The Pittsburgh Pirates In April

The Pirates played their first game of the month of May today. Before we move on, let's take a look backwards at the month of April.

The Pirates went 12-15 in the season's first month. All-in-all I think that's a pretty decent record, considering the circumstances that I am about to describe.

The positive side of April was the pitching. Let's look at the starters first, specifically.

Six different pitchers made starts for the Pirates in April: Kevin Correia, Paul Maholm, Ross Ohlendorf, Charlie Mortonn, James McDonald, and Jeff Karstens. All together, those 6 guys had an ERA of 4.40. They pitched just below 6 innings, allowed 5.9 hits, gave up 2.9 earned runs, walked 2.5 batters, struck out 3.6 batters, and gave up 0.7 home runs, all those numbers being per start.

The leader of the rotation was Correia, who posted a 2.90 ERA in 40.1 innings in his 4-1 month of April. He was followed closely by Morton, who used his "electric stuff" to post a 3.00 ERA in 33 innings which earned him 2 wins and 1 loss. Maholm also pitched decently despite losing 4 games in the month with a 4.14 ERA. McDonald struggled mightily in his first 4 starts but had a really good outing in his 5th, and will look to see his 7.66 ERA fall significantly over the rest of the season.

When all was said and done for the month of April, the starters performed better than anybody thought they would. There are still questions about how they will perform as the season progresses and if they can keep up their successes, but I don't think many people think they will be last in the league in ERA again this year, and that's a real positive sign.

As good as the starters were, the bullpen was even better. The combination of Joel Hanrahan, Chris Resop, Jose Veras, Michael Crotta, Evan Meek, Karstens, Daniel McCutchen, Joe Beimel, Garrett Olson, and Danny Moskos teamed up to post a sparkling 2.43 ERA in 81.1 April innings. The bullpen only has 3 wins to show for their efforts, and that is a testament to how much the Pirates offense has struggled late in games, but they have lost only 5 games. There were question marks about this bullpen as well coming into the season, and the bullpen has quieted a lot of that with their strong April performance.

Now we'll get to the negative part of this post, the offense.

The Pirates hit .230 as a team in April and scored only 3.4 runs per game. That's not going to win you a lot of games. There were only 7 different games where the Pirates scored 5 or more runs, and they won 5 of those games. Strikeouts have been a huge problem, the offense has struck out 8.4 times per game. Coming into the season people were thinking this would be the Pirates strong point this season, but it has been the opposite of that. Even the Pirates best players have struggled. Here are the April averages for the Pirates top hitters:

Neil Walker: .301
Garrett Jones: .265
Ryan Doumit: .255
Jose Tabata: .242
Lyle Overbay: .223
Andrew McCutchen: .219
Matt Diaz: .208
Pedro Alvarez: .200
Ronny Cedeno: .192

Ugly. It's hard to believe that the Pirates ended up only 3 games under .500 with team batting like that. Chances are that most of those guys will turn it around and have a lot more success throughout the rest of the season, which could mean really good things for the team if they keep pitching like they have been.

So the first month was probably the opposite of what you had expected. We all said that the Pirates would score a good amount of runs but the pitching wouldn't be good enough to win us a lot of games. Well it's been the opposite, the pitching has been good enough to be a winning team, but the offense hasn't followed their lead, which led to another losing month for this Pirates team. The good news it that the offense is going to get better, and if the pitching can keep up their solid start to the season, this team could definitely hang around the .500 mark for the long haul.