October Ollie

News item (from the Associated Press):

"The New York Mets are handing the ball - and their season - to Oliver Perez in Game 7.

"That's right, Oliver Perez, who was demoted to the minors by lowly Pittsburgh less than four months ago.

"The erratic lefty who went 3-13 with a 6.55 ERA in the big leagues this year. The guy who couldn't seem to throw a strike earlier this season."

So it's come to this. The pitcher who maddened the Buccin' Ear, the Pirates and the rest of Bucco Nation for a year and a half with stuff that alternately delighted and dismayed departs the team in disgrace and suffers the indignity of starting a game that could take his team to the World Series.

Best of luck, Mets.

The Buccin' Ear watched Ollie's Game 4 start, in which he displayed the same unpredictable behavior we all came to know and loathe when he was a Pirate. People seem enamored of calling Perez's stuff "electric." Well, it's certainly shocking, that much can be conceded. No one seems to know where it's going, much less him. Sunday, Perez put the ball up, down, outside and inside, fell behind, baffled hitters, flummoxed his catcher and put up an all-too-familiar line: 5 2/3 IP, 5 ERs, 9 hits. Okay, he got a win, not much of a feat when your team scores 12 runs.

But we Pirate fans know all too well that Ollie's M.O. is to confound, so we probably shouldn't be surprised if he goes out and throws a gem on Thursday. He's ornery that way.

Should the Mets win, by the way, the World Series will feature not one, but two players who began the season as Pirates, Sean Casey having already made it as a member of the Detroit Tigers, although he may not play due to injury. Then there's Jim Leyland, he of the resurrected career, who will guide the Tigers through the last leg of their storybook season. Leyland's presence alone dictates that the Buccin' Ear will abandon National League allegiance for the Series in favor of Detroit.

The rise of the Tigers from nearly 20 years of obscurity to the cusp of the championship of baseball tempts the dreamer to imagine a similar turnaround for the Pirates, but the Buccin' Ear's goals are more modest. This time next year, if references to Our Team are not routinely prefaced by "lowly," "downtrodden," "hapless, "beleaguered," "miserable" or other like appellations, your humble correspondent will feel that a corner has been turned.

Friday the 13th: The Buccin' Ear failed to commemorate the 46th anniversary last Friday of the most famous hit in Pirates history, Bill Mazeroski's Series-winning homer in the seventh game of the 1960 World Series. For reasons all Pirates fans understand, the Buccin' Ear's favorite number is 336.

Same As It Ever Was?

Twenty weeks and 76 posts have passed since The Pirates of Penance debuted on May 16, with the team's fortunes gurgling down the drain at 11-27. The team's 14th consecutive losing season has ended, and the '06 team and its 67-95 record has passed into history. Time for a bit of perspective and a tentative look forward to '07.

The team duplicated its record of '05. The winning percentage of .414 is the 16th worst in the team's 116-year history, and the third-worst of the post-'92 winless span, ahead of only the '95 team (53-86/.403) and the '01 club (62-100/.383). The '06 Pirates basically dropped out of the race by the end of April, a month in which they lost 19 of 26 games, and they were an embarrasing 30 games under .500 at the All-Star break. They lost a team-record 13 straight at one point, and were within two games of closing the season on a 10-game skid before recovering to post two shutout wins in the final two games. They managed just one winning month (July/13-12).

Given this litany of defeat and the fact that on paper, at least, the team did not improve its record by a single game over the previous year, the temptation is to conclude that the Pirates are going nowhere. Well, there's always that possibility, of course, but one can also argue that the '06 team did show some signs of improvement.

For instance, this year's club went 37-35 in the second half of the season. The '05 team finished 27-42. The '06 Pirates stuck with a young group of starters, Zach Duke, Tom Gorzelanny, Paul Maholm and Ian Snell, who gained valuable experience and helped to bring the team's ERA down by about a run in the second half. Gone are underachievers Oliver Perez, Kip Wells and Josh Fogg the "mainstays" of the '05 staff. This year's edition even managed to escape the cellar, something the previous year's team could not do, falling short by six games.

After shedding unneeded baggage (Jeromy Burnitz, Shawn Chacon, Joe Randa and Victor Santos), the Pirates will look in '07 to a group of players that is headed, in the Buccin' Ear's estimation, by a core of five everday players: Jason Bay, Chris Duffy, Ronnie Paulino, Freddy Sanchez and JackWilson. However you shuffle the pieces around, then, the team will need to fill three starting positions, either with players they already have, players they bring up (unlikely given the state of the minor league system) or players they sign. Here are the Buccin' Ear's Boys on the Bubble:

