A Lot NOT To Like in Pittsburgh Pirates' First "Pyrrhic" Victory

All other things being equal, it's clearly better to chalk up a "W" than an "L." Nevertheless, some wins are better than others.

The wins to be happy about are ones where opponents were clearly out of it, and are likely to stand up under most different sets of circumstances.

On the other hand, the Pittsburgh Pirates won last night, not because they posted winning metrics, but because they were playing an opponent they could beat. The Los Angeles Dodgers outhit the Pirates, 12 to 10, and proved once again that Zach Duke is one of the most hittable starters in baseball.

But the Angelenos are even less clutch than the Bucs, meaning that the former scored only two runs for seven scattered hits against Duke. On the other hand, the Pirates chalked up five runs on only three hits in the fifth inning, which also included two walks and a hit batter.

On some other night, against a different starter than Vicente Padilla (a "reject" from the wild-pitching, brawling Texas Rangers team), the Pirates would have lost. The five runs that they gave up were more than the Pittsburghers can score in an "average" game. 

And Duke's sloppy, five inning, one strike-out start put a lot of pressure on relievers (a total of five), as well as defenders, who got him out of all but one jam in the early innings.

Contrast this with Duke's 2-0 loss against the Chicago White Sox last May 22. Here, he pitched a "complete game" of eight innings (Chicago didn't bat in the bottom of the ninth), meaning that he had given the Pirates a winning game configuration without using any relievers.

The fact that he lost was not due to him, but to Pirates' hitting (or lack thereof), in a scoreless outing. On most other nights, even the light-hitting Pirates would have scored the three or more runs needed to win. Here was a case where a loss was actually "better" than most wins.

A famous Greek general invented the concept of a Pyrrhic victory. When a flatterer congratulated him on a great victory, the general, Pyrrhus (who had lost a quarter of his men in battle), said something like,

"If I have another victory like that, I will lose the war." By that standard, last night's game was a "Pyrrhic" victory.