Pitching is Fundamental, Part 2

See yesterday's post about "Pitching is Fundamental" for my thoughts on today's game. That being said, I'm not going to freak out--it was Maholm's first game back after a layoff and for as icky as the statistical line for the game certainly was, it was just that: a mere one-game statistical line. Speaking of pitching being fundamental, I'll take Bryan Bullington's three scoreless innings as something good to note in today's game.

Interestingly or completely not interestingly, prior to this series I wrote a lengthy post that I opted not to publish. I noted that the PBC had an overall record that indicated that they were a bad baseball team but that their record since August 1st indicated that they were trying to morph from a bad baseball team into a merely mediocre baseball team. Here is a brief excerpt from the original, unpublished post:

The Pirates will play the Astros this weekend. While the Astros are currently beneath the Buccos in the standings, they are only 1.5 games behind your fifth-place Pirates. Neither the Pirates nor the Astros are anywhere near being good MLB teams, as evidenced by their records. Given the recent Bucco streak of mediocre play (best record in the NL Central since August, at the top of the mediocre class for five weeks), one might expect a mediocre team to be able to win 2 out of 3 games from the Astros, even on the road.

Except there's a problem. Because here's what bad teams do:
--They can't hit quality MLB pitching. (Roy Oswalt is pitching for the Astros on Friday night.)
--Their "somewhat reliable" (statistically near league average) pitchers can't pitch well enough to counter their team's complete inability to hit quality MLB pitching.
--The other team scores more than runs than they do, and they lose games because that's what bad baseball teams do.
--Overall, they respond to brief and hot winning streaks with much longer and much colder losing streaks, making them a team with a record, oh, give or take, around fifteen games under .500 on a particular day.

Now, here is what mediocre teams do:
--Occasionally, they're able to hit quality (above-average) MLB pitching.
--On still atypical, but not completely only-once-or-twice-a-season-events, their "somewhat reliable" pitchers (e.g. statistically league average) have games where they can at least keep pace with quality (above-average) MLB pitching and perhaps even pitch one game that is close (if not equal) to the "best" of what another team has to offer.
--On such unusual occasions, as in once out of every ten or twelve or fifteen games, rather than once every 85, when their batters hit above average MLB pitching and their pitchers pitch at an above average level, the team scores more runs than the other team and wins enough games to be regarded as a mediocre team rather than as a bad team.
--Overall, they balance out their hot winning streaks with cold losing streaks of approximately the same length, thus resulting in a .500 record, and acknowledgment as a mediocre ball club.

Well, it's now Sunday evening, and the Pirates just lost 2 out of 3 games to the Astros, one of the worst teams in the majors, while making their fifteenth consecutive losing season official. The team's overall record still indicates "bad baseball team," because bad baseball teams lose 2 out of 3 games to one of the worst teams in the majors. Probably because I still dream delusional dreams, however, the team's victory in the first game of this just completed series could be a potential indication that there have been infrequent occasions that could lead to the suggestion that a team with a brutally bad record is actually closer to mediocre than the team's overall won-loss record would indicate.

But that closeness to mediocrity--and remember, mediocrity entails contention for a pennant in the NL Central this summer--is predicated on something else, as clearly seen by the Game 2 and Game 3 losses in this series, and allow me to repeat yesterday's refrain just once more: Pitching truly is fundamental.