POTP: Your 2013 Pirates: Contenders? Not Quite

For a third consecutive summer, the Pittsburgh Pirates are near the top of the NL Central Division at the halfway mark. Unlike the preceding two seasons, it would appear all but certain that an epic collapse of historical proportions is not in the cards in 2013. But are the Pirates true contenders? The answer to that question is, Not Quite. Or perhaps, Not Yet.

The first reason for this is that this year's team simply does not hit enough. It is at least one, and really, two legitimate bats short of a playoff spot, even in the watered-down, two wildcards format unfortunately adopted in the latest cringeworthy "innovation" that comes down to us from the Commissioner's office.

Your 2013 Pirates are currently a putrid 26th in major league baseball in runs scored. Other than the badly disappointing Washington Nationals, the only teams below Pittsburgh are this year's bottom feeders: the DisAstros, the White Sox, and the Marlins.

All across the statistical columns, the Pirates are significantly less than contender status. Team batting average? A woeful .243. Home runs? 92, which ranks 18th in MLB. OPS? A middle-infielder-ish .699 mark, "good" for 22nd. Only in stolen bases are the Pirates anywhere near the top, where their 68 swipes are the 7th best figure. But that is largely the work of tow men, Starling Marte and Cutch. Even there, the team is not particularly outstanding in a top to bottom sense.

So, at least one trade - and ideally, more than one - must be made if this year's edition is going to stay in the race and claim a playoff spot. The first and most likely place to look in terms of an upgrade is, obviously, right field, which has unfortunately been a black hole all season long.

Travis Snider, formerly thought to be an elite hitter in the making when he was in the Blue Jays organization, has instead continued his death spiral from minor leaguer rising with a bullet to tarnished prospect to journeyman. In fairness, Snider has shown flashes, hitting two of the more clutch home runs this season and also showcasing a strong and accurate throwing arm, but over 250 at bats has managed a putrid .229 average with just three long balls and 22 RBI. His OPS? You don't want to know.

Garrett Jones, who hasn't played as much in right as at first base this season, has had a subpar year by his solid-but-not-spectacular standards, with a .257/8/35/.731 mark to date. More on Jones in a moment. All of which left Jose Tabata - remember him? - as the de facto starter, at least until his next in a seemingly endless procession of leg muscle injuries.

Tabata has looked...okay...all things considered, but continues to post numbers that would be fine for a versatile fourth outfielder type, but that are simply not good enough for a starter, particularly at a corner outfield spot. The suspicion is that he might be playing every day at this point as much to showcase him as trade bait as because of the failures of Snider and Jones.

As for where this leaves Alex Presley, he is getting The Ciriaco Treatment from the current regime. What is that, you ask? A player is "getting The Ciriaco Treatment" when he is 1) plainly the best option currently available to the organization on either the major or minor league levels, but 2) nevertheless somehow gets the short end of the stick and never gets the kind of extended look that would otherwise be a no-brainer given the situation. In other words, I'm not saying that Presley is bound for Cooperstown or even for the All Star Game, merely that he is clearly better than what has been taking the field ahead of him and there doesn't appear to be a logical reason for his lack of playing time.

Thus, we return to the idea of a trade for a right fielder. If you follow the Pirates' blogosphere, you have probably already heard the cast of characters being bandied about. These are names like Alex Rios, Michael Morse, the ageless Raul Ibanez, and so on. There are also some other guys who may not be as sexy but who might actually be better fits. Mostly these are below-the-radar-but-quite-capable veterans such as Chris Denorfia and Nate Schierholtz. My guess? I think the Pirates will bring in one of the latter type and won't empty the farm system for one of the big names.

Now, on to the other position of obvious need, which is first base. As mentioned above, Garrett Jones is having a mediocre year. His batting average is about what you would expect, or at least is not too far off what he usually does. It's his power that has been a real disappointment, especially given that he was coming off a career high 27 bombs last year. Jones might be feeling the pressure of trying to produce in what amounts to a walk year, as he is getting quite expensive in arbitration and it is highly unlikely that the Pirates will offer him arbitration again this coming off season. But whatever the reason, he is eminently replaceable in 2013.

Nor is his platoon partner, Gaby Sanchez, showing much of anything. Sanchez, once a solid-average starting first baseman for the Marlins, has been pretty bad since a fairly hot start. Thus even a stretch run rental player such as Justin Morneau of the Twins would be highly appealing if his price tag was not too high, which it ought not to be, given that he is in the last year of his contract. In any case, right field or first base or both must be upgraded for the Pirates to increase their legitimate chances at a playoff spot.

Nor are these the only holes for this much-improved but still significantly flawed team. The bench has been very bad all season. Brandon Inge, who on paper would figure to be an ideal multiposition part timer and platoon partner for third baseman Pedro Alvarez, is either still hurt from a shoulder injury in spring training, or finished due to age, or both. Backup catcher Mike McKenry, whose glaring inability to throw out opposing baserunners was sort-of tolerable because of his better than average power in 2012, has seen his hitting plunge to the level of his defense, which is to say, he's been pretty bad. Josh Harrison, who has ridden the escalator up and down between Pittsburgh and Indianapolis all season, long ago proved to my eyes that he is not a major league player, even as a utilityman.

In short, this is nowhere near the bench of a true contender.

The only realistic reinforcement from within would figure to be former number one draft choice Tony Sanchez, currently having a fine if still streaky season as an All-Star catcher in Triple A. He could be promoted and McKenry sent down so he would still be available later in the year if the Pirates opt for a more veteran presence in the hoped-for playoff push. But Inge and Harrison must be flat-out replaced. They are not good enough.

That leaves the rotation and the bullpen. The relievers have been the strength of this team, and even though they have been heavily used overall, the workload seems to have been pretty well spread out, all things considered. Although a capable veteran would be welcome, one is probably not necessary.

The rotation, however, could definitely use another arm. Even though the starters have performed well overall - remarkable when you factor in long term and/or season-ending injuries to Wandy Rodriguez, James McDonald, Jeff Karstens, Phil Irwin, and Kyle McPherson, as well as the flameout by former Giant and Royal Jonathan Sanchez - they have not, in general, gone deep into games and "phenom" Gerrit Cole has looked a lot more like a decent, 3/4 mid-rotation guy than an ace in the making, no matter how hard he throws. A veteran starter like Jake Peavy, who might be available from the rebuilding ChiSox, would be a major and much-needed upgrade at this point in time.

Stand pat, and the Pirates would still figure to end their all time major professional sports record of consecutive losing seasons. But they won't be contenders, not really. 85 wins would be a fine achievement for this crew as the team is currently constructed. Add in one or two legitimate hitters to go with a veteran starter and at minimum promote Sanchez to replace McKenry, and at least the wildcard is within reach. We will soon see if General Manager Neal Huntington can produce the necessary upgrades while facing the pressure of increased competition and increased expectations.

Our partner in the blogsphere, Will Pellas, hasn't had his fair share of at-bats this year; his PC landed on the DL. But he's back in time to give his state of the Pirate nation post.

Pellas: Hanny Deal, Future Trades?

GW commentator Will Pellas weighs in on the Hanny deal and the possibility of another move in the works:

The trade of Joel Hanrahan to Chowdah Nation was one of the more significant deals of GM Neal Huntington's tenure. The Pirates probably did about as well as could reasonably be expected, given Hanny's "Hanrattacks" last season and given that Joel is carrying more than a few extra pounds around his waistline.

Add in the fact that he is in his free agent walk year, and unfortunately there wasn't as much leverage for the Pirates to work with as would have been the case had they traded him last year. If they had done that, though, the natives (probably including both Ron and me, to be honest!) would have stormed the Bastille. So, you win some, you lose some.

Of the players the Pirates acquired in exchange for Hanrahan and overachiever utilityman Brock Holt, I am cautiously optimistic about relief pitcher Mark Melancon and believe he is a good bounceback bet.

