Gene Collier: Pirates don't get into swing of things

Right fielder Ryan Doumit just misses making a running catch on a foul ball hit by the Cubs' Aramis Ramirez yesterday at PNC Park.

Thursday, May 03, 2007

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Given the indifferent results coming from the less than novel practice of just taking 'em one game at a time, the Pirates awoke yesterday to an unusually hopeful set of opportunities, including an experiment with taking 'em 1.277 games at a time.

With at least two innings of Tuesday's suspended game remaining to be completed and another full novella of day baseball against the Chicago Cubs scheduled as the wrap-up to their homestand, May 2, 2007 veered suspiciously close to what could be described as a big day of baseball on the North Side.

A relatively robust sun-splashed crowd, heavy with young voices chanting "Let's go Pirates!" turned out mostly by coincidence, but the stage was nonetheless deftly set.

Crumpling to the occasion, the Pirates essentially stunk for more than four hours, eventually sending the adult portion of the audience muttering toward happy hour.

Between 12:36 p.m., the start of the suspended game, and 4:38 p.m., the end of the regularly scheduled fray, they scored two runs, matching the number of games they kicked into the loss column. So instead of putting some emphatic, momentum-cooking cap on a lusty 7-2 homestand and heading for Milwaukee to make a run at first place in the National League's so-called Comedy Central, they settled for 5-4 in the nine home games that ended in a feckless display of what looks almost like irredeemably flaccid offense.

"We're not going to continue to hit like this," manager Jim Tracy said after his team failed to send a runner as far as third base after Ryan Doumit's second-inning homer off Chicago starter Jason Marquis.

He's right, of course. Nobody can continue to hit like this.

Certifiably awful offensive teams -- and right now, this one's only a candidate for such a distinction -- score eight or 10 runs in a game every other week just by accident. Nowhere in the game's semi-mystical numerology is there a major-league team that never, ever, scores eight runs in a game. But that's what we're looking at. The Pirates have, on occasion, scored seven. On one occasion. In the first 26 games. Fifteen times as often, they've scored three runs or fewer.

No Jim Tracy team, which includes the 2006 Pirates edition and five versions of your Los Angeles Dodgers, has made it to May without scoring eight or more runs at least once. No Pirates team of this depressing millennium has done it, either.

"We're not stringing hits together," said third baseman Jose Bautista, one of five Pirates regulars who went hitless against Marquis. "We get our share of hits, but we don't put them together. That's what's been happening to us all year long."

Marquis is a redoubtable National League starter, but all he did yesterday was pitch well enough to beat the Pirates, which is not to be confused with pitching well right now.

"He wasn't all that great," Bautista said. "For me, it was a matter of swinging at pitches out of the zone."

At least Bautista was swinging, which separates him from too many critical components of this alleged offense. Tracy is loathe to put his finger on it, but Pirates hitters are simply not aggressive enough in hitters' counts.

Jason Bay, representing the tying run with two out in the ninth of the suspended game, took a called third strike to end the game. Adam LaRoche, hitting with Bay on first and the Cubs ahead by a run in the fourth inning of the regularly scheduled game, took a 3-1 fastball from Marquis right down Broadway at 93 mph, the perfect remedy for a struggling slugger to slug his struggles away. On the subsequent 3-2 pitch, LaRoche waved indifferently at strike three. LaRoche has 32 strikeouts and 12 hits.

Adam, sit.

"We'll get to the point where we have to talk about it," Tracy said regarding the possibility of benching the club's premier offseason acquisition. "But you can't sit him down for long because he's not going to get any better that way."

Though LaRoche remains the poster boy for hot Pirates disappointment, there was no shortage of suspects on the matter of who curdled this rare baseball opportunity yesterday. Both LaRoche and Paulino got caught flat-footed as the Cubs' Jacque Jones rounded third and scored the critical seventh Cubs run on an infield hit in the eighth inning of the suspended game. With Bautista on second in the bottom of the inning, Paulino jogged to first on his two-out grounder to deep third. Bay's game-ending at-bat was atrocious long before he took a called-third strike. He took a perfect 2-0 pitch from the never intimidating Ryan Dempster rather than attack the ball in a critical situation. The instances are not exactly rare when Bay looks quite content to be a good player rather than a great one.

"We'd have wanted the homestand to be a heck of a lot better than it was," Tracy said. "Still, we went 5-4. You can't fault the effort."

Maybe not, but I can get awfully close.


(Gene Collier can be reached at gcollier@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1283.)