For most of the past month, this rare five-game entanglement between the Pirates and the St. Louis Cardinals loomed on the calendar like an ominous and perhaps even fateful crossroads, yet when it finally came around, both teams rolled into it with little evident apprehension.
The Pirates and Cardinals knew the one thing about this series that maybe we didn't care to know because it might have taken the fun out of it, that it would only turn out to be really significant if somebody swept it.
Despite the gathering of another massive North Shore crowd, this one carrying dollar store brooms and frothing to see St. Louis get skunked in a five-game series for the first time in 97 years (seriously, 1916), the Redbirds put a big fat purple 13-0 bruise on Clint Hurdle's pitchers Thursday night and got out of town with their dignity.
With their dignity, yes, but without their 11/2-game lead in the National League Central Division, which they turned over to the Pirates by losing four out of five.
Had the Pirates swept it and wound up ahead by 3 1/2, or had the Cardinals done the same and pushed the Pirates 6 1/2 games behind, then you might have had something both teams would point to in October as the place where so many things started to go right/wrong. As it is, in terms of relevant Central Division politics, this series will enjoy the approximate shelf life of a hard-boiled egg rolling down the aisle of a PAT bus.
Or something.
It's not like the Pirates haven't been in first place before, and it's not like the Cardinals are about to plunge into a dark depression at the prospect of being 1 1/2 games out with 55 to play.
But as theater, it was little else than the very best essence of the sport.
Baseball must ultimately be adjudicated, obviously, with pennants won, a World Series staged, a champion crowned and another city's heart ceremoniously broken on national television. But it says here that none of that is necessarily better than this, than these past five games, when nearly 130,000 people came out on four perfect summer nights in Pittsburgh and watched the best teams in baseball perform with purpose and passion.
The whole edge-of-your-seat, heart-palpitating-on-every-pitch brand of big-league ball can wait until October as the promised product of what dreams may come, but the game lives for the summer. This was a series that could not have been placed more perfectly than at the intersection of July and August. It was a series to savor, to relax, sit back, talk ball, have a dog or two and a brew or three, and to lament nothing except that PNC Park could be here for another 50 years and never produce a more perfect showcase.
In practical terms, the Pirates proved they could beat the very best competition in a variety of ways, shutting 'em out (6-0), outlasting 'em in 11 (2-1), spanking 'em hard (9-2), coming from behind (5-4), and proved beyond any doubt they are far from a perfect machine.
Oh yeah, 13-0.
In practical terms, Charlie Morton, the starter Thursday night, worked six shaggy innings to extend a funk in which he has now allowed 38 hits in 302/3 innings with an ERA of 4.98. He's no Brandon Cumpton.
The Cardinals, always glad to see Morton, lashed him for 10 hits in five innings. St. Louis is 8-2 all time against Morton. Against the Cardinals, his career ERA has swollen to 6.30.
If the Pirates have a part of their rotation squealing with dysfunction, the Cardinals are possibly solidifying theirs thanks to Joe Kelly, 25, who kept the Pirates hitless into the fifth and worked six shutout innings. Starting for only the fifth time in 2013, Kelly has allowed just one run in his past 172/3 innings.
No one figured him for the stopper when it came to the Cardinals' seven-game losing streak, their first of longer than three all season.
Nine games remain between these teams, six of them in St. Louis, the final one Sept. 8.
Should you be looking for the next fateful scheduling crossroads, the next ominous zombiescape dystopia, you might look past Sept. 8 to the season's horizon, because after that final Pirates meeting, the Cardinals might very well play the final 19 games of the season against teams with losing records.
Nineteen days of Brewers, Mariners, Rockies, Cubs, Nationals and, yes, more Brewers.
A lot will happen between here and there, and perhaps beyond, and maybe it will be more dramatic and more momentous and even more historic.
But it won't be better baseball than the baseball that filled this week.
Can't be.
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