It would be great if 1B/OF Jerry Sands became a mirror version of Garrett Jones - and let's all hope that he will - but Sands hits righthanded and isn't able to handle same side pitchers very well (lifetime MLB lines - .314 BA/.904 OPS v LHP; .204/.589 v RHP).

On the other hand, by virtue of hitting lefthanded, Jones is more useful because he can play against "opposite handed" pitchers much more often. So you have two very similar players in Sands and Jones, but unfortunately the younger, cheaper guy is less likely to be on the field than the older, more expensive guy. Jones is arbitration eligible this winter and coming off his best production since his incredible half season debut for the Pirates in 2009. As a result, he will cost more than a player with his respectable but not great career resume should.

I'm not expecting anything from trade throw-ins Pimentel and DeJesus, but Brock Holt couldn't play any position other than second base, and he didn't even do that particularly well. DeJesus at least can catch the ball and he can definitely play shortstop.

Holt brings up another point, though. The real issue with the Pirates' utility infielders is that Clint Hurdle "Ciriaco'ed" not only Ciriaco himself, but also Jordy Mercer. Ciriaco would have been a GREAT help to this team as a utility infielder and he would be ideally positioned to become the Pirates' starting shortstop after Clint Barmes almost certainly leaves town at the close of the 2013 campaign.

But the Pirates blew it with him the same way they've blown it, repeatedly and at great loss to the team, with their, ahem, "evalutions" of many other young players over the years. That happens in all organizations, of course, but such mistakes are greatly magnified in small markets where it's unlikely that the team can just buy a major league ready replacement for such mistakes off the shelf.

At the end of all this rumination and dealing, you would think that another trade is pending. Surely the Pirates can't go into 2013 with all of the part time/platoon 1B-DH-OF types on the roster at the moment. Jones, as previously noted, is getting a tad expensive in arbitration, and Sanchez is arb-eligible, too. MLB Trade Rumor's Matt Schwartz has their arb figures pegged at $4.4M for Jones and $1.8M for Sanchez.

Beyond these two there are Sands and Clint Robinson. Both are guys who were on the same career path that Jones was before he came to Pittsburgh in what must surely be one of the most effective minor league free agent signings of all time. That is, both Sands and Robinson were more or less trapped in the upper minors because their progress in their original organizations weas blocked by established major leaguers immediately above them.

Sands didn't sniff the field at Fenway Park after going to Da Sawx, stuck at Albuquerque until the season's end to remain eligible as the PTBNL in the deal. Boston obviously didn't think much of Sands because they conceded 1B to the distinctly underwhelmling and underachieving James Loney - who ironically was his blocker in LA - instead of taking a look at Sands. They passed him off to the Pirates without giving him a single at-bat in anger with the organization. Another yellow flag for his future in Pittsburgh, perhaps, but he has nothing left to prove in the minors and is at least worth a look.

Turning to the outfield, it's pretty clear that either Tabata, Jones or Presley will leave town this offseason. If I had to guess which one would go, it would be Presley, since as the team is currently constructed, you have Snider and Jones as outfielders who hit lefthanded. I much prefer "The King" to Tabata, particularly for the fourth outfielder role, but Tabata is (supposedly) a little younger and also has a team friendly long term deal in place. Of course that same contract could make Tabata very attractive to other clubs.

Looking at all of this it's hard to escape the conclusion that one more deal, maybe a big one, is very likely in the works. You could get quite a return from a Jones/Tabata/good prospect package. Maybe even the next starting shortstop, since it is apparent that that will not be Jordy Mercer or Chase d'Arnaud as long as the current regime is in charge.

In the aftermath of a trade like this, it would mean a right field platoon of Sands and Snider, with Presley as the fourth outfielder. Hmmm....that would leave the Pirates a bit thin in terms of outfield depth. So, perhaps an additional prospect along with Jones instead of Tabata. There are many possibilities, but I'll make this prediction: maybe not two, but definitely one from among Jones-Tabata-Presley will be traded before spring training.

Pellas on the Pirates: Sobering Realities

Much ink, both real and virtual, has already been spilled by many people in various corners of the media regarding the Pirates' alternately thrilling and exasperating 2012 season. Rather than continue to analyze the factors---and they are many---that led to the worst collapse in major league history by any team that was as far over .500 as the Pirates were at one time during the season, I've decided to take a closer look at some of the sobering realities the team and the organization will face going forward.

Cold Bucket Of Water To The Face #1: Your 2012 Pirates were the beneficiaries of not one, but TWO 100-loss teams in the same division. Think about that for a moment. The Cubs and the DisAstros both lost 100 games last season. Since major league baseball went to the current six division-plus-wildcard playoff format, what Chicago and Houston "achieved" has only happened one other time: in 2002, when the Tigers and Royals both hit the century mark in L's.

In spite of such generosity from two of its arch-foes, the Pirates still managed just 79 victories. The Astros are about to depart for the American League, and the Cubs don't figure to be woebegone for very much longer. If Pittsburgh couldn't manage to contend or at least break .500 in a season in which two division foes went over the century mark in losses, how in the world are they going to contend going forward?

Cold Bucket Of Water To The Face #2: The starting rotation looks surprisingly bad or at least unsettled heading into 2013. Given how well the rotation performed over the first two thirds of 2012, this state of affairs is all the more alarming. Right now, only two spots are locked up. Fortunately one of them is number one starter A. J. Burnett, who showed he had plenty of gas left in his tank with a sterling first year in black and gold, and the other is number two starter Wandy Rodriguez. Both are better than average veterans who will definitely anchor the starting five next season as long as they don't break down, but the cupboard is surprisingly bare behind them.

James McDonald's career is at the crossroads. If the Pirates had some indication that they were getting the first half of 2012 edition of McDonald going forward, then the top 3 starters would be no worse than second in the division, behind only the Reds. But McDonald was so horrid after the All Star break that he was banished to the bullpen. He barely played at all over the last month of the season. Both he and team management swear he wasn't hurt; if it's a case of a fragile psyche then things could go either way. In any case he is definitely in the doghouse 'til further notice.

Charlie Morton will presumably be back at some point next year after going under the knife for Tommy John surgery, but recovery from that operation often takes more than a year, and Morton was no sure thing even before he got hurt. Erik Bedard, who did quite well for the first two months of 2012 before failing so badly that the Pirates simply cut him, must be replaced; ditto for underrated veteran Kevin Correia, who will almost certainly leave as a free agent. Top pick Gerrit Cole should be up from the minors for the second half of 2013, but fellow first rounder Jameson Taillon is probably still a year or two away.

That leaves a handful of pitchers who have nothing left to prove in the minor leagues but whose major league experience to date is either limited, or underwhelming, or both: Kyle McPherson, Jeff Locke, and Justin Wilson. The only other potential reinforcement on hand at the moment is veteran Jeff Karstens, and while he figures to return via the arbitration process, he has never managed to get through an entire major league season without missing significant time due to injury.

Cold Bucket Of Water To The Face #3: This team still can't steal bases or otherwise manufacture runs with small ball to save its life. As good a fine young veteran player as Andrew McCutchen is, and as great a season as he just had, the truth is that he would be even better if he could just translate his outstanding footspeed into successful basestealing. But for whatever reason or reasons, McCutchen simply is not very good at swiping bags. In fact, he's getting worse at it as his career heads toward its peak, not better.

Beyond him, Alex Presley can run a little but is more of a pick-your-spots guy than a true threat, and Jose Tabata has lost it due to his ongoing and never-ending series of leg injuries. Starling Marte, fresh off a fitfully effective rookie half season, can definitely run, but in spite of his obvious and impressive physical talent, he is still very raw and far from a finished product; a return to Triple A for more seasoning is not out of the question for him.

