates fans have heard all this stuff from the Front Office many times before. Yes, the Jekyll-Hyde splits of so many players’ first- and second-half statistics this year does suggest there is much good to be found amongst the evil, as it were. But then, the club’s record on maximizing its players’ potential is far from stellar. This is evidenced by the fact that the major leagues are littered with good-to-great ex-Pirates who stumbled and floundered until they prospered under the mentoring and nurturing of other organizations.

Getting back to what I’d written in April, I’d expressed hope that, come what may, I might this year lighten up considerably about the Pirates—not let their fortunes so profoundly affect my moods, or so lessen my enjoyment of live baseball at Nationals Park, or on so many nights bedevil Lynn with my OCD stratagems for influencing athletic contests taking place hundreds or thousands of miles away. I made a little bit of progress on those fronts, although of course it was easier when the wins still flowed. Even during the dark months of August and September, though, my attempts to be philosophical were fitfully successful. I obsessed a little less and shrugged a little more. I saw several games through to their completion at Nationals Park even after the out-of-town scoreboard recorded a Pirates loss. I was better at enjoying the successes of my hometown team in DC, which by many measures had an outstanding year, and whose future is bright.

If the Pirates’ future looks less luminous—and it does—there’s still some good news. They’ve now experienced some real success on which to build. Their headier moments in 2011 brought fans to the ballpark and captured the city’s imagination, which might encourage management to spend more money to make more money. A few of the current players look like the real deal, and laws of probability suggest that one or two of the team’s recent high draft picks (fruits of their ineptitude) just might pan out.

None of which makes today—a day on which, once again, playoff baseball will be played by other, better teams—any less cold and rainy. But it, and my incremental emotional progress this year, stand to make next April’s inevitable renewal of optimism feel a little less naïve, and a little more maturely measured.