Were this Pirates season a prize fight, they'd have stopped it this week in Los Angeles.
Habitual students of this rolling disaster will remind you that Bob Nutting's 2021 crew looked to be overmatched since about mid-May, but the accumulated damage and resulting embarrassment of late summer should allow them to be excused from the last six weeks.
Wednesday's 16th consecutive loss to the Dodgers, this one a 9-0 skunking that put the composite score of that specific nose dive at Los Angeles 110-Pittsburgh 42, featured what seemed like an inordinate number of cutaways by the local cable broadcast to manager Derek Shelton in the Pirates dugout. I'm guessing because someone thought that instead of his standard baleful stare at what no one should have to watch night after day after night, Shelty might actually reach for a towel and fling it over the ropes.
Pirates telecasts, still holding strong at about 90 percent happy talk/Bucco propaganda (hot prospects having monster weeks!), further noted this week that color man Bob Walk, in nine career starts at Dodger Stadium, went 5-2 with a 2.89 earned-run average.
Too bad he didn't pitch in this series.
Instead, the Pirates headed for LAX and a late charter to St. Louis having lost 15 of their last 17, 19 of their last 23, 23 of their last 29, and, since the start of Nutting's latest management restructuring, 120 of their last 181.
Everyone inside the organization and everyone outside who still cares about it knew this season had a chance to go sideways from the start, but raise your hand if you had Yoshitomo Tsutsugo batting cleanup and playing first base on Aug. 17.
Tsutsugo this week joined a long list of eminently unqualified major leaguers the Pirates have harbored for most of the summer. In 49 big-league games prior to the weekend, Yoshi's hit .183. He was a good player in Japan years ago, which is apparently all you need to interest an organization that's been attracted to good players in India, good players in Africa, good players in Lithuania — none of whom ever became good players in Pittsburgh.
Nothing against Yoshi. We wish him well, and the same for John Nogowski, who earned a three-week run as a faux folk hero simply for adopting the un-Pirates-like posture of not taking any crap, and for Ka'ai Tom, for Will Craig, for Hoy Park, for Anthony Alford, Dustin Fowler, Jared Oliva, Rodolfo Castro, Cole Tucker, Troy Stokes Jr., Ildemaro Vargas, and Hunter Owen, any or all of whom, were they in most any other organization, might not have enjoyed their cold cup coffee in the show.
The same could be said of up to half of the 30 pitchers Shelton has run out there to fashion the club's wretched 5.09 ERA. Thirty pitchers! It's not even September.
Anyway, consider this precept. I'm not a fan. Not invested. For me, this stuff makes no difference. They win, I write. They lose, I write. But for the people still invested, somehow, imagine the dispiriting import of this Pirates summer, and all of last year and the year before, and for most every summer back to 1992. For the people who drew such joy from Bonds and Bonilla and Van Slyke and Drabek, and especially for those old enough to have hung on every swashbuckling exploit of Clemente and Stargell and Blass and Oliver, imagine looking up one day and finding Ka'ai Tom hitting third for the Pirates.
That's where Clemente hit.
Tsutsugo hitting fourth.
That's where Stargell hit.
You can't tell those Pirates fans that everything will be all right because Henry Davis is off to a good start for the Greensboro Grasshoppers.
The big tell on the 2021 club was not that Ka'ai Tom once hit in Clemente's spot, or even that first baseman Will Craig started a rundown between first and home, which no team had ever done, at least no team whose oldest player wasn't 12.
No, the big tell came in what Mike Tomlin might call situational baseball the night of June 11 in Milwaukee. With the score tied 2-2, the Brewers loaded the bases in the seventh on a single and two walks against Clay Holmes. Holmes, who'd replaced Sam Howard after he'd gotten the first out of the inning, was struggling mightily with his location but could still see his way out of the inning; he just needed to produce a double-play ball.
And Christian Yelich complied, hitting a ball sharply to the right of mound, a ball that was painfully obvious no one on the Pirate infield wanted anything to do with. Holmes could have played it but waved at it hesitantly, perhaps out of fear he'd swat it away from a middle infielder and ruin the double play. Ke'Bryan Hayes and Erik Gonzalez were somewhere in the middle of the shifted infield, and Adam Frazier, the second baseman, was somewhere in right, but nobody wanted that baseball. It somehow became a two-run double to center and the Brewers went on to win 7-4.
It doesn't make sense that the Pirates would be afraid to take charge in these situations, that they'd be afraid to win, because everyone knows the better you play around here, the more likely you are to be traded away from this mess.
It's not the players' fault — they are who they are — and it's not management's fault, for they are unduly constricted. It is, as ever, Nutting's fault. I have to laugh at all those ads he runs on the telecast about the organizations' support for various small businesses in the area.
I wonder if he would ever try supporting the Pirates.
