Dunlap: For Pirates, It Didn't Come Down To Wednesday Night
Maybe you've calmed down by now.
Perhaps you're able to have some perspective and look back on the Pirates' 2015 season through some different eyes than the ones that, almost certainly, forced a terrible taste in the immediate aftermath Wednesday night of a 4-0 Wild Card Game blanking at PNC Park by the Chicago Cubs.
It was the third such time the Pirates played in the Wild Card Game and second time in as many years a solid run through the summer was left to the mercy of a nine-inning, win-and-you're-in proposition for the real playoffs.
Perhaps with a little perspective you can look back on everything and arrive to the point where I am: There's no reason to cry the system is unfair, no reason to gripe, complain or object about anything.
Here's the reality: Losing a one-game playoff for the second time in a row should force everyone to understand just how important wining the National League Central is and, by extension and maybe a bigger point, just how important those early-season games are.
Know why?
Because the last couple of seasons, the Pirates have been bad in the early portion of the schedule and it has, effectively, forced them to climb a hill they could never surmount.
Over the past two seasons in the months of March, April and May, the Pirates are a combined 51-54.
This season, the Pirates started the first few months with a 26-24 record.
However, during this season, the Pirates played a week of baseball from May 13-20 when they faced the Phillies, Cubs and Twins. The club lost four straight and six of seven in that span, marking an easily-identifiable, early-season horrid stretch that, no matter how many games you win late in the season, will always stick with you.
And that came this season after the Pirates, immediately upon leaving Bradenton, were swept in a three-game series in Cincinnati to start the campaign.
They all count the same, every single one of those.
Especially for a team that ends up winning 98 games and finishing 2 games behind the Cardinals.
In 2014, it was even worse before the Pirates were made to play in that one-off against the Giants. The Pirates went 25-30 in the first couple months of the season, finding themselves at 12-20 and a really rough 9.5 games back by May 5.
When you end up with 88 wins and finish 2 games behind St. Louis --- as the Pirates did in 2014 --- one can easily point to (and I will) the early-going as a portion of the schedule when they could have, and should have, done more.
If that had happened either one of these past two seasons, perhaps this club wouldn't have been scrambling to catch the Cardinals in the final few days of the season or, at the very least, would have forced a one-game playoff for the NL Central crown.
No question, 98 and 88 wins in back-to-back seasons is more than respectable. But, without staggering out of the starting blocks, this team --- one or both of those seasons --- might have been able to avoid that dreaded Wild Card Game.
There is a lesson learned in all of this.
At least I hope a heavy lesson we have absorbed in all of this --- that Game 7 on the season counts exactly the same as Game 159 of the season.
You get that? They all count the same.
That is to say, so many want to define the parameters of the pennant race. There are so many who want to put their own timeline on when the pennant race starts.
Some say it begins at the All-Star Break.
Some say it begins at the trade deadline or with 60, 45 or 30 games left.
Some measure it in weeks remaining in the baseball season, unable to grasp that their team is grappling for a pennant --- or Wild Card spot --- from the very day the Grapefruit or Cactus League ends.
If you learned nothing else over the past two seasons for the Pittsburgh Pirates, learn this: The pennant race begins the very moment the team leaves Bradenton.
The pennant race begins on Opening Day.
Those games, way back in April when the players had an extra layer under their jersey and their hands stung with the cold, were really, really important.
And it would be in the Pirates' best interest to fare better in those ones at the beginning of 2016 if they want to avoid it all coming down to just one at the end.
Colin Dunlap is a featured columnist at CBSPittsburgh.com. He can also be heard weekdays from 5:40 a.m. to 10 a.m. on Sports Radio 93-7 "The Fan." You can e-mail him at colin.dunlap@cbsradio.com. Check out his bio here.
