Despite Skid, You Won’t Find The Pirates Panicking Just Yet

PITTSBURGH — Following their 4-0 loss to the Toronto Blue Jays on Friday night, the Pittsburgh Pirates find themselves stuck in a five-game losing streak.

Prior to the start of their current skid, the Pirates had only lost eight times in their first 28 games of the season.

While there may be cause for concern, don’t expect the club to hit the panic button just yet. It’s a long season, and just about every team goes through a rough patch here and there at some point.

“Just flush it…. Just kinda move on to the next one,” David Bednar said on the current stretch. “That’s the beautiful thing about this. There’s 162 of them and obviously things aren’t going to go our way all the time. You can’t do anything about it today except go out and play hard today and I have full confidence that’s what this group is going to do.”

While a five-game skid is never welcomed, in the grand scheme of things, a five-game stretch is only a drop in the bucket compared to the season as a whole.

The Pirates have looked more bad than good these last five games, but they also looked more good than bad in the first month of the season. They believe that’s the stretch that is more indicative of what this team is about, just ask Rich Hill.

“It’s the effort and the work. That’s what it is. Any team that I’ve been on that’s been very good, the consistency of the work, showing up every single day, not taking it for granted. I think that’s something that we’ve been doing. Continue to keep working. Keep the effort high.

“Good teams do that. We’re certainly a good team. As many years as I’ve played, it doesn’t come around a lot that you’re on a team that has a chance to do something special. This is one of those groups,” Hill said.

Hill and the other veteran players the Pirates added in the offseason were brought in for these types of situations.

For an overall young team, this is the time to lean on the veterans. Anyone who has played this game as long as guys like Hill, Andrew McCutchen and Carlos Santana, knows these stretches happen and can be overcome.

While losing streaks are frustrating, it’s not the end of the world. Winning teams deal with adversity.

“There’s a reason why they’ve been around for so long and playing at such a high level. Just keeping that steady ship through no matter what. You know, not getting too high on the highs, too low on the lows. I think that attitude is kind of contagious,” Bednar said.

While there’s no need to sound the alarm just yet, the Pirates will look to get out of this team-wide slump as quickly as possible.

Their next opportunity to do that comes on Saturday night in the second game of this three-game set with the Blue Jays. The Pirates enter Saturday still in first place in the National League Central. If they want to remain there, they’ll try and put this dry spell behind them.