None of this would matter much if the Pirates were the kind of heavy-hitting, American League style of team that General Manager Neal Huntington seems intent on building, except that the Pirates, as currently constructed, resemble nothing so much as they resemble a pale facsimile of that sort of club. In other words, they look like the Cleveland Indians, which is fitting since that's where Huntington was working before he was hired by the Pirates.

Cold Bucket Of Water To The Face #4: All of which leaves plain ol' hitting and home runs as the only way this team, as currently built, can score. To be sure, the Pirates do have some hitting, and they do have some power. Just not enough. And if Neil Walker's late season back injury becomes chronic, or if the holes in Pedro Alvarez' swing continue to result in prolonged slumps of mammoth proportions, or if Travis Snider continues to spend more time setting world records for steak consumption and less time on his conditioning, the offensive shortfall could go from noticeable to overwhelming.

Cold Bucket of Water To The Face #5: And of course, neither the team's catchers nor its pitchers did much of anything to slow down enemy basestealers. This became a major problem as the 2012 season wore on, and it will continue to be a major weakness going forward until and unless it is addressed.

The bottom line is that while the Pirates did manage to tie their, uh, "record" for most wins (79) in any season during the current, 20 year run of losing, continued improvement is no sure thing, and significant regression is possible---if not probable---unless management takes action this offseason to address the team's considerable weaknesses. A lot can happen between now and the opening of spring training in February 2013, and a lot must happen if the Pirates are to continue their climb back to respectability and, ultimately, to true contender status.

(Will Pellas is a regular contributor to the blog, and today points out that if the Bucs stand pat, all will not be kumbaya come next season)

Pellas on the Pirates: The Pirates at the Quarter Pole, or, How to Hang Around, Improbably

The late Sparky Anderson always used to say that he never drew any conclusions about any of the teams he managed until they had played 40 games, or a quarter of a season. In keeping with that wisdom,and because the Bucs have now competed in 38 contests in 2012, I figure we're close enough to the "quarter pole" to draw some conclusions about the latest edition of the Nutting Era Pirates.

Let's start with the positive: this team's pitching is legitimately good. Maybe even contender good, if by some miracle the current pace can be sustained. I say "miracle" because it will surely take something not far from supernatural intervention to keep any number of Pirate pitchers' arms from falling off given how badly the bullpen has already been abused.

But it's hard to argue with the results. The 2012 pitching staff has been at or near the top of the heap among all major league teams right from the get go. A special nod here must be given to both Erik Bedard and to the man who signed him, General Manager Neal Huntington.

Bedard is certainly one of the better lefthanded starting pitchers in the game on the rare occasions when his broken-down body feels like cooperating. He's also that rare southpaw who is capable of high strikeout numbers. Bringing him in was an astute move by Huntington, even if Bedard would never have come to Pittsburgh had he been remotely healthy in recent years and thus not in need of a port in a storm. Credit Huntington, though, for making the right read on Bedard's circumstances and for moving quickly to sign him.

Another Huntington acquisition, James McDonald, has been lights out and looks to be building toward a career year. He took a no-hitter into the sixth inning in his most recent start. Charlie Morton made it back more quickly than expected from off season hip surgery, and while he hasn't been great, he has been closer to last season's breakout than to the 2010 implosion that nearly sank his career.

A. J. Burnett, despite a currently-unsightly 5.12 ERA, has been much better than that with the lone exception of one horrendous (probably career worst) start. Even fifth starter Kevin Correia hasn't been bad, though he will presumably be bumped to the 'pen once manager Clint Hurdle decides to give resurgent Brad Lincoln a regular spot in the rotation and/or when Jeff Karstens makes it back from his early season shoulder injury.

The relievers haven't been as spectacular as the starters - and it says here that closer Joel Hanrahan may have peaked over the first half of last season and he's looked a lot more like a mere mortal ever since - but by and large they have been reliable and effective. Grizzled veterans Jason Grilli and Juan Cruz in particular have come through in a number of high pressure situations, usually with multiple strikeouts. Grilli and Cruz are "journeymen" by any other name, but you wouldn't know it from their effectiveness while wearing black and gold.

Unfortunately, there's the hitting, or rather, the complete and total lack of hitting outside of Andrew McCutchen. Consider that the Pirates have somehow managed 18 wins in 38 contests with the worst "offense" in all of American professional baseball as of a couple of weeks ago. You read that right, folks. Your Pirates are the single worst outfit wearing major OR minor league threads when it comes to scoring runs.

There are numerous culprits. Everyone knew coming into the season that the starting outfielders, particularly the corner outfielders, had considerably less over the wall power than most teams typically field.

However, there was also reason for optimism: both projected starters, right fielder Jose Tabata and left fielder Alex Presley, were "four tool" types in the minors, both had shown lots of ability other than over the wall power, and it was frankly kinda cool to see a couple of 1970s throwbacks bringing some old school National League style back to Pittsburgh. In other words you don't necessarily need to hit lots of home runs if you're doing literally everything else, and both Tabata and Presley appeared to be more than capable of playing that style and playing it well.

Alas, Tabata had an ice cold start and Presley fell into a 3-for-42 tailspin that landed him all the way back down to Triple A. Tabata seems to have turned it on in recent weeks, but has still looked more like a good fourth outfielder than a legitimate starter, overall.

Fan favorite Nate McLouth, brought back to Pittsburgh as insurance in the event that Tabata or Presley failed, has looked...well, finished. He's done absolutely nothing with the opportunity that presented itself when Presley failed. Garrett Jones still has his moments, but his game is what it is: brief stretches of unconscious power hitting followed by much longer stretches of complete futility coupled with mediocre outfield defense.

Turning to the infield, Casey McGehee, brought in via trade from the Brewers last offseason, hasn't hit for power or for average and has fallen near the Mendoza Line. Pedro Alvarez, despite an impressive power surge in April, is not out of the woods yet, himself, and he's done nothing for the past two to three weeks.

Neil Walker looks to me like he has stagnated. His modest power seems to have disappeared, and he's not hitting for enough of an average to compensate. Prior to this season, he was said in some quarters to be headed for a multi-year extension as the next building block in the ongoing team rebuilding project. But he's done nothing with the stick in 2012 to show that the team should invest in him that way, though his glovework has been impressively and unexpectedly pretty good for a guy who is really playing out of position when you get right down to it.

Veteran catcher Rod Barajas, whose defense and game-calling has been a welcome relief from previous starter Ryan Doumit's butchery, has finally started to turn it around recently after a horrendous start with the bat. As advertised, he does have power, but he still has just 5 RBI for the season. That's "five", as in, "one more than four".

Then there's shortstop Clint Barmes. Barmes has been benched for several games recently in favor of utility man Josh Harrison, and deservedly so, even though Harrison really can't play shortstop. Barmes was brought in as a presumed upgrade over previous starter Ronnie Cedeno, and he had a respectable resume. Unfortunately he has looked all but helpless at the plate, and his struggles have been so great that they've overshadowed his consistently pretty good defense, which is saying something.

While there's still time for him to prove otherwise, it's hard to escape the conclusion that Barmes' career is in jeopardy. He'll get plenty of chances because the Pirates don't really have a viable alternative in the upper minors, where athletic Chase d'Arnaud can run but not play baseball so well, and steadier Jordy Mercer appears to have a limited ceiling.

Rarely has a team had such contrast between its pitching and defense on one side and its hitting, or total lack of it, on the other. If not for Andrew McCutchen's incredible start, the Pirates might have fielded the worst offense in the live ball era over the first six weeks of 2012.

And yet, here they are, hanging around in the NL Central, just a few games back at the quarter pole. Improbable, yes, but the opportunity for this team to make some noise in the division is definitely there. The Cubs and Astros are rebuilding. The Brewers and Cardinals have fallen back to the pack after significant offseason personnel losses. The Reds are decent but hardly imposing.

