5 big 2020 Pirates questions: Will a short season help the Pirates? - TribLIVE

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Our “Breakfast With Benz” Pittsburgh Pirates Spring Training 2.0 coverage has built all week to this.

We’ve posed one crucial question per day about the Pirates as they prepare for the 2020 shortened season.

We looked at the batting order and the starting rotation. We analyzed the bullpen and tried to figure out what would happen with Cole Tucker.

So, let’s get to the big picture to wrap up for the week as the Pirates host the Cleveland Indians on Saturday at PNC Park in an actual preseason game.

Friday’s question: Will the Pirates be helped — or hurt — by a shortened 60-game season?

Friday’s answer: How the heck should I know?! We’ve never seen anything like this before.

Just trying to be honest.

There is no basis for comparison or building an argument to figure out how a very different roster is going to fit into a brand-new paradigm of a season.

But let’s look at the question closely and try to answer it literally because it’s been asked so often in advance of this truncated calendar: Does a compressed season help or hurt the Pirates?

Come to think of it, the question isn’t that hard to answer. Yes. A shortened season will help the Pirates.

That’s a very different question than “will the Pirates be better this year?”

Because they aren’t. They just aren’t.

In terms of talent, there’s no way this team is as good as the club that left Bradenton in late March 2019. Felipe Vazquez, Starling Marte, Chris Archer and Jameson Taillon have been subtracted from that group. So have Corey Dickerson, Francisco Cervelli and Melky Cabrera.

They’ve been replaced with the likes of Jarrod Dyson, Guillermo Heredia, Derek Holland and a bunch of lesser options in elevated roles from last year’s last-place team.

Taillon and Archer may not have been very good in 2019. But I’d rather have them than not right now.

I bet Pirates management feels the same.

However, could this team remain competitive more easily relative to the pack thanks to a truncated schedule?

Yes. That should be the case.

For as bad as the Pirates ended up last year, they were 29-31 after 60 games. They were 30-30 at the same point in 2018.

The bottom didn’t fall out a season ago until they went 4-24 from mid-July to mid-August. That gruesome stretch didn’t bite until game 90 of the schedule when they were 44-46.

So, unless the wheels completely fall off in the first few weeks of this calendar, the Pirates should feel like they still have something to play for all year.

Well, unless after years of us derisively saying the Pirates “could be mathematically eliminated after the first month,” it actually comes true in this case.

I’m not usually a big “intangibles” guy when it comes to analysis like this. Certainly not in a situation where we can tangibly look at a last-place team that’s returning with a lesser roster from the previous year.

But under these odd circumstances, some elements of who the Pirates are off the field could help them once this 60-game sprint begins.

With the exceptions of some tumultuous personalities in the bullpen — such as Keone Kela and Kyle Crick — the Pirates do seem to have a really good collective persona. New manager Derek Shelton has a ton of optimism and appears to have injected some levity onto this team.

The likes of Josh Bell, Cole Tucker, Steven Brault and Trevor Williams have lots of personality. Kevin Newman, Bryan Reynolds, Jacob Stallings and Adam Frazier never seem bothered by a thing.

That could go a long way toward extending an early hot streak if they stumble onto one. It may help them snap out of an early bad streak if that should befall the franchise in the first few weeks.

“The most important opinion in the ballpark is the one from the guys wearing the uniforms as far as their expectations walking onto the field every night,” general manager Ben Cherington said this week. “It feels like this group likes to be with each other. Likes to play and prepare with each other.”

Another thing this batch of players has going for it is that they all appear to genuinely want to be participating. Most are young, early in their service time. They wanted to report. The priority appeared to be about suiting up, not getting as much money for as few games as possible.

For many of the veteran, higher-payroll franchises across the league, I think it may have been the opposite.

Grousing and concerns about coronavirus and the corresponding rules have been nearly nonexistent since the team got to PNC Park.

“They like being here. It’s a strange time. There’s a lot these guys go through just to get on the field every day,” Cherington said. “And you haven’t heard a bit of complaining about it. And that’s a good signal for us.”

For these Pirates, it appears that 60 games isn’t as good as 162 but it’s better than nothing. In some of the bigger markets, I could see underachieving, high-payroll teams tank, and tank quickly if things don’t go well early.

Most of these Pirates players are playing for their futures as much as they are for 2020. And in this case, that’s a good thing.

“They do gel. They do get along,” Shelton said. “They are going to spend a lot of time together. They aren’t going to go anywhere. You’re in a bubble, so to speak. You’re in hotels on the road. We don’t want them going a lot of places. The fact that they get along is going to be very beneficial to us.”

Regardless of what the length of this season would’ve been, I’m pretty sure you couldn’t have found a reasonable amount of games that could’ve coerced me into thinking this unit could contend. But the shorter the better to keep it interesting.

I don’t think the Pirates will finish in last place again. I’ll give them 25 or 26 wins if the season goes a full 60 games. Which looks worse than it should. Hey, five extra wins would be .500, right?

And who knows? Maybe they’ll have a better grip on some of the other questions we asked at the start of the week by the time 2021 starts.

Tim Benz is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact Tim at tbenz@triblive.com or via Twitter. All tweets could be reposted. All emails are subject to publication unless specified otherwise.

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