By Their Chinny Chin Chins...

The Pirates sneak another one past the baseball gods, overcoming a couple of unexpected errors from Adam LaRoche and Jose Bautista and getting Albert Pujols to foul out and preserve a 3-2 victory and the Buccos 5th win of the season. This puts the team ahead of last year, where they didn't get win #5 until game 16, and hopefully they won't match last year going forward, either, since last season the 5th win was followed by a 7 game losing streak where they were outscored 34-12.

All of this mediocrity and occasional winning is covering up a few disturbing trends, though, which I think need to be brought to light.

Am I talking about Adam LaRoche? No. It's difficult to be surprised at a hitter struggling in April when he has never hit over .200 in that month.

One potential concern is Jose Bautista. He started of a smoking 6 for 13 this season, and didn't strike out in his first 26 at-bats, but has now struck out 6 times in his last 17 at-bats. Hopefully it is a slump and not a continual issue.

Ronny Paulino? Not him either. Ronny doesn't have a history of poor starts to fall back on and explain away his .189 average, but last season Paulino only played in five games prior to April 25th, so I have a funny feeling the current weather is quite disagreeable for him.

There are hitters across the majors who are struggling with the cold weather. Of the NL's top 10 hitters by OPS last season, all of whom had an OPS over .910, only two of them (Miguel Cabrera and Matt Holliday) are posting an OPS over .870 so far. Granted, a lot of the "big boppers" are struggling a bit less than Bay and LaRoche, but that should even out during the course of the season.

The problem I am worried about is the Pirates wasting the starting pitching they are getting, mainly in the form of the same impatience they showed last season. Pirates starting pitching has gone 71 innings through 11 games an average of just under 6 2/3 innings per start, and have compiled an ERA of 3.80. Remove Zach Duke's bad start against San Francisco, and those numbers become 69 innings in 10 games (7 innings per start) and an ERA of 3.00. In spite of those numbers, which include 6 quality starts and a couple more that almost were, they have compiled a measly 3-4 record.

What does that have to do with the Pirates' impatience at the plate? Well, common sense dictates that the more a pitcher throws, the more tired he gets, and the more tired he gets, the more hittable he becomes. Therefore, even with the best of pitchers, the faster you can escalate a pitch count, the more likely you are to see hittable pitches.

Apparently the Pirates don't follow this philosophy, and the stats seem to indicate that Adam LaRoche needs to start sharing his ADD medication. The team is dead last in the NL with 25 BB in 11 games - just over two walks per game. The only other NL teams who have less than 35 (three per game) are St. Louis, Milwaukee, Chicago, and San Francisco. But the Brewers and Cubs are hitting (3rd and 4th in average, respectively) ans St. Louis is pitching (3rd best ERA in the NL), so those guys aren't struggling like the Pirates.

I looked into something that I thought might be a trend, and it seems as though I was right. The Pirates are getting the starting pitchers to work very early on in games, but seem to give up on the idea after that.

I must note that when I talk about these stats, I have to leave out the game where we were shut out by Braden Looper, because I couldn't find a pitch-by-pitch log.

The Pirates have seen upwards of four pitches per plate appearance in either the first or second inning of every game (1st inning of games 1, 3, 4, 8, 10, and 11; 2nd inning of games 2, 5, 6, and 9), to the tune of 4.47 pitches per plate appearance for 53 hitters in those innings. Over the remainder of the innings where Pirate hitters have faced the opposing starter, 217 hitters have seen a mere 3.52 pitches per plate appearance - a full pitch less!

Remove the four other really good innings the team had (five hitters seeing 23 pitches twice in the 4th and 6th against Randy Keisler; six hitters seeing 29 pitches in the 6th against Aaron Harang; five hitters seeing 24 pitches in the 9th against Russ Ortiz) and that average drops to an even lower 3.38 pitches per plate appearance.

So all that numbers show you a team that has one good inning early on where they work the count, then start hacking away. Seeing almost a pitch and a half less per plate appearance after you work the count early on defeats the purpose of doing so. Today was the perfect example. In jumping out to a 3-0 lead in the first inning, the Pirates sent eight hitters to the plate and made Anthony Reyes throw a total of 47 pitches (almost six P/PA), finishing the inning with three hits and two walks. During the remaining eight innings, the Bucs sent 28 batters up and saw only 98 pitches, and half of those batters saw three pitches or less, managing only five hits and one walk in those eight innings. This type of patience seems counter productive, but gets muddled when you compare it to something else...

The Pirates are hitting 16-44 (.364) when putting the 1st pitch in play, and only 60-282 (.213) otherwise.

So perhaps my diatribe about patience is ruined? Perhaps. Then again, it could be a combination of things. For instance, in today's game, the Pirates had two instances where the first hitter smacked a triple on the first pitch of the inning, then spent the rest of the inning stuck at third.

Only time will tell.