Assuming the pitching holds up, a couple of productive veteran bats could make a real difference for the Pirates and might even make them at least wild card contenders this season. On the other hand, if the players currently on the roster play to their career norms over the remainder of the year, there might be enough improvement from within to make things interesting, or at least, interesting enough for the front office to decide to hold onto its kids rather than trade some to get some hitting.

For now, the Pirates are better than bad, but worse than good. Probably a little below the middle of the pack overall, though with the asterisk that they appear to have a pitching staff that is considerably better than that. The question is whether to go out and get some hitting from outside the organization, or take the rest of the 2012 season to answer some lingering questions and see where we are next year.

(Will Pellas is a regular contributor to the Green Weenie, and today gives us his tout sheet as the Bucs come out of the first turn.)

Pellas On The Pirates: Don't Give Up On Lincoln...Yet

I still have hope that Lincoln can be at least a useful mid-rotation guy in the big leagues. Correia will, presumably, be gone after this season (though ya never know), Bedard almost certainly will be, too, Morton has to prove he's healthy and that he's no longer a space cadet---at least not on days he's pitching---Karstens has to show that he can take a regular turn for an entire season, and so on. In short, there are still plenty of opportunities for Lincoln to show he belongs in the Pirates rotation.

His incredible-for-a-pitcher stick is a big plus, too. Other than Carlos Zambrano, he might already be the best hitter at his position in the National League. Seriously, he's that good with the bat. So, he doesn't really have to be anything more than reliably average to be a definite asset for this team.

But to this point he hasn't been reliably average or even mediocre. He's had a handful of good outings and about twice as many really bad ones. He also doesn't seem to trust his stuff very much; he's a real nibbler, which is puzzling for a guy who has a true hammer for a curveball. I know he's lost a few feet off his fastball because of the surgery, but if I'm not mistaken his heater is still hitting 92-93 MPH---not great, but definitely a better than average major league fastball.

The fact that he doesn't have a third pitch has been pointed out in various places, and his fastball is also pretty "straight," but even so you'd think he'd go right after hitters a lot more than he does. There are many pitchers, in other words, who have lesser stuff than Lincoln who succeed by being far more aggressive. So, it's very strange.

Maybe his best position would be in the bullpen after all. A number of commentators said so back when Lincoln was first promoted; I have fought against that perception because we need all the starters we can get and because I think we need his bat, but maybe in the 'pen he can dial it up for one or two innings at a time and he'll have better results. I dunno. The clock is ticking with him, that's for sure.

(Will Pellas, GW's co-conspirator, contributes his thoughts on the Brad Lincoln enigma.)

Pellas On the Pirates: Shortstop

Will Pellas' thoughts on the shortstop position:

I'll say it again: if you have to go with a shortstop who is a one or two dimensional guy---a flawed player, a less than ideal solution---surely he ought to be the one with the best glove unless he is totally incompetent with the bat. To me, that spells "C-I-R-I-A-C-O".

That said, given the weakness of the position all around the majors at the moment, as well as the weakeness of this offseason's free agent class, maybe Cedeno isn't such a bad idea after all, assuming his considerable defensive improvement in 2011 is real and sustainable.

I'd personally be inclined to re-sign him and make Ciriaco the backup, while giving Ciriaco enough starts to get a better idea if his bat---such as it is---and running game would provide enough offense to consider getting rid of Cedeno, either during the season or, surely, by the winter of 2012.

D'Arnaud, I think, probably has the inside track among the guys who are left, but if he doesn't hit a lot better next year, the door is wide open for Mercer. Mercer has power, D'Arnaud has speed; if I had to choose one or the other I'd take speed, at least when we're talking about shortstop, but as the saying goes: you can't steal first base.

Then again this team has a lot worse holes than shortstop, and a lot more of them. So, maybe this is a tempest in a teapot discussion.

Pellas on the Pirates: The Bottom Line

In an offseason that is shaping up as the best one since the current regime took over, there have been a lot of words written in various quarters about the Pirates and what they're doing. That in itself is rather refreshing, but there's already been a very definite difference of opinion that has emerged amongst the august assemblage of, umm, "experts".

In short, the argument is over whether GM Neal Huntington and to a lesser extent team President Frank Coonelley and even Owner Bob Nutting are in "save my job / please the fans" mode, or whether the moves made will legitimately make the team better when it takes the field at PNC in April.

I've read the arguments from both sides, and have decided I'll split the difference between them but lean in the direction of "the team is legitimately improved".

I agree with some that the Pirates were probably (if not definitely) pressured by the MLBPA to spend more money on their major league roster salaries. To be honest, I could care less who or what pressured them, as long as they actually do it, and provided that the players on whom they spend the money are actual upgrades - even modest upgrades - over the players they replace.

That criterion seems to me to have been met this offseason. Which is to say that while Lyle Overbay, Kevin Correia, and Matt Diaz aren't going to lead us to the promised land, we already knew that and that's not the point here.

The point is that a "major league" organization - quote, unquote, har-dee-har-har - quite simply on principle alone would never let its on field product plunge to the depths of the all time worst (as this regime has done by any measure almost since it took control) if it had any other option. To do otherwise, as this bunch has done, is to demonstrate that you are not a, well, "major league" operation.

This offseason, one in which not great, but definitely noticeable improvement has probably been achieved by acquiring a handful of moderately priced productive veterans, proves beyond all doubt that this team definitely had other options besides sending John Russell as a lamb to the slaughter and otherwise all but ignoring the team on the field right now at PNC.

Which is to say, it was never true to begin with that the Pirates had no other choice but to put one of the all time worst teams in big league history on the field over the past 3 years because, well, you see, all those free agents are just too expensive. Absolutely not true. The team simply chose not to spend even the relatively modest dollars it took to bring players like Overbay, Correia, and Diaz to Pittsburgh before this winter.

But really, whether the current offseason has all come to pass because "Opie" is trying to save his job or because "Bobby" is bowing to fan outrage or because the MLBPA or even the Commissioner (such as he is) is leaning on "Frankie", or---most likely---all of the above, I don't care. I'm just glad it finally happened. Ya know why?

Because I want to see a team that is just mildly interesting, competent, and entertaining while we wait for the supposed "real" team---the one now mostly in the minors---to arrive. I don't believe now, nor have I ever believed, that such an expectation is unreasonable or impossible or unachievable, even in the bottomless well of insanity that is the economics of major league baseball.

I'm not asking for a World Series winner from the roster we see at present. Just a team that has a legitimate chance to beat any other team on any given day while we wait for the harvest to come in down on the farm.

Maybe the Pirates won't win more than they will lose for the time being, but I'm okay with that given the Marlins-Rays model this front office has chosen to implement. Or rather, I'm okay with that as long as we have a team something like the one we figure to have in 2011.

So, the bottom line for me is the bottom line: this team as presently constructed has a chance to win 70-plus games and to win some meaningful contests against the upper echelon of MLB while also providing the added intrigue that will be added later in the year by our next wave of kids from the minors. I can live with that.

I'm still not thrilled, but I'm willing to wait on the kids as long as the here and now product isn't criminally incompetent - which is what it has definitely been up til now.

Pellas on the Pirates: Making Peace With Neal Huntington ---or--- How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Tampa Bay North

I’ve sat down several times to write a pithy piece about the appalling trainwreck that is your 2010 Pittsburgh Pirates, but every time I got started, the words just trailed off into the ether.

That’s because unlike the (rapidly dwindling?) legion of Neal Huntington apologists, I expect a “major league” baseball team to make at least a show of trying to win a few games every year instead of deliberately tanking entire, multiple seasons on the premise that that’s all okay “because we’re rebuilding”, doncha know.

Unfortunately it’s become crystal clear that while current team ownership and management certainly has its priorities, winning in the here and now is definitely not among them. All of which does not make Huntington or his apologists right to blow off season after season on the hoped-for premise that someday, it’ll all be made right and no one will care. What it does do is force me and fans like me to re-evaluate how we perceive and follow the Pirates.

