Pirates of June Actually Know How to Hit

If you didn’t hear about how bad the Pirates offense was in the first two months of the season, you must have just been locked in your room without access to a computer, cell phone, or radio. They were awful.

Guess what? June brought a new month and a new Pirates offense. The team has been doing well offensively, and not just well based on Pittsburgh standards. They’re hitting .264/.323/.447, the league average for this 2012 season is .253/.319/.402, so the Pirates are significantly better in all three categories.

Despite the hitting, they’re still striking out a good bit. In April and May they struck out 411 times in 50 games. That’s 8.22 times per game. In June they have struck out 128 times in 16 games, that’s 8.0 times, so just a tiny bit better. That’s not a huge concern when you’re scoring runs despite it though.

Here’s the list of the team’s offensive contributors this month:

McGehee: .356/.434/.622 3 HR 6 XBH
McCutchen: .333/.394/.619 4 HR 9 XBH
Walker: .303/.370/.455 2 HR 6 XBH
Jones: .310/.333/.500 2 HR 4 XBH
BarmeS: .286/.300/.408 HR 4 XBH
Harrison: .278/.409/.556 HR 3 2 XBH
Tabata: .271/.364/.375 0 HR 5 XBH
Alvarez: .244/.333/.578 4 HR 7 XBH
Presley: .232/.246/.482 3 HR 7 XBH
Barajas: .182/.229/.341 2 HR 3 XBH
Hague: .194/.216/.194 0 HR 0 XBH

The team has gotten SOMETHING out of everyone up there besides Hague, who has singled seven times in 36 at bats. Barajas has been awful this month but those two home runs have helped his slugging percentage up to .341 which isn’t as bad as it could be. Pedro’s been tearing the cover off the ball the last three games and looks confident again (who knows how long it’ll last though), and even Tabata and Barmes are showing good signs. It’s been a fun ride and the team has shown how easy it is for them to win when they score some runs.

They’re averaging 5.1 runs per game this month. If this team would have scored exactly five runs every single game this season, their record would be 48-18. That shows you a bit of how good the pitching has been.

It’s not going to be easy to keep that five runs per game mark up, but the longer they can, the longer they’ll be pushing themselves further and further above .500, because it’s really hard for this pitching staff to allow more than four runs in a game.