Inside the Pirates: 15 extremes from 15th losing season

From the highs of Houston to the many lows, consistency hardly was a hallmark

Sunday, September 30, 2007
By Dejan Kovacevic, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

In recognition of the 15th consecutive losing season that the Pittsburgh Baseball Club will complete this afternoon at PNC Park, a look back at 15 extremes from another long summer ...



Tom Gorzelanny

Top player: So much for those lousy spring statistics. As compared to positional peers across Major League Baseball, no one on the Pirates stood out like Tom Gorzelanny. His 14-10 record ranked seventh, his 3.88 ERA ninth, his 201 2/3 innings eighth among all left-handed starters.

Bottom player: Using that same criteria, no left-hander fared worse than Zach Duke, who won three games in 19 starts and allowed opponents to bat an astounding .359. Every hitter he faced, in essence, was Tony Gwynn.

Greatest leap forward: With all due respect to Steve Pearce taking the Lynchburg-to-Pittsburgh express, no one progressed quite like Nate McLouth. Beginning the day Rajai Davis was traded July 31, McLouth went from being a subpar bench piece to an effective everyday player, batting .280 with 10 of his 13 home runs, 26 of his 37 RBIs and 16 of his 22 steals.



Jason Bay

Greatest step backward: Who can explain the decline of Jason Bay? His .248 average is 40 points below his norm, and his 21 home runs are 12-15 short, too. All that, and his defensive play often was a liability.

Best game: Ian Snell matched Roy Oswalt strike for strike. Relievers left bases loaded every other inning. Xavier Nady homered with two outs in the ninth off Brad Lidge to tie. And, five hours after it began, Adam LaRoche's three-run shot sparked a five-run 15th to beat the Astros, 8-3, Aug. 24 in Houston. Manager Jim Tracy, his team on a 7-2 roll and pummeling the ball all month, was nearly moved to tears. "I'm proud of them," he said. "I am. I really am."



Ian Snell

Worst game: The Pirates were flicked like a flea out of Yankees Stadium with a 13-6 battering June 10. With the national media on hand for Roger Clemens' return, the Pirates were miserable on and off the field, bungling at every turn and barking at each other and the umpires. That prompted the New York Post's Joel Sherman to type, "The Pirates are a major-league team like Lindsay Lohan is a NASCAR driver."

Best ownership move: The firing of general manager Dave Littlefield came as the result of Bob Nutting spending his first eight months as principal owner in doing exhaustive research -- he took up to 400 pages of notes, some say-- to make the move he felt would lead to a dramatic change in all facets. More is coming.

Worst ownership move: Until ownership explains how the Milwaukee Brewers, based in a market two-thirds the size of Pittsburgh with similar revenue streams, can have a $72 million payroll while the Pirates spend $46 million, questions will remain about commitment at the top.



Josh Phelps

Best personnel move: Josh Phelps getting claimed off waivers was no more than a footnote June 23, but he rapidly emerged as a powerful, consistent contributor.

Worst personnel move: Taking on Matt Morris' $13 million in full drew national derision, but nothing lit the local fires like passing on Georgia Tech catcher Matt Wieters in the draft. The Pirates' baseball people were leery of negotiating with Wieters' agent, Scott Boras, and turned instead to reliever Danny Moskos with the fourth overall pick.



Matt Morris

Best managerial move: Many doubted Tracy's decision to move Freddy Sanchez to second base, especially after a double-play takeout crumpled Sanchez's knee in spring training. He ended up being one of the National League's best.



Jim Tracy

Worst managerial move: Many in the PNC Park crowd of 30,677 gasped when Tracy summoned minor-league mop-up man Marty McLeary to face Arizona slugger Tony Clark with bases loaded and the Diamondbacks down by four in the seventh inning. But few were surprised when the ball sailed over the fence. The next day, McLeary was back in the minors.

