Wow, it's August and I'm still following Pirates baseball. The 2012 squad is still on top of the teams from the past 20 years. The Pirates have consistently improved their winning percentage as the months go by. In the past few years, August has been a pretty dismal month for Pirates baseball. Their best August performance in the past five years was 2007 when they played .567 for the month. Their second "best" was .321 in 2009.

Split W L RS RA WP
April 10 12 58 66 .455
May 15 13 89 110 .536
June 17 10 146 110 .630
July 17 9 130 105 .654

Unfortunately, the 2012 Pirates are losing ground against Cincinnati who simply refuses to lose. The Pirates are three games back in the NL Central, but tied with Atlanta for the top two wildcard spots, and four games ahead of St. Louis and Los Angeles. At least we aren't the 2012 Astros. They went 3-24 in the month of July. They performed slightly better than that against the Pirates in July going 1-7, for a marginally better .125 winning percentage.

 Watch the 2011 team plummet in the rankings in the next few weeks. At the end of July they were only three games into a ten game losing streak. The 2011 team won't catch 2012's current win total of 59 games until Aug 20th. At least 2011 finished better than 2010, 1995, or 1995, none of which finished with 59 wins.

Standings for Jul 31
2012  59  44 .573 --
1992  55  48 .534 4.0
2011  54  52 .509 6.5
1997  53  55 .491 8.5
1999  50  53 .485 9.0
2004  49  53 .480 9.5
1994  49  55 .471 10.5
2008  51  58 .468 11.0
2003  49  57 .462 11.5
1998  50  59 .459 12.0
2002  49  58 .458 12.0
1993  47  57 .452 12.5
1996  48  59 .449 13.0
2000  46  58 .442 13.5
2009  44  58 .431 14.5
1995  36  49 .424 14.0
2005  44  61 .419 16.0
2007  42  62 .404 17.5
2001  41  64 .390 19.0
2006  40  67 .374 21.0
2010  36  67 .350 23.0