Did the 19 Inning Win Hurt the Pirates?

Last year the Pirates got ripped off by Jerry Meals in the 19 inning game and then proceeded to watch their season absolutely fall apart in the span of about two weeks. Everyone jumped at the opportunity to blame the 19th straight losing season on that game. They claimed that if Meals would have made the correct call and the Pirates would have gone on to win the game, things would have gone down differently.

Does that make any sense? No. Does that mean it's completely wrong? Not necessarily. My belief was that if the game had anything to do with the collapse, the outcome of the game had nothing to do with it. Playing 19 innings in one night can really exhaust a team and have a pretty bad effect on them the next few days, there's no questioning that. What I can question is that losing a tough game like that has an effect the next few days or weeks. I always believed that the season would have turned out that exact same way if the Pirates would have won that game.

Now fast forward to last week when the Pirates beat the Cardinals in a 19 inning game. A lot of people were thinking that was going to propel the Pirates to have another stretch of wins and get them back into the Wild Card picture. Well since that game the team is 1-5 and pitching extremely poorly. Why isn't it possible that the 19 inning game took a toll on them even though they won? They still played the same amount of innings as last year's marathon, does the outcome really matter? There's no way to know.

What we do know is that the Cardinals were the losing team in that game and they are 5-1 since then. THey were fortunate enough to have an off day directly after the game and then get a three game set with the Astros to boot. Things seemed to work out perfectly for the Cardinals, and they really didn't seem to work out at all for the Pirates.

All of that said, I still don't put any stock in the 19 inning game. These are professional athletes who are all in fantastic shape. The pitchers weren't really affected thanks to Kevin Correia, Kyle McPherson, and Justin Wilson pitching eight and a third of the nine innings the next game. Everybody but Wandy Rodriguez stayed on their normal rest schedules. The offense hasn't been great since that day, scoring just 17 runs in six games since, but I'm not ready to say that has anything to do with playing more than two games worth of baseball one day.

We're simply looking at a Pirates team that just isn't all that great. It's hard to get full seasons out of unproven players. Andrew McCutchen is proving that himself right now. Nobody was even close to as good as him in the first four months of the season, but the season is taking a toll on him and he's struggling big time now. The rest of the team has been following him and just not doing much of anything. The pitching has been much more like what we thought it would be when the season began, Jeff Karstens is the only one pitching well at all this month.

Despite all the negativity, the Pirates are still nine games over .500 and just two games out of the playoffs with 35 games left to play. It's still a positive season, and if they can just get their stuff together for the last month of baseball, this could still turn into a magical season that ends in a playoff berth. Just don't jump off the ship before it sinks entirely.