As a General Manager, Huntington makes a good Farm Director. Which, according to his apologists, is exactly the point. The Pirates, such fans continually remind me, were totally broken when “Opie”(seriously, he looks just like him) took over. Dave Littlefield’s approach didn’t work, nor did Cam Bonifay’s before him.

Littlefield may have seen to it that the Pirates were consistently somewhere in or not far from the realm of mediocrity, but his farm system was a disaster and there was no hope of contending. Bonifay tried to retain a couple of productive stars in Jason Kendall and Brian Giles, only to see the team’s finances ruined for...well, ever since.

Thus, only a complete and total teardown-and-rebuild of the entire organization, top to bottom, had any hope of producing another winner in Pittsburgh. Only the kind of consistently outstanding minor league systems we see in Tampa Bay, in Miami, in San Diego, and perhaps in Oakland and Minnesota had any chance at all of turning the team around.

Believe it or not, to this point in the discussion I largely agree with the other side. It’s when we go past this point that we part company. That’s because I don’t believe it’s ever “okay” to all but completely ignore the product that’s being put on the field at the (allegedly) major league level.

Not when your team plays in the elite professional organization in the entire industry, worldwide. Not when wins and losses and statistics can all be distorted, even pennant races affected, simply because you can’t be bothered to put even a mildly competent, sort-of professional team on the diamond for 162 games. And not when you charge paying customers admission in order that they might witness the carnage firsthand.

I don’t care how dysfunctional or “unfair” the economics of major league baseball are, or are purported to be. Them’s the rules. I don’t care that no free agent of real consequence would be caught dead in Pittsburgh even if ownership had the will and the cash flow to outbid other teams for their services. I don’t care that the Pirates are, in fact, making a real and legitimate effort to produce a consistently productive farm system. Well, that’s not true. I do care about that. I just don’t think a “major league” GM’s job description begins and ends in the bushes, even though Neal Huntington’s evidently does.

But wait, the apologists will protest. Didn’t he sign some very useful guys for the bullpen this past offseason, and didn’t he get a productive hitter in Garrett Jones off the junkheap, and didn’t he make a great trade with the Yankees? The answer to all of those questions is, yes he did.

Unfortunately, those deals are just about the complete extent of all the major-league-productive-right-now moves Huntington has made to date. That is, they’re about the only thing he’s done that has helped the team on the field at PNC even a little during the entire time he’s been the GM of the Pirates. (Jose Tabata and Pedro Alvarez have, of course, made the big club this season as the first wave of homegrown kids under Huntington’s watch. But they’re still too few, too young, and too inconsistent to really affect things without considerable reinforcements.)

To be sure, other moves were attempted. A few of them, anyway. But for reasons I will never comprehend, when it came to trades and signings that were supposed to help bridge the gap until the kids arrived, a veritable M*A*S*H unit of already-hamburgerized players was brought to Pittsburgh, apparently with little or no due diligence on the part of the front office.

Aki Iwamura, Jose Ascanio, Ryan Church and Jeff Clement were all certainly hurt before they ever put on a Pirates uniform. Andy LaRoche probably was. Same with Kevin Hart and Bobby Crosby. Charlie Morton, maybe, though his problems run far deeper than his supposedly sore shoulder earlier this season. Think the Pirates win more games if even half of those guys are physically sound and able to contribute over the past two seasons? I do.

Nor does the list stop there. Most of the current regime’s trades have been veterans for prospects; this was in keeping with the aim of rebuilding the farm system as fast as possible and so at least the approach was consistent. But does anyone else wonder if Tim Alderson’s sudden drop in velocity after he came over in the Freddy Sanchez deal might have been due to a pre-existing injury? Were any other prized prospects hurt when we got them?

Granted, almost anyone who has ever played organized sports knows that you’re rarely 100%; from Little League to the big leagues, playing hurt is part of it. Injured, or sort-of injured, players change teams all the time. But the Pirates had limited resources on hand when Huntington took over, and he could not afford to miss with many of his veterans going out, kids coming in trades.

This indisputable fact should have made the team more thorough in its medical diligence, not less. Yet somehow, multiple already-hurt players came in, and they made up almost the entire complement of the guys who were supposed to help in the here and now as opposed to Someday Over The Rainbow.

The fact is that Huntington missed badly with both Sanchez and Jason Bay, and the kindest thing you can say about most of his other trades is that the jury is still out.

Add the resulting dearth of talent caused by these moves to the wholesale exodus of the on-hand veterans, then mix in the horrendous (and to my mind, inexcusable) regression of virtually the entire starting staff in every season since the current front office has been in charge, and the results are entirely predictable: this team is bad beyond belief, it has only gotten worse over the past three years, and there is little or no reason to conclude it will be significantly better any time soon.

So, the picture is bleak and the outlook is grim, at least for the near term. Further down the road, there is certainly some talent in the Pirates’ minor league system, and there is enough talent to form the core of a significantly better team.

Huntington has, in fact, succeeded to some extent in his makeover down on the farm, and team owner Bob Nutting has certainly not been shy about paying large bonuses to sign top amateur talent. Unfortunately there’s still not yet enough talent to weather any significant storm.

For example, while there are four promising starting pitchers currently toiling at Double-A Altoona, none of them figure to make the Don Robinson 1978 leap, when he jumped up from Double-A to the Pirates and became the Sporting News Rookie Pitcher of the Year. One of the kid hurlers, Brian Morris, is the last realistic shot for getting anything significant out of the Bay deal. But there are doubts about his mechanics, and he’s already had a sore elbow this season after going down with Tommy John surgery while in the Dodgers’ system.

The other three pitchers, Justin Wilson, Rudy Owens, and Jeff Locke, are all more or less Paul Maholm clones and project as middle-of-the-rotation types in the bigs. There are few if any other hurlers anywhere in the system above Class A who figure to help the Pirates anytime soon. So, if any of these four go down or don’t make it, let alone two or more of them, it is difficult to see where the team will acquire any starting pitching.

In fact, it’s difficult to see where the team will acquire any talent, other than from its own farm system. Sure, there’ll be the occasional adroit junkyard signing---like the aforementioned Garrett Jones and a few others---but by and large this front office has cast its lot entirely with its kids.

That, in turn, is what Tampa Bay and the (Miami) Florida Marlins have done. Kids, kids, kids, and more kids, period. Maybe you make a deal for an established veteran to help you if you’re ever close enough to sniff the playoffs, but that’s it. Otherwise, it’s sink or swim with your own homegrown talent and very little else.

To bring things full circle, believe it or not I have no problem with a team that wants to be smart with its finances, and that chooses to invest the bulk of its resources in acquiring and developing most of its players from within. Most winning organizations have been built primarily (though please note, with rare exceptions not entirely) with homegrown talent, including the Pirates during the glory years of former General Manager Joe L. Brown.

Where I have a problem is with a front office that apparently can’t be bothered with the here and now---even a little bit---while it is doing the hard work of rebuilding. Something about that rubs me 180 degrees the wrong way. But it is clearly the path this team has chosen.

In short, the Pirates want to be Tampa Bay North, which is a fine and dandy notion in principle, but exceedingly difficult to carry out in practice. To be sure---putting aside my considerable disgust and disagreement with the current state of affairs for the moment---it is possible to win with such a strategy; the Marlins have two World Series titles and Tampa Bay is headed back to the playoffs after losing the Series to the Phillies in 2008.

The Pirates clearly believe in the Tampa Bay – Florida Marlins model, and they clearly mean to follow the same blueprint. Very well: the die is cast, the gauntlet thrown down. Like it or not, that’s the plan. But it remains to be seen if the “Best Management Team In Sports” is up to the task of building the “Pittsburgh Rays” before they’re run out of town on a rail. So far, clearly, they’re not.

