Reason for optimism: It's a team with a wealth of under-30-year-old talent coming off of a 98-win season -- how bad can regression possibly be?
Reason for pessimism: The window closes quickly for teams with three straight years of playoff failures.
As noted in last year's preview, Vegas consistently shows little preseason respect for the Pirates, who then go out and make a regular-season mockery of their wins market. Last year was no exception, as Pittsburgh blew past its projection of 85.5 on the way to 98 wins. It was the fifth straight year that the team's "over" cashed, all with relative ease. Not only are the Pirates the only team with five straight "overs," they manage to beat those totals by an average of 8.6 wins each year over that span.
Vegas might have been slow to catch up with the Pirates' success, but it has set the bar progressively higher every year -- and with a current 86.5 win hurdle, the Pirates have an even bigger number to hit this year. A closer look at the 2015 team reveals, pretty clearly, which side of the line to support this year.
The 2015 Pirates might have posted 98 wins, but despite that output they were really a 91-win team, from a statistical perspective. From a Pythag wins expectation they were among the luckiest teams in baseball, to the tune of about 5.5 extra wins, and cluster luck (a measure of how many runs scored and allowed their underlying performance should have yielded) reveals the benefit of another win or two.
A 91-win base is still formidable though, and the only notable change offensively is the replacement of the Pirates' weakest point of production. Pedro Alvarez was unquestionably one of the home-grown talents who transformed a franchise with two decades of losing records into one with three straight years of postseason appearances. Normally, 30-home run power over a full season of at-bats is a tough asset to lose, but Alvarez, who achieved that pace in three of the last four years, also packaged a ton of strikeouts with that power -- without the elevated walk rate normally associated with feast-or-famine sluggers. Furthermore, that skill set has the least amount of value at first base, where he played last year, so while the Pirates will suffer a drop-off in home run production, John Jaso's vastly superior on-base skills might actually improve the offense. I don't quite see the Pirates getting to within a whisper of 700 runs scored the way they did last year, but that's not the biggest area of concern.
It's the runs allowed side of the ledger where Pittsburgh has an abundance of red flags that point to a nasty regression, and subsequent increase in runs allowed. And it starts with the bullpen. Improbably, and I suspect it's unknown to even many hardcore baseball fans, the Pirates -- and not the Royals, Cardinals or Yankees -- had the best bullpen in baseball in 2015. You can summarize Pittsburgh's MLB-leading bullpen ERA of 2.67 over a whopping 522 innings this way: they were Matt Harvey, over nearly three times as many innings pitched.
While it's not unusual for the best bullpen in baseball to have an ERA below 3.00 -- it happens about twice a year -- it's stunning for a team to do it with a below-average strikeout rate, which is what the Pirates achieved last year (21.5 percent vs. an average of 22.1 percent). Yes, led by Mark Melancon's 57.5 percent groundball rate they do induce the highest rate of grounders among MLB bullpens, but the entire skill set mix still calls for the Pirates' pen to have a sharp uptick in runs allowed this year.
It might be even uglier when the rotation's results are tallied. Backed by the pitch-framing prowess of Francisco Cervelli, who unexpectedly continued the strike-stealing excellence of Russell Martin, the Pirates have gotten a lot of successful back-end production from other teams' cast-offs. That formula is going to be severely tested this year, as Jon Niese and Ryan Vogelsong (who turns 39 in July) will be asked to replace the 2015 work of A.J. Burnett, Charlie Morton and J.A. Happ.
To fantasy players, the names Burnett, Morton and Happ aren't exactly DeGrom, Harvey, and Matz, but they gave Pittsburgh 60 starts of 3.54 ERA-quality production last year, and what we're concerned with here is marginal changes. I assure you, Niese and Vogelsong, with their declining velocity and strikeout rates, are going to give up materially more runs this year. On top of that, staff ace Gerrit Cole could improve his skills somewhat this year, post a very reasonable 3.00 ERA and still give up 15 more runs than he gave up last year.
While more than half (18 out of 30) of all MLB franchises have made the playoffs three years in a row at some point in their history, stunningly, only five franchises have ever had a streak of at least four straight postseason appearances. While there are a lot of factors that make continued success difficult, there is a surprising indicator that has halted a few teams' streak at three. For all the talk about baseball's postseason being a crapshoot, or more accurately a tournament designed to produce a champion while not necessarily identifying the best team, teams that have sustained playoff runs also have had playoff success. Only one team -- the Oakland A's of 2000-2003 -- managed to make the playoffs four years in a row without winning a "best-of" playoff series in its first three appearances.
Yes, it means I'm not counting the Pirates 2013 wild-card victory any differently than a Game 163 tiebreaker, but semantics aside, that tidbit should be chilling for Pirates fans who fear the window is quickly closing on the Andrew McCutchen era in Pittsburgh. If you look closely enough, the signs of decline appeared for the first time in 2015 for this franchise-altering talent, and 2016 will be McCutchen's last under-30 campaign.
In the stock market you see the detriment of chasing past performance all the time, and it might end up, ironically, that the year Vegas finally has Pittsburgh pegged for the postseason, it misses the playoffs. The Pirates were an "over" recommendation last year, but at a market of 86.5 wins I've got the Pirates as a solid "under" call this year. If the surge in runs allowed that I foresee turns into an explosion, the Pirates might turn out to be a very surprising under-.500 team.
2016 projection: 80-82, (third, NL Central)
Bet recommendation: Under