If Gerrit Cole appears to be lost these days, perhaps your eyes aren’t deceiving you. In his last four starts, Cole is 0-3 with a 7.06 ERA in 21.2 innings. During that span, batters are hitting .348 against him with a .554 slugging percentage, including a total of 13 total bases the Houston Astros collected […]

It’s been two and a half weeks since Major League Baseball’s non-waiver trade deadline, when the expectations for any possibility of the Pirates making a run at a National League Wild Card spot became clear. Those expectations were specifically based on a handful of variables: – IF Andrew McCutchen could re-gain his form as a […]

It’s time to recognize a situation for what it really is instead of what it’s purported to be. When the autopsy of the 2016 Pittsburgh Pirates is conducted, the cause of death will not be a middling payroll, an unwillingness to increase said payroll or even trade-inflicted. If this team is indeed doomed to die […]

When the Pirates’ lineup card was posted in the PNC Park clubhouse Tuesday afternoon, it could’ve been seen as a clean bill of health, much less a list of that night’s starters. It was also a message to both the team and anybody following it: the Pirates are back at full strength, or at least […]

“Every battle is won or lost before it is ever fought.” This quote in Sun Tzu’s age-old classic The Art of War speaks to the virtues and benefits of superior planning in relation to winning in combat. Unfortunately, it can also roughly be translated as an understanding of the Pittsburgh Pirates in relation to their […]