Pellas OnThe Pirates: Make Mine Pomeranz!

The buzz is building around the web that the Pirates are looking hard at collegiate lefthander Drew Pomeranz as their top pick in this year's baseball amateur draft. Despite the howls of protest coming from Pirates fandom, Pomeranz is clearly the right choice, even though almost every college pitcher the team picked during the Littlefield years blew a tire almost immediately after signing. Here's why Pomeranz makes sense:

1) While his low 90s, average fastball velocity is a bit of a concern, he does have an exceptional---and very rare---breaking pitch: a knuckle-curve. To my knowledge there are very few pitchers in all of big league history who have mastered the knuckle-curve, and the two most prominent, Burt Hooton and Mike Mussina, were both righthanders. The surprise factor of this pitch all by itself should be a significant weapon, and Pomeranz's other pitches, while not great to this point in time, were good enough to make him this season's SEC Pitcher of the Year. Speaking of which....

2) Like Paul Maholm, he comes from an elite college power conference, meaning he is at the top of the heap in terms of organized amateur competition. Most observers consider the SEC to be equivalent to High Class A or perhaps even Double A, which of course means he'll get to Pittsburgh faster than a high school arm---of which we have plenty from last year's draft and, I expect, we'll get plenty more this year. What's wrong with picking the occasional collegiate pitcher, provided they're not already used up or ready to break down?

3) If he gets here by 2012---certainly do-able given his pedigree if he stays healthy---wouldn't it be great to add him to our first big wave of all-at-once homegrown prospects? Provided we continue to draft and pay for overslot high school and international arms further down in the draft, what's wrong with picking Pomeranz at the top? Didn't we follow the same strategy last season with Tony Sanchez? Yes, we did.

I'd be very happy with Pomeranz. Manny Machado, of course, would be a "best available player" pick where Pomeranz would be more of a "need" pick, but Machado is going to be another drama queen signing---if he can even be signed, since he has Darth Sidious as his agent---and in any case it's not a hard and fast or night and day distinction. In other words, it's not like you have the chance to pick Stephen Strasburg but take Daniel Moskos instead. (Speaking of Moskos, by the way, he is doing very well at Double-A Altoona and looks like at least a seviceable major league reliever before much longer.)

The bottom line for me is that I have no problem whatsoever with a mild overdraft at the top of the draft---which even I concede is probably true of Pomeranz---AS LONG AS the team continues to draft and pay over-slot for more projectible arms and players further down. Whatever else is true of the current ownership and front office, they have demonstrated beyond all doubt that they are committed to this very sound draft and talent acquisition strategy and that they are willing to back it up with cash (believe it or not!). The Pirates should stay the course, take Pomeranz, and get ready for him and Brad Lincoln at the top of the rotation by 2012.

(GW and Will had a little chat about the draft, and we agree on the suits' way of operating: pick the more prepared college guys first, sprinkle in some high-level, high risk prep kids, and overslot for them as the budget allows. It's a good formula.)

Pellas On The Pirates: The Small Market Death Spiral

The Pirates just got swept by the Cincinnati Reds. That, in and of itself, is not news in the annual 162 game marathon that is major league baseball. What is news is the way the sweep occurred, and what it says about the state of the organization and, most critically, the state of the team that the organization is actually putting on the field at increasingly empty PNC Park.

That team stinks, pure and simple.

Not only does it stink, it’s boring in its stinkage. There is nothing worse in sports than a team that is both bad and boring. Bill Veeck, (in)famous for decades for his, umm, creativity in the face of consistently terrible baseball on the south side of Chicago, understood this. Bob Nutting, Frank Coonelly, and Neil Huntington plainly do not. That’s why the Pirates are now firmly in the vice grip of the dreaded “small market death spiral”.

Ironically, it was a writer from Cleveland who best described this phenomenon back in April, in an article about the Indians---Huntington’s former team. Here is what he said:

The Indians now are in the (graveyard) spiral of the small-market team, the one that links payroll to attendance and prohibits them from getting better because they can't spend beyond their means, and they see their means dwindle with each bad season.

Attendance during the 3 game brooming by the Reds was less than pathetic. Given the way the Pirates played in the series, in which they came within a seeing eye single and a hit batsman of a perfect game by the luminous Johnny Cueto and then followed that gem with a listless shutout against perpetual underachiever Homer Bailey, there is no reason to expect it to get better any time soon, if ever.

The pathetic attendance, it says here, was due not to the weather but to the inescapable fact that this team is brutal, and it is boring, and it is painful to watch. We’re talking about the team that takes the field in Pittsburgh, the so-called major league team, the product that the organization is presumably trying to sell, the one for which it charges customers a fee before they are allowed the, err, privilege of watching it. Somewhere along the line, probably very early on in the current “rebuilding plan”, the current front office decided that the quality of the product it put on the field was irrelevant. This is not merely an insulting notion. It is, and has been, disastrous.

In short, there is little or no reason to go see this team play. It’s that simple and that bad.

Let’s start with the pitching. There is not one starting pitcher on the current staff who could reasonably be expected to do something special against the enemy on any given night. Not one. That’s not to say that the likes of Zach Duke, Paul Maholm, Ross Ohlendorf, etc., are “bad” pitchers. They’re not. They’re just nothing to write home about, and they don’t throw particularly hard, and so as a fan you never get the gratification of the occasional wow-he-really-mowed-‘em-down-tonight moments in the face of a terrible season. This staff never mows ‘em down.

At best, it gives you some quality starts and keeps you in games---which is certainly not a bad thing (just ask the Cardinals, except that they have a real team alongside their otherwise mostly pedestrian staff), it’s just not something that grabs your attention and gives you some hope and entertainment.

Steve Carlton, who was of course a Hall of Famer and far better than anyone we have on hand, was nonetheless a great example of this when he won 27 games for an utterly brutal Phillies team back in the early 70s. Curt Schilling, speaking of Philadelphia, did the same thing for a couple of seasons in the 90s, before the Phils began their current run of sustained excellence.

The Pirates have no similar pitcher in their current rotation and are highly unlikely to have one anytime soon, unless Brad Lincoln and his reconstructed elbow can fulfill the can’t miss label he had coming out of college. But that’s probably too much to ask of him after his surgery.

The bullpen has Evan Meek and Octavio Dotel and Brendan Donnelly, and they are all big, mean guys who throw hard and who “miss bats”. They come closest to providing some “wow” moments, but they are relievers and they aren’t going to be in many epic confrontations unless this team is playing meaningful baseball in July---which it won’t be.

The hitting is not only lackluster, it’s boring. Well, other than Andrew McCutchen, who is certainly the closest and only thing this team has to someone who is worth the price of admission. But it’s increasingly apparent that he’s just about all this team has.

The sad thing is that the Pirates traded away McCutchen’s charismatic running mate from last season, Nyjer Morgan, and he has gone on to give Washington a real boost amid an unexpectedly competitive and---that word again---entertaining season. Now, obviously, no one is saying that Morgan is headed for Cooperstown or even the All-Star Game. Well, probably not the All-Star Game. But despite his higher-than-you’d-like caught stealing numbers and punch and judy bat, Nyjer was….well, he was fun. Fun!

And he and McCutchen together were like frick and frack, the more so because they came up together through the Pirates’ minor league system. The two of them together at the top of the order would certainly have added enormous entertainment value to this Pirates team, but instead Morgan was sent to the Nationals in exchange for Lastings Milledge.

As with so many of Huntington’s moves, this one made sense on paper. Further, Milledge has unquestionably done everything that was asked of him by management, and has evidently put his previous pain in the neck behavior behind him, perhaps for good. Unfortunately, as with so many of Huntington's moves, his performance on the field has been almost as bad as his behavior has been good, and on top of that, he’s been ho-hum in the process. Well, except for that whole getting tagged out while jogging because he thought he’d just hit a grand slam thing. That was funny. Heh.

