High Expectations Make Tough Times Tougher

Andrew McCutchen was 0/5 last night and missed a big time chance in the ninth inning to tie up a very important game. That led to some criticism of him after the game. You certainly do expect your best player (and probably the best player in the league) to show up in big time games, but to me, calling out a player that's done what he's done this year is a bit ridiculous.

This has been a bit of a theme lately. The Pirates haven't played their best baseball in August, and a lot of people are being very critical of the team and the management. This certainly isn't any kind of surprise, when a fan base sees a glimpse of something special, they want it to continue and they'll be quick to pass blame at whoever they can when it starts to go wrong.

This season has brought a lot of new feelings to Pirate fans and followers. We haven't dealt with this kind of competition in 20 years, so we aren't really sure what to expect or how to react to it. That along with how the season has gone to this point has made for some serious overreactions and one heck of an emotional roller coaster.

Think about it this way, let's say the Pirates were in 4th place and 5 games under .500 a month or so ago, and then over July and the first half of August they won nearly all their games and pushed to 66-54, which is what their record is now. The feeling would be completely different. We'd be looking at being 12 games over .500 as a miracle almost. There wouldn't be anybody speaking badly about the team or the management, because our minds are shortsighted. There probably wouldn't have been much bad talk during the first three months when the team was just hovering around .500, because the expectations at the beginning of the season weren't very high. It would be a completely positive season.

In reality, the team had an incredibly stretch in June and July that made them one of the best teams in the league heading into August. Now a rough half month of baseball has people back to their former all-negative mindsets. If this team fails to make the playoffs, people will be disappointed in a big way. If they would have just floated above water the first half of the year and then made a push in the second half but fell short of the postseason, people probably wouldn't be disappointed at all.

It's the same way with McCutchen. If he got the numbers he has now in a different way, people probably wouldn't have been so critical of his performance yesterday. The guy put up video game numbers in the first four months, so once he got back to reality and putting up real life numbers, it takes a bigger emotional toll.

Obviously I'm not breaking any ground with this post, this is all pretty much common sense. I just think it's funny how the feel of a sports season is, at any given time, almost entirely dependent on what has happened recently.

Again, this is all new to us. It's hard to handle things in good sense when you've never experienced them before. For now, we can just hope that this becomes more common to us and we'll learn what it's really like to have a team compete over a full season.