Can't String Em Together | Nationals 6 Pirates 3

The Pittsburgh Pirates lost their 12th game of the 2011 season today as they fell to the Nationals in the 2nd game of the 3 game series.

First of all, let me put my 2 cents in about the last place of the game. Andrew McCutchen was on third with 1 out and the Pirates were down by 3. Jose Tabata hit a marginal fly ball to right field, and McCutchen was thrown out at home trying to tag. As any reasonably intelligent basball fan will say, the play was unbelievably stupid on McCutchen and/or the third base coach's part. There is absolutely no reason to try and tag up when you're down by 3 in the 9th. McCutchen's run meant nothing, the tying run was in the on-deck circle, so why risk getting thrown out? Even if McCutchen would've been called safe (which he easily could have been), the Pirates would have been no better off. A bonehead play that took away the small chance the Pirates had to win today's game. After the game, Clint Hurdle was defensive of the call, saying that it wasn't necessarily a bad decision and it is important to be aggressive on the basepaths. He might have just been saying this to protect his players and coaches, but he was incredibly wrong and sounded pretty unintelligent for the first time in his Pirates career.

Anyways, the point of this post was to look at how the Pirates have had trouble stringing wins together in recent years. Let's take a look at it:

This year, the Pirates have won no more than 2 games in a row, they've done that twice. They have lost as many as 4 in a row.

In 2010, the Pirates won a maximum of 4 consecutive games, which they did only one time. The Pirates won 3 games in a row on 3 occasions, all in the first 3 months of the season. The team also suffered through 2 different 7 game losing streaks.

The Pirates had 2 5-game winning streaks in 2009, but had 7 streaks of 5 or more consecutive losses, including a 9-game skid late in the season.

We could look at 2008 and beyond, but it would mean pretty much nothing since there are only 2 relevant players left from 2008 (Ryan Doumit and Paul Maholm... plus a little bit of Jeff Karstens and Ross Ohlendorf).

None of this information should be a surprise to any Pirate fan. This team has shown us all too many streaks of putrid baseball, and not enough stretches of good ball, which have resulted in these really ugly records the last few years. It's really hard to be a winning team when you have this much trouble stringing together wins. It's shown to be a problem already this year, although it's still extremely early in the year.

The main reason the Pirates haven't been able to string together wins is the pitching staff. They just haven't had 5 guys that can go out and give you a really good chance to win the game. Each pitcher will have some good stretches mixed in with some bad stretches, and most of the time there are more bad stretches than good ones, so it becomes that much harder to get all the guys clicking together, which eliminates the real chance of stringing together 5 or more wins.

If the Pirates want to be a .500 team this year, they're going to have to find some consistency and find a way to get hot and stay hot for awhile, so they can go on some serious winning stretches. They've been falling further and further below .500 ever since the first road trip, and things certainly don't look to be getting much better as pitchers like Kevin Correia and Charlie Morton come back down to earth.