Saturday, October 4, 2014

Better Luck Next Year

Pittsburgh Pirates fans are going to have to wait another year to see if their team can win a championship. The Pirates season ended on Wednesday with an 8 to 0 shellacking put on them by Madison Bumgarner and the San Francisco Giants  

For all the buzz, hype, and excitement in and around the city of Pittsburgh for the Pirates wild card game, they sure turned in a dud of a performance for the largest crowd in PNC Park history, along with everybody watching on television. The game stayed competitive for the first 3 innings, but then in the top of the 4th, Giants' shortstop Brandon Crawford delivered a gut-wrenching blow to the Pirates when he took Edinson Volquez deep over the Clemente Wall in right field for a two-strike grand slam. That was it for the Pirates. The Giants tacked on a few more runs over the remainder of the game to take it 8 to 0, sending the Pirates home for the winter.


A definite positive to take from this season for Pirate fans is that they have now recorded winning records and made it to the postseason for 2 consecutive years, after a North American Sports record 20 straight losing seasons from 1992 to 2012. So it seems the Pirates have made the jump and are here to stay when it comes to being competitive. 

So one question remains... Where do they go from here? The Bucs are heading into a very tough off-season where some of their key contributors from the 2014 seasons will be becoming free agents.
  1. Catcher - Russell Martin
  2. Shortstop - Clint Barmes
  3. Pitcher - Edinson Volquez
  4. Pitcher - Francisco Liriano
The Pirates off-season is going to be extremely important, as well as interesting, and definitely one to pay attention to over the next few months. It will be exiting to see what happens.
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3 comments:

  1. UnknownOctober 4, 2014 at 4:25 PM

    Volquez, Liriano, and Martin are all gonna be tough to re-sign. These guys played better than they have over the course of their career- naturally in a free agent year. They are all going to get big bucks somewhere, especially Martin. The Bucs have a tough offseason in front of them...

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  2. UnknownOctober 5, 2014 at 5:33 AM

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  3. UnknownOctober 5, 2014 at 5:34 AM

    Nice article. I agree Martin will be tough to re-sign and despite his amazing numbers & public outcry I'm not sure they should. This is only the second season of his career where he's put up an OBP of over .380, and he's going to be 32, so he's due for some regression. Barmes isn't a big loss so he's likely gone, and Liriano could ask for a big contract and get it from a team in a bigger market, though I could see them trying to retain him.

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