• Xavier Nady. Many people would probably put Nady in the core group, but the Buccin' Ear isn't convinced. Sure, he had some nice moments, but where's the beef? He hit three homers and drove in 23 runs as a Pirate. After batting .359 in August, he sagged to .219 in September and was a big part of the team's offensive swoon in the second half of the month. Nady is capable of filling the gap at first base or in right field next year, obviously, but the team needs to decide if he really is the answer, not just another body.
• Jose Castillo. The underachieving Castillo should be dealt, but the Pirates are, as too often happens, in the position of trying to dump a player whose value has plummeted (see Perez, Oliver). The Buccin' Ear recently documented Castillo's plunge from June 1 to the end of the season. A three-month dive hardly gives a team the clout it would like at the trading table.
• Jose Bautista. Ideally, Bautista would move to third base, which would allow Sanchez to take over at second, while Castillo takes his famous inconsistency to some other market. But Bautista, much as the Buccin' Ear pulled for him, did not make a statement when he got significant playing time. He hit .190 from August 1 to September 30, with four homers, 21 RBIs, and 53 strikeouts in 157 ABs. He finished the season at .235. Can the offensively challenged Pirates afford that kind of performance from its third baseman?
• Nate McLouth. Given a chance to start in '06, McLouth was a big disappointment, batting .233 with an OBP of .293 before a season-ending ankle injury. The Buccin' Ear might dismiss him, but he's not yet 25 and has shown some promise. The real point is that if the Pirates have a choice of playing McLouth or someone else they already have (like Nady) in rightfield or signing another overpriced retread (see Burnitz, Jeromy), make mine the former. Save the money and put it into developing young players.

Aside from these decisions, the Pirates must look for another starter, preferably a righthander. Normally, the team scrapes the bottom of the free agent barrel in looking to pick up a warm body to start, but that won't cut it in '07. They have the makings of an above-average staff, and it makes no sense, particularly in a weak division where even decent improvement could move a team into contention, to skimp on pitching. Jeff Suppan is the kind of innings-eating veteran who could really help solidify the rotation, and he won't come with an outrageous price tag.

Next Post: A look back at the season that was (or wasn't, depending on your point of view).

Between a Laugh and a Tear

The Pirates ended the '06 season with a series of escapes: with their 1-0 victory over the Reds, they escaped the cellar, leaving the Cubs to hibernate there for the offseason; they escaped having a worse won-loss record than the '05 squad (both finished 67-95); they escaped finishing the season as they had begun it -- with a loss; and they actually played two games above .500 (37-35) in the second half of the season.

And so the clouds parted just a sliver on yet another season shrouded in gloom. And yes, there were several other rays of sunshine that fell on PNC Park on Sunday:

• Freddie Sanchez concluded a remarkable season by winning the batting title, the first by a Pirate in 23 years. He finished at .344 and earned the crown in typical Freddie fashion, shunning the idea of sitting the game out to protect his lead and salting things away with two hits in his first two ABs.
• Rookie Shane Youmans duplicated the seven innings of shutout ball produced by Marty McLeary on Saturday. Shane didn't get the win, but he put the Pirates in position to get one. Youmansin the last two weeks of the season lived up to the attributes of his 1953 film namesake, described by http://www.filmsite.org/shan.html as a "mysterious, gunslinging hero from the wilderness who appears from nowhere."
• Salomon Torres, the best story on the Pirates this year by anyone not named Freddie, appeared in his 94th game -- the most in Pirate history -- and collected his 12th save in as many opportunities. That concluded a season that the Buccin' Ear continues to maintain was every bit as notable as Sanchez's.
• Rookie Matt Capps appeared in his 85th game and collected his ninth win against one defeat. Capps certainly makes the short list of best rookie seasons by a Pirate.

As might be expected, in the flush of victory, there was much brave talk about '07. Resident Genius Jim Tracy can, the Buccin' Ear supposes, be granted one last don of the rose-colored glasses:

"We had an above-.500 second half of the season for the first time since 1992," RG said.

No word on when the last 30-60 start was.

Not to worry about that detail, of course. RG is nothing if not the eternal optimist -- or spinmeister, depending on your point of view.

"And this is a team that played 90 games before the break and lost 60 times, with pretty much the same group It's great to see. I think the thought process for 2007 is that we're going to pick up where we left off instead of feeling like we're starting over."

Pardon the cynicism, but does picking up where we left off mean finishing 2-0 or finishing 2-8 and scoring 24 runs total in the last 10 games?

But the Buccin' Ear will leave a more detailed assessment of the '06 season and what it has wrought to another post. Let's conclude with a snatch of a John Mellencamp tune suggested by regular reader Zack from Shanghai. Z-man decided that JM's tune "Between a Laugh and a Tear" from the Scarecrow album sums up being a Pirates fan (see more of the lyrics in the comments to the "Mailbag" post of September 22):

"Between a laugh and a tear

Smile in the mirror as you walk by

Between a laugh and a tear

And that's as good as it can get for us

And there ain't no reason to stop tryin'".

The Buccin' Ear will leave the last regular season post with this remark from Zack:

"The Pirates of Penance" is that space between a laugh and a tear. It is necessary because sometimes it laughing that keeps us from crying."