The baseball season creeps past its halfway point this weekend, and still again with no Pirates starting pitcher on pace to win 20 games, so it's about time somebody said it, right?
There's a high probability no one will win 20 games for the Pirates ever again.
Yeah, I said it.
Now, whether that actually matters is another issue to be wrestled presently, but first let's spread the game's numerological trends on the table.
No Pirates pitcher has won 20 games since 1991, when John Smiley won exactly 20 one summer after Doug Drabek won exactly 22, and while both those teams won division titles, the 20-game winner in the 21st century can no longer be considered even terribly necessary.
In fact, there hasn't been a 20-game winner on a World Series champion in 10 years. Josh Beckett of the 2007 Boston Red Sox was the most recent. Hall of Fame-bound manager Bruce Bochy, currently in town with the San Francisco Giants, has coaxed three Series winners across the finish line since 2010 without having a pitcher win 20 games.
"I would love it, personally; I would enjoy watching it," said Clint Hurdle, now in his 15th year as a big-league manager without ever seeing a 20-game winner who wasn't in the opposing uniform. "Does it matter? If you ask pitchers, it matters. I think there's enough of us, I mean, I grew up when it mattered. I'm gonna hold on to that a little, until I find something better to hold on to."
Before the skipper goes all John Prine on us ("Just give me somethin', I can hold on to. To believe in this livin's just a hard way to go."), we should make it clear that Hurdle's in the larger boat, the one crowded with managers who'll never have this luxury.
The Colorado Rockies, established 1993, have never had a 20-game winner, and while that's owed partially to Denver's atmospherics, the Kansas City Royals, Milwaukee Brewers, San Diego Padres and Baltimore Orioles have been absent a 20-game winner even longer than the Pirates. The Orioles, who famously had four on the same staff in 1971 (Mike Cuellar, Pat Dobson, Jim Palmer and Dave McNally) have had exactly none on the 31 staffs since Mike Boddicker went 20-11 in 1984.
So as HBO's John Oliver might ask, how is this (the ever more fog-enshrouded plateau of 20 wins) still a thing?
"It's certainly not devalued in the clubhouse," said Gerrit Cole, who came closer to 20 than any Pirate since Smiley when he won 19 times in 2015. "Twenty wins is awesome. Sometimes it's a stat you don't have much control over, but at the same time, you want to win. I do my own evaluation. Did I do enough to win the game tonight? But when you see 20 wins next to somebody's name, then they're doing that probably 28 times out of 32 (starts)."
There's no need here to full interdigitate the reasons baseball used to produce seven or more 20-game winners annually (15 in 1969) in the quarter century before John Smiley Summer and is averaging only three since, but it's important to understand that winning isn't the primary burden of the starting pitcher it once was.
"For a starting pitcher to win 20 it means his team is scoring and he's pitching well enough," said Pirates GM Neal Huntington, perpetual honor student of the game's emerging metrics. "He's going six, seven, eight innings or on rare occasions nine. So it means he's putting his team in position to win, but it also means his team is scoring enough to win.
"You've gotta be pretty good to win 20 games in this day and age but you've also got to be on a good team. The age of Steve Carlton, when he won 27 for a Phillies team that won only 59 games (1972), is over. Wins have really become much more of a team metric. It's still relevant but (20 wins) doesn't carry nearly the significance it once did, when starting pitchers went seven or eight innings without question and often nine."
Spotting a 20-game winner, however, still isn't as jarring as seeing a raccoon in the daylight. It happened three times last year, two the year before, three the year before that. In the previous decade, it happened five, six, even seven times in one season, but it's not at all likely to happen along the banks of the Allegheny for reasons painfully obvious.
For the Pirates to have a 20-game winner, it will have to be someone the club drafts and develops, like Cole, and who develops fast, before the mind-altering prospect of taking 20-win potential to the marketplace becomes unbearable.
I asked Huntington if that was a fair statement.
"That is," said the GM, "unless one of these years our offense is strong enough, but it has a much larger chance of happening from somebody that we've drafted, developed, or traded for as a young pitcher, an A ball pitcher, Double A pitcher, and they come through out system, a Gerrit Cole, a Jameson Taillon, that much more likely than from someone we get on free agent market."
The Pirates and teams in similar-sized markets can barely afford a pitcher who might win 20, let alone one who has actually done it.
Rick Porcello, who went 22-4 last summer for Boston, grossed $20 million along the way and gets $62 million for this season and the next two. Max Scherzer, who got $22 million while going 20-7 for Washington last year, will make $44 million this year and next, then $126 million in the three years after that, including deferred compensation. Clayton Kershaw, who sustained himself on a mere $6.5 million winning 21 times for the Los Angeles Dodgers in 2014, made $104 million for the three seasons since and gets $106 million for the three seasons after that.
Not exactly Nutting numbers s'all I'm sayin.'
The fattest contract ever for a Pirates pitcher belonged briefly to Francisco Liriano _ three years totaling $39 million _ but neither the club nor the pitcher had the stomach for it. Liriano was in full meltdown by July of the contract's middle year, and the Pirates bundled him and two prospects to Toronto just to get the Blue Jays to assume the payments.
At the current rates of compensation for accomplished starting pitchers (Kershaw, who made only 21 starts last year, took down $1.6 million per start), it's no wonder that clubs are so hyper-careful with that investment that the slightest discomforts send pitchers to the disabled list by the dozens. There are 119 pitchers of all stripes there right now.
But it's hard to win 20 from the trainer's table or the stationary bike or an extended round of rehab at Triple A, and it's certainly no way to commemorate the 100th anniversary this month of Cincinnati Reds righty Fred Toney throwing complete-game three hitters against the Pirates in both games of a doubleheader.
Pitch count? What, 320?
Today, starting pitchers get paid for innings. If you are fortunate enough to have two starters who can eat 400 innings and a third who can grind out 160 to 180, your team is going a long way and not even the older fans care that no starter won more than 15 times (on the 2015 world champion Kansas City Royals, nobody won more than 13).
But it matters because of one thing _ expectation. Managers old and young will tell you that when you have an ace working toward 20 wins, or one that has proven he can get there, you have a different feeling in the clubhouse. You go the ballpark expecting to win rather hoping to win. Having that pitcher _ Kershaw, Scherzer, Dallas Keuchel, Porcello, Chris Sale _ infuses a different attitude than exists in a clubhouse than one in which you're just wondering if anyone can win 15.
"Kershaw might not win 20, Bumgarner might not, but when they take the mound," Hurdle said, "you're gonna win, you feel like you're gonna win."
To me that's no small thing, but as Cole pointed out, it's fascinating the way the game changes. Perhaps we should have foreseen all this via the wisdom of the great baseball prophet Bill (Spaceman) Lee, the capable lefty of the 1970s-era Red Sox and Expos.
"People are too hung up on winning," Lee once said. "I can get off on a good helmet throw."