I could go on. Garrett Jones is either coming back to Earth, or being pitched around to an incredible degree, or both. Probably both, though I still think he could be a productive, better than average hitter with any support around or behind him.

But this lineup just doesn’t put any pressure on the opponent. It doesn’t run---again, other than McCutchen---and it doesn’t hit home runs and it doesn’t hit for a high average and it doesn’t flatten opposing catchers after running a stop sign at third base. It’s bad and it’s boring, and there’s no reason to expect improvement any time soon, except, perhaps, from Jose Tabata, who looks to be nearly ready at Triple-A Indianapolis.

But Tabata, cue the drum roll, please, looks more like a solid, complimentary, “professional hitter” type than he does an impact prospect. Again, not someone who is going to “wow” you. He’ll probably be better than Milledge, at least the Milledge we’ve seen thus far in 2010, but not as much fun as Morgan.

Pedro Alvarez, currently Tabata’s teammate in Indianapolis, does have the “wow” factor, but he seems to have stalled a bit in his rise through the system, and it might not be until next season that he gets established in Pittsburgh.

All of which returns us to the disgruntled Indians writer. Insert the word “Pirates” for “Indians” and he would be writing about the Bucs:

The Indians are doing their best to sell this rebuild as one made for the long-term, not the short. And it may well turn out that way. But if they were going to have any kind of season that would keep fans interested and keep revenues at any kind of acceptable level, they needed a decent start.

This team is not decent. It is not good. And it’s not even watchable. The current front office is getting the terrible attendance it deserves with its putrid on-field product. It seems to me that there was an arrogance about the way Neil Huntington went about his task, an arrogance that insisted the team’s on-the-field performance while it was being rebuilt simply didn’t matter. That always rubbed me the wrong way, and it only gets worse the longer I watch what is going on at PNC.

No, you can’t have everything, and yes, the longer term really is more important. But bad baseball doesn’t have to be as boring and hopeless as this bunch clearly is. While it’s not the main thing, it’s critical that fans be able to have some fun in exchange for their long-suffering patience.

That’s what made Veeck’s teams somewhat tolerable, and it’s what made the Cubs “lovable losers”, and it’s what made the Phillies occasionally interesting even when they were otherwise terrible. There’s almost nothing interesting about this bad team. That’s something that Neil Huntington evidently never understood when he set out to fix the Pirates.

Pellas On The Pirates: Time For Russell and Kerrigan To Walk The Plank

I'll get right to it. It's time to fire John Russell and Joe Kerrigan.

Yes, I'm saying it while I'm still shell-shocked from the combined 36-1 beatdown the Brewers just put on the Bucs over the past three days---in our own house, no less.

Yes, this is still very much a team in transition, one still in the process of being rebuilt from top to bottom. Yes, Milwaukee is significantly better than us at the moment---though nowhere near 35 runs over 3 days better. And yes, expectations for this team were rightly modest heading into the 2010 season.

I'll add, too, that it is a rare thing when I ever actually call for someone to lose their job, particularly in the world of sports, which is, after all, certainly a relatively frivolous undertaking in the grand scheme of things.

But this was too much. Wa-a-a-y-y too much.

It's not just that the Pirates got swept by the good-but-definitely-not-great Brewers. It's that they were annihilated. Wiped out. Terminated with extreme prejudice. Embarrassed. Humiliated. Steamrollered. Tidal-waved.

This wasn't merely 3 losses in a row in our home park. This was Genghis Khan against the village idiot. Hulk Hogan versus Urkel. Hitler against France. Heck, anyone against France. The Pirates in this series looked for all the world like a bunch of tee-ballers who took the field against a team of grown men.

This was, in short, completely and totally unacceptable. All other considerations are secondary. Period.

Nor was today an aberration. Not only has the team lost, and lost consistently, during the Russell and Kerrigan Era, it has lost at a truly historic rate against the Brewers in particular. Here's a newsflash: this Brewers team is nowhere close to the '27 Yankees. There is no excuse---none, zero---for Pittsburgh to have lost at the ridiculous clip they've lost to Milwaukee over the past 3 or 4 seasons.

John Russell and Joe Kerrigan---if not the entire current regime---have pretty much been given a mulligan since they took over the Pirates, and for the most part, rightly so. If this organization was not the worst-run in modern professional sports history before they came aboard, it was certainly in the conversation, along with such luminaries as the Los Angeles Clippers and, until recently, the St. Louis-Arizona Cardinals.

Obviously it takes time, probably a lot of time, to recover from such ineptitude, no matter how good or smart or professional the new management team might be.

But the Pirates are going backward, and they look bad doing it. Somehow they've managed a close to .500 record over the first 15 games, but their appalling run differential and bushel of blowout losses---already---makes it look very flukish that they've even done this well.

Most distressing of all has been the pitching. The starting rotation, under the tutelage of supposed guru Kerrigan, is beyond brutal. What in the world has happened that so many pitchers have nosedived straight into the ground upon their arrival in Pittsburgh?

How many hurlers under Kerrigan have become objectively better, and how many are objectively worse? What in the name of Ray Miller is going on here? And, how much of Kerrigan's reputation before he got here was due to his professional competence and how much was due to his being in the right place at the right time on a Boston staff that featured several Hall of Famers?

Neil Huntington likes to talk about how he really needs to change the culture in Pittsburgh. To that end he's rid the organization of almost all of the players who were on hand when he took over. Why should it be any different when it comes to management?

If Huntington really wants to make a statement that losing will no longer be tolerated in Pittsburgh, here's a golden opportunity. What this team did against the Brewers in this series was a disgrace. It's time to fire John Russell and Joe Kerrigan.

(GW was wondering after the historic 20-0 thumping what exactly Joe Kerrigan and Ray Searage have done to the staff - Will wonders no more.)

Pellas On The Pirates: Between Two Worlds

There seems to be a certain weariness among folks these days when it comes to watching the Pirates. Whether the total demolition of the team by the current front office was the right approach or not, fans in general are sick of losing, and---more crucially to my mind---they’re sick of a team that has few if any identifiable faces.

Remember the Cubs’ “lovable losers” teams of the 70s and 80s? Why were they “lovable”, exactly, even though they never came close to contending for more than a decade? Because they had a great venue in which to watch baseball, and because they somehow always had a handful of good-to-middling ballplayers who were easy to root for even if the team as a whole was almost always bad. The Pirates, it should be noted, have half of that formula, as PNC Park is widely considered to be one of baseball’s crown jewels. The other half, obviously, is lacking.

The thing is, it wasn’t lacking as recently as last season. But a second round of bloodletting saw the last of the fan favorite veterans---most notably Jack Wilson, Nyjer Morgan and Nate McLouth---sent out of town for prospects and reclamation jobs.

McLouth, by the way, is still having problems with his hamstrings, and if he is permanently debilitated, that trade takes on a whole new dynamic. But the point is that while no one doubted most of our vets had to be turned over for kids, the fact that almost all of them were dealt left us with the worst of all possible teams: one that was both terrible on the field and that had next to no one you could root for on an individual basis.

Now of course, winning cures many if not all ills when it comes to professional sports. The Pirates, we are told repeatedly, are aiming not just for respectability but for sustained excellence. Look at the Twins, the A’s, the Rays, and the Marlins, and you see what this team could become.

Obviously it takes a consistently loaded farm system to compete when you’re a small-to-mid-market organization, and obviously it takes time to load that system up. It’s just that when you gut everything from top to bottom, there isn’t much left to root for in the meantime. Maybe that’s the price this team must pay for nearly two decades of obvious mismanagement; certainly the current front office has a plan and it’s sticking to that plan. I’m of the opinion that the surgery did not have to be as radical as it was, but the die is cast, and it’s time to play ball in 2010.

