What's Wrong With The Offense?

After a tough final 3 games in Los Angeles the Pirates get a well needed day off. Lastings Milledge and Andrew McCutchen have both had a couple on field minor injuries that they will be trying to recover from today. The McCutchen injury was extra scary as he fell to the ground after stepping on Hiroki Kuroda's foot on a play at first late in yesterday's game, but he proved to be okay as he got up, jogged around and played the rest of the game.

Regardless of these injuries, they cannot be blamed for the lack of offensive production that Pirates have been getting this year. The Pirates have been scoring 3.4 runs per game, which is second to last in the National League. They are also giving up 7.0 runs per game, but that is largely attributed to the awful stretch of beatings we took during our 7 game losing streak. The pitching has been pretty respectable since then, and will probably only get better when Ross Ohlendorf comes back next week. What I want to talk about today is the offense.

When it comes down to it, offense in baseball is a series of individual actions. For a baseball team to score enough runs to win, they need multiple players stringing together successful actions. The Pirates have no had that. Here's the team batting averages for the most frequent starters:

Doumit: .308
Clement: .171
Iwamura: .213
Cedeno: .203
LaRoche: .323
Milledge: .233
McCutchen: .288
Jones: .221

There are 3 players on that list with respectable averages. LaRoche has only 65 plate appearances, which is much less than every other starter, so his solid impact has been limited. Doumit has just recently started hitting, and McCutchen has been pretty solid all year. Even if all three of those guys had been hitting all year long, this offense still would not be much better than it is right now.

The team batting average is .234, which is last in the NL and 3rd to last in the entire league. The Pirates are 21st in the league in walks drawn, so they are showing more plate patience than you would assume seeing the low average. The Pirates are also 17th in the league (9th in NL) in home runs, which is a lot higher than anyone would have expected them to be at the beginning of the year. The problem is not easy to find on the surface.

The most obvious explanation is that the Pirates have a whole bunch of unproven and sadly below average hitters. The only bats the Pirates have on the team that could make a name for themselves in a better team's lineups are guys like McCutchen, Doumit (only because he's a catcher), and Jones (assuming he is just slumping right now and not really as bad as he looks). The rest of the lineup is full of bats with potential that have not yet made an impact in the majors. Bottom line, until (and if ever) guys like Andy LaRoche, Lastings Milledge, and Jeff Clement mature and start being productive in the majors, this offense is not going to be effective enough to compete for anything except last place.

The good news is that there is potential in the majors and a lot of potential in the minors. Those three guys I mentioned all have the potential to hit the ball successfully in the majors, and there are guys with huge potential in AAA like Pedro Alvarez and Jose Tabata that are expecting to make their major league debuts this year.

One thing the Pirates can do for right now is go to the plate with a better approach. There are definitely issues with guys like Jones, Clement, and Milledge where they would no doubt be more successful if they had a better approach. Clement and Jones really seem to be rolling over on the ball too much. They have not been going to the opposite field, probably because they are trying to pull everything. This might be from pressure to hit the ball out of the ballpark, which they were both supposed to do this year. The problem with Milledge is just that he has been getting behind in counts far too often. He needs to stop swinging at bad pitches early in the at bat and not be afraid to swing at good pitches early.

If the Pirates can start taking better approaches and playing smarter right now, they can be respectable enough to compete until younger guys mature and become more successful big league players.