I just want to see some good baseball this weekend. I might only be able to watch tonight, but let's execute and finish some games here. There's been so much shit that the average inning is almost unwatchable right now, which I think is damaging a lot of our perspectives.
If the pitching remains horribly bad, then we're only at the very beginning of a death spiral, and it's fair to assume that in about three weeks time, our win total will be much closer to the Marlins and Royals than the Padres and Rockies. The homer, never-say-die optimist in me wants to point out that if we run the table here for a little bit, we're realistically probably right back in the thick of the NL race. And in some sense, the playoff odds don't really become cast in stone until early August or so.
I won't go that far, but this team can historically be very streaky, and we have a number of pitchers underperforming what you'd expect from them by a lot. I keep telling myself that I will jettison the long writeups about this team, so I'll at least try to keep this off hand post shorter, but either direction wouldn't surprise me much with this group. Maybe we get a couple bounces in tonight's game, get a good vibe going, and finish the road trip on a high note, or maybe we see more of the same, Agrazal isn't fooling anybody, and Archer proves those two ok starts were flukes.
Basically any path back to respectability requires a five game winning streak that starts tonight, and then a team that has a lot of second-half momentum. Jason Mackey has a good quick writeup in the PG about what's been going wrong, and rightly points out that for us to be on pace for 90ish wins, we basically have to win 3/4 games for an extended stretch, which is almost impossible to conceive. However, I think some of the projection stuff also suffers from being done too early in the season. This team has been highly volatile, and the injury question marks (most especially Taillon), rookies, and general shittiness of the bullpen suggest that there's no way to think it won't remain volatile in a bad way, but we've also seen brief glimpses of the team handling very solid NL contenders such as the Cardinals and Rockies. The margin for error is now even thinner than ever, but despite all the times I've said in the past several games/posts, I'm not quite ready to declare the season dead.
When we flail around to a 3-5 record in the next 8 games and then get stomped by the Astros, the corpse will be good and dead, but until that happens, I'm still squinting for a zombie wrecking havoc.