Best quote: The always candid Snell, on July 24 in New York, as his season -- and the team's -- was unraveling: "I'm starting to break. I'm getting stressed out. I don't know about these other guys, but I just want to win. I don't want to be called a loser. Man, even my family calls our team losers."

Worst quote: Littlefield, chiding reporters for asking questions on draft day about the Pirates' choice of Moskos: "I have this sense that there's this desire to say we didn't get the No. 1 guy we wanted."

Best luck: Xavier Nady. Yes, really. He had a serious digestive ailment, a hamstring that never stopped hurting and, to top it off, was beaned by a fastball in St. Louis. But each incident nearly was much worse, and Nady somehow still clubbed 20 home runs.

Worst luck: Ryan Doumit reported in superb physical shape, eager to shake his injury-prone tag, and still wound up with another two months on the disabled list.

Most promising sight: A Matt Capps fastball.

Most discouraging sight: Jose Castillo moping. Management seemed determined to punish him for a poor attitude from the start of spring training, and he responded with ... a poor attitude.



Jose Castillo

Best swing: The highlight of LaRoche's salvaging second half was a majestic blast Aug. 11 off San Francisco's Tim Lincecum that landed in McCovey Cove. That made him the first member of the Pirates to hit a ball into the water on the fly anywhere, including the Allegheny River.

Worst swing: Atlanta manager Bobby Cox elected to pitch to Jack Wilson with a man on third, two outs and the pitcher on deck. And the insult multiplied when journeyman Buddy Carlyle came right at Wilson with three fastballs. All were strikes. That series sweep for the Braves began the Pirates' 2-14 free fall after the All-Star break, but Wilson, like LaRoche, rebounded individually.

Best pitch: Masumi Kuwata, still making headlines in Japan at the time, fanned countryman Ichiro Suzuki June 19 in Seattle with a curveball that might as well have dropped off Mount Rainier. "I surrender," Suzuki said later when asked about his rare, awkward swing.

Worst pitch: A 63-way tie for all the pitches Tony Armas threw April 20 in Los Angeles while swinging and missing through exactly two of them. The Dodgers went on to a 10-2 rout, and Littlefield went on to richly regret the $3.5 million he handed Armas.

Best play: Five days after making the catch of the day in the majors, Nyjer Morgan delivered what might have been the catch of the year Sept. 14 in Houston, a Willie Mays-style grab of a Ty Wigginton blast.



Nyjer Morgan

Worst play: Ronny Paulino walked right into a tag at home plate -- no slide, no crash -- June 7 in Washington, a display emblematic of the team's first-half fundamental failures.

Greatest sign of team unity: Seven players met with Tracy July 17 to set a goal of winning 82 games. That was knocked later by Littlefield, who was part of a front office that had set no tangible goals for the Pirates in the past half-decade.

Worst sign of team unity: Wigginton's malicious slide into Wilson Aug. 25 in Houston tore up his shin and might have called for retaliation from the Pirates' pitchers. None came. Not even a note of chin music. In fact, the next four times the teams met, Wigginton was so comfortable at the plate that he went 8 for 17 with four home runs.

Best statistic: The Pirates' 82 errors are fourth-fewest in the majors, thanks almost entirely to terrific infield play from Sanchez, Wilson, LaRoche and Jose Bautista. And their 98 errorless games are a franchise record.

Worst statistic: The hitters walked 461 times, third-fewest in the majors. That brought yet another meager on-base percentage -- .325, seventh-lowest -- that underscores a glaring organizational weakness in teaching the proper plate approach.



Freddy Sanchez

Reason to believe in 2008: Of the three professional sports teams to have 15-year losing streaks, two were snapped the following season. The Vancouver Canucks ended theirs in 1992, and the Sacramento Kings ended theirs in 1999. Those 1933-48 Philadelphia Phillies, of course, plodded on for another year.

Reason not to believe: Someone still needs to restore the pride in those seven letters stitched across the front of their jerseys.

First published on September 30, 2007 at 12:00 am
Dejan Kovacevic can be reached at dkovacevic@post-gazette.com.