Sunday was the one-month mark for the 2024 season (which began on March 28) and the first full month of baseball will come to an end on Tuesday. For the Pittsburgh Pirates, this past month was a story of two halves. In the first half, the Pirates raced out to a 9-2 start — their best record through 11 games in more than 30 years — and saw their playoff odds climb to almost 40%, the club’s best mark since 2016. The first three series against the Marlins, Nationals and Orioles played out like a best-case scenario for the 2024 season: the starting rotation was much better than expected, the bullpen got solid contributions from every arm, and the offense wore down opposing pitchers with their long at-bats. Most of those positives continued through series splits with the Tigers and Phillies, although the Bucs dropped a couple of games when the supposed stalwarts of the bullpen — David Bednar and Aroldis Chapman — had bad outings.
Then came the six-game losing streak, where the Pirates looked like one of the worse ballclubs ever assembled. They fared a little better this week with a split against a tough Milwaukee team and series loss against the Giants, but a lot of the issues behind that six-game skid have continued to haunt the team: namely, the anemic offense. Other problems — like poor defense and questionable fundamentals — have plagued the team since Opening Day, but were easier to ignore when the Bucs were winning ballgames.
The result, at the end of April, is a frustrating 14-15 ballclub. There is talent both in the field and on the mound, but the past couple weeks have shone a glaring light on the gaping holes on this roster — holes that I spent the entire winter fretting about, and which the Pirates failed to address due to lack of internal options or outside additions. The anemic offense will not be easy to overcome. There isn’t much help on the way in the farm system, and it’s too late to add a bat through trade or free agency, so the Pirates are just going to have to hope guys start hitting better.
Perhaps it would help if the Bucs went back to facing the kind of bad teams that filled the first week of the schedule to get the offense back on track. And fortunately for the Pirates, they will be getting exactly that over the next couple of weeks. On Monday, the Bucs will open a 3-game set against the soon-to-be-homeless Oakland Athletics. The A’s have been (Bill Simmons voice) surprisingly frisky over the first month of 2024, but make no mistake — they’re a bad team, and the Pirates should beat them. After that, the Bucs return home to face the Colorado Rockies and the Los Angeles Angels. Neither the Rockies nor the Angels are the worst teams in their respective leagues (at least not yet, in Colorado’s case) but they are two of the worst-run. The Halos’ offense has been about as bad the Bucs’ this year, and these two teams have two of the worst pitching staffs in the majors, with Colorado finishing dead last in most major pitching statistics. If the offense can’t get right against the Rockies’ woebegone pitching corps, then when can it ever?
There’s a saying that divisions aren’t won in April, but they can be lost in April, and that’s certainly applies for May as well. Sitting here on April 29th and considering the idea that the Pirates could be a playoff contender — let alone a potential division winner — might have some Bucco fans feeling like Jim Mora after losing to the 49ers. But while the projection systems didn’t consider the Pirates a contender in 2024, that should be the expectation of the organization and its fanbase after four seasons of rebuilding. The Bucs haven’t played great baseball in April, but that doesn’t mean the team is cooked. A decade ago, the Pirates opened up May 2014 with back-to-back losses to the Orioles, dropping the club to a disappointing 10-18 in its first season following a playoff appearance of my lifetime. They’d eventually rally to snag a wild card spot with an 88-74 record. The following year, a much more talented Bucco squad spent much of April and May dawdling around, and sat at an uninspiring 18-22 on May 20th. They’d finish the season with 98 wins.
This isn’t to say that the 2024 Pirates are a good team, let alone a great one. Most projection systems projected them to finish with a mid-70s win total, and I was slightly optimistic in predicting a 79-83 finish. By finishing the first month of the season with a 14-15 record and thus on a 79-win pace, the Pirates are technically outpacing those predictions. It just doesn’t feel all that great because the club got off to such a fantastic start and have been mired in a sinkhole of bad baseball for much of the past two weeks — and a 79-win season isn’t all that exciting.
The Pirates aren’t suddenly going to become a division favorite in a tough NL Central if they run the table against the A’s, Rockies and Angels over the next couple of weeks. But it will be easier to buy into the pessimism that has gripped the fanbase if the Bucs faceplant against the dregs of Major League Baseball. Over the winter, Bob Nutting talked a big game about how he expected the Pirates to remain “competitive” for the entire 2024 campaign. If this club is going to live up to even that modest goal, it has to start Monday night in the vacant, crumbling confines of the Oakland Coliseum.
Bucco Ball 
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