Which brings us to the coming season and what we should expect.

Unfortunately, it looks like another transition season for the Pirates. There are reasons for hope, ie, some useful veterans have been added to the kids, some impact rookies are certainly on the way, and the team doesn’t look horrible on paper---though it certainly doesn’t look good, either.

But as always it’s just so hard to say because you just never know when the roster will be blown up yet again, and to what extent. This makes it very difficult for the average fan to invest themselves, let alone their money, in this team. At some point, the rebuilding must be fundamentally over, and the team should switch from tearing down to building for a playoff run. I am confident in saying that 2010 won’t be the year in which the Pirates reach that point.

Sure, there’s a best case scenario. It goes like this: first, Garrett “The Legend” Jones continues to rake, and he becomes perhaps the greatest late-blooming big leaguer ever. There’s precedent: Mike Easler, a pretty fair hitter back in the day, was almost as old as Jones before he finally got his shot with the Pirates. Current reliever Brendan Donnelly was 30 before he had a regular job in the majors. And so on. Jones has a chance to outshine them all, and if he does, it bodes well for our fortunes in 2010 and beyond.

He’ll need help if the Pirates are to achieve respectability this season, but it’s not impossible he’ll get it. Which brings us to Ryan Doumit. No one questions Doumit’s talent. It’s just that no one knows when he’ll next land on the 60 day DL with the chicken pox, or a busted nose when a 2 year old niece or nephew accidentally punches him at a family get-together, or after he gets run over by an overzealousfan driving a shopping cart, or when he slips while singing in the shower. But if he can stay on the field for 120 games or so, Jones and Doumit hitting back to back has potential.

Lastings Milledge may not be the five tool kid he was touted to be when he first came up with the Mets, but to his credit he’s shown none of the punk behavior that doomed him in New York and Washington, and by all accounts he’s been a model professional since joining the Pirates. If he’s half as good as his press clippings said he should become, he’ll be useful and perhaps better than that.

Andy LaRoche might play out of his mind and force the front office to make some hard choices, though I think it’s more likely he’ll be traded or move to a 2B-utility role. But he had the minor league numbers and if he can translate those to the bigs, ya never know.

Meanwhile, the rotation doesn’t scare anyone, but it seems to be made of
guys who are all at least solid competitors who will go right at you. This is especially true of our 1-2-3 starters, Zach Duke, Paul Maholm, and Ross Ohlendorf---though Ohlendorf’s rough spring is worrisome. Fourth starter Charlie Morton has the best stuff, and if the light bulb comes on for him, look out. Fifth starter Daniel McCutchen doesn’t throw hard but he’s as fearless and competitive as they come, and you can win a lot of games with pitchers like that.

The bullpen is made of similar stuff, with the exception of closer Octavio Dotel, who is the one man on this staff who can truly miss bats with any consistency. Again, nothing overwhelming overall, but definitely deep and definitely am improvement on last season.

The bottom line? If everything works out and nobody gets hurt for an extended period of time, a run at .500 is actually not out of the question, particularly in a mediocre National League Central division.

Unfortunately there’s also the much more likely worst-case scenario. Jones continues to hit home runs, but is so overmatched by lefthanders that he ends up losing both 30 points on his batting average and his place in the starting lineup when the team faces southpaws. Doumit gets hurt---again---and the team loses his otherwise powerful bat for extended stretches.

New second baseman Aki Iwamura’s knee doesn’t hold up, and his glove isn’t what it was in Tampa, nor his hitting. Andy LaRoche tries too hard because he knows top prospect Pedro Alvarez is breathing down his neck, and so he lands on the bench in July, then gets released in the offseason, making the Jason Bay trade even more of a disaster than it already is, if that’s possible.

Morton’s hamstrings act up again, and even when healthy he is unable to find home plate with any consistency. Ohlendorf’s spring struggles carry over into the regular season, until he’s finally banished to the ‘pen if not to Indianapolis. Top pitching prospect Brad Lincoln comes up, but his changeup is still a work in progress, and after a successful first time around the league, teams catch up to him and he is battered.

Meanwhile, one or more of the bullpen veterans springs a leak or blows a tire, and Pedro and Jose and their rookie enthusiasm aren’t enough to compensate. Fan unrest culminates in a blogosphere-inspired “Storm The Bastille Night", and GW is arrested while leading the charge. 100 losses loom…..

Nah. It won’t be that bad. But at least one more significant trade is likely, ie, Duke going to a contender (the Dodgers are said to have interest), which wouldn’t be the end of the world given his arbitration status, but which could be another mid-season disruption that sidetracks whatever team chemisty might otherwise be developing.

And of course, some moves are inevitably going to be made because of the three rookies who are knocking on the door: Alvarez, Tabata, and Lincoln. In an ideal season, they force their way onto the roster simply because they’re better than the players they are replacing, and the team on the field at PNC is noticeably improved as a result.

Any moves the front office might make at that point would become a matter of addition by subtraction (dealing the inferior players) instead of being yet another demolition job. For now, let’s hope that things go well, that more veterans are only traded because our in-house rookies have displaced them, and that the team at the end of the 2010 season will be one that not only wins more games but is easier to root for than what we see on the field as the season begins.

Pellas On The Pirates - Mea Culpa...Sort Of

Okay.

So, the Pirates' front office evidently had some kind of plan going into this offseason, after all. No sooner had the virtual ink from my last missive on The Green Weenie dried, than the suits went ahead and did exactly what we've been clamoring for them to do: they went out and signed a handful of carefully chosen, fairly affordable, good-but-not-great-but-definitely-helpful veterans.

This is good news, and if Octavio Dotel puts his "X" on the dotted line in the near future (as has been rumored for weeks), so much the better. All of which makes the 2010 edition of the Pirates look a lot like the fondly-remembered 1997 "Freak Show", a team that rode on the back of several similar veterans to stay improbably in contention until September.

To be sure, long-suffering fans have more reason to invest in the Bucs now than they did during the second half of the 2009 season. That period of time saw what many observers consider to be the very worst stretch of baseball this city has ever witnessed from its home nine. I am personally still more than a little steamed at what I still consider to have been a far more radical than necessary demolition job.

I'll say again that it's one thing to do a substantial teardown-rebuild, something we all agree was necessary. It's quite another to abandon even the smallest pretense of professional and competitive integrity while you're doing surgery on the organization. In my view, the Pirates came perilously close to that point in 2009.

Still, with or without Dotel, the combination of relative bargain veteran free agents (Carrasco, Lopez, Donnelly) with a few holdovers who can reasonably be expected to be solid contributors (Jones, McCutchen, Milledge, LaRoche), added to trade acquisition Akinori Iwamura and if-he-could-only-stay-healthy Ryan Doumit, all of a sudden makes this team, at least on paper, one that is approaching respectability.

If any of the nearly ready for prime time players, ie, Lincoln, Tabata, and Daniel McCutchen, rises to the top and makes a significant impact, things could actually get interesting past the All Star break.

So, while it appears we were right to cry foul about the disaster that was the second half of 2009, and while we were not out of bounds in urging the team to pursue at least a few free agents, apparently either the front office was listening or they had already decided they were going to follow the same course of action we had in mind. We just didn't believe them. Thus, a mea culpa of sorts is in order.

That said, the vast majority of the Pirates' offseason activity has been in the bullpen. The bullpen last year, to put it kindly, was horrible after the trade deadline.

Without John Grabow as the veteran glue to hold things together, with Evan Meek and Phil Dumatrait hurt and with Jesse Sanchez wilting from overuse, there was little or no hope for the team unless the starting pitchers went the distance. The relief corps, then, definitely needed a makeover.

But at the risk of sounding like sour grapes, where was Huntington's free agent alacrity during his first two seasons? If, as he has obviously shown this winter, a functional if not overwhelming 'pen can be assembled mostly from veteran spare parