The Pirates Have Been Good, Just Not in the Way We Expected

If you were looking to rank early-season National League storylines, the Pirates playing at an 87-win pace probably wouldn’t be near the top of the list. As a narrative, it doesn’t compete with the scorching-hot Cubs, the surprising Phillies, a team that can’t win home games in Atlanta, and plenty of exciting individual players. Our preseason projections had the Pirates finishing the year with 83 wins, so it’s not all that interesting to point out that they’re playing slightly ahead of that pace. And that’s before acknowledging that most people thought the model was a little light on the National League’s eternal Wild Card.

So, you might be asking, why would the author call attention to the Pirates performance to date if it’s essentially what a reasonable person would have expected from them seven short weeks ago?

While the Pirates are winning baseball games at roughly the expected rate, they are not doing so in the manner we expected. Observe:

The Pirates average run differential in 2016 is similar to the expectation (+0.05 vs +0.11), but they are essentially scoring and allowing a full run more per game. Of course, we’re only 39 games into the season, so this isn’t to say that the projections were wrong and we should disregard them, but rather that the Pirates have looked different than we expected for the first quarter of the year.

Here are the Pirates who’ve recorded at least 30 plate appearances so far this year. As you can see, the only Pirate who isn’t hitting better than his preseason Depth Charts projection is Andrew McCutchen.

As a group, these 12 hitters have produced a .358 wOBA, which is a full 36 points higher than that same group’s projected average (weighted for their actual PA to date). Offense isn’t perfectly linear and there are things wOBA doesn’t capture, but a 36 point difference works out to just over one run per game. In other words, the Pirates aren’t scoring a bunch of runs because of sequencing, they’re actually hitting well enough to justify the runs that are crossing the plate. In fact, they’re underperforming their BaseRuns expected runs slightly on the offensive side of the equation.

Rodriguez, Joyce, and Kang are all in the middle of unsustainable stretches, but the rest of the team isn’t doing anything terribly outlandish. It’s not that key Pirates are beating their projections by a lot, it’s that so many of them have landed on the positive side of the median so far this year.

Statistically, there’s no reason why we should expect less regression toward the mean for the Pirates than we would for any other team, but there is something about a team that’s getting a little more from everyone that feels more sustainable than a team that’s getting crazy performances from the best couple of hitters.

The story is just as bleak on the pitching side as it is great on the batting side.

The pitchers highlighted in red have an ERA and FIP worse than their preseason projections. Most importantly, three-fifths of the starting rotation — Niese, Liriano, and Locke — are performing much worse than we expected going into the year. Liriano and Locke have also pitched worse in 2016 than they did for the team in 2015 — and the club lost A.J. Burnett and J.A. Happ, both of whom had solid seasons a year ago. The Pirates have one of the worst pitching staffs in baseball after having one of the best units in the game in 2015. Run prevention was a hallmark of the Big Data Bucs, but so far this year they’ve been one of the worst teams in the league when it comes to keeping runs off the board.

After only 39 games, you would expect that few players would performing at their projected levels even if we had really good projections. There’s simply too much variance in outcomes over one quarter of the season for us to expect a team to be performing exactly as we expected, even if we somehow nailed the projections in the first place.

The Pirates are interesting, however, because the projections have basically nailed the hardest part of the equation — the overall performance of the team — while getting none of the details right along the way. Basically all of the batters are doing better than we anticipated and most of the pitchers are doing worse. And they’re doing so in perfectly harmony. I don’t think that means anything. I’m not sure how it could mean anything.

Sparky Anderson used to say that he knew what kind of team he had after 40 games. I’m not sure if Clint Hurdle would agree in 2016. The Pirates looked like a below-average offense and an above-average pitching staff going into the season and, after 40 games, they’re a well above-average offense and a well below-average run-prevention team. This kind of thing is bound to happen if you observe enough seasons, but symmetry of the Pirates’ weird year is aesthetically pleasing. They’ve played as well as we expected, they just haven’t played at all like we expected they would.