I was thinking of taking a look at how the Pirates might do next season, but Dave Cameron beat me to it. He likes the offense, but is less sure about the pitching:

With all due respect to the Pirates abilities to find undervalued relief arms, this isn’t happening again. The 2012 Orioles pulled this trick off with a bunch of great relief seasons out of nowhere, then were a disaster in close games in 2013. This is the kind of thing that has huge season-to-season variance, and counting on Melancon, Wilson, Watson, Grilli, and Mazzaro to be a devastating core of relievers again in 2014 will likely lead to disappointment. Steamer projects over one run ERA regressions from Melancon and Wilson and almost one run regression from Watson and Mazzaro. It doesn’t hate these guys, but they’re more useful than other worldly. The Pirates bullpen is going to be worse next year, and it’s going to cost them a handful of wins that they got this season.

So, really, the run prevention is going to come down to two factors: how much of Gerrit Cole’s late season dominance is a precursor of things to come, and whether they can either retain Burnett or replace him with a similarly valuable veteran starter. If they keep Burnett, or fill his spot with a high quality starter, and then Cole steps in to throw a full season worth of All-Star performance, this rotation should still be pretty good. They’ve got a good enough defense to turn mediocre arms into useful back-end starters, and they can find another Jeff Locke or Charlie Morton to soak up innings, but with a less effective bullpen, they’re going to need their top three starters to be quite excellent again.

They might go through something like Washington did this season, with a good but not great season. That’s okay. As long as they are building in the right direction, the greatness doesn’t need to come in one fell swoop.