This whole baseball thing, perhaps you’ve noticed, offers a person innumerable opportunities to drive him or herself crazy, especially if him or herself is straining under the delusion, for example, that the track of the 2016 Pirates offense can be in any way predictable.
Tracking hard toward total dormancy, Pirates hitters Tuesday night jumped that track and boomeranged all the way back to full competency, ignoring the mixed metaphors along the way, obviously.
For the middle game of this Houston Astros series, with both teams reluctantly aware their wild-card notions were disappearing in the long shadows of August, you would have guessed from the trends and the raw data that the Astros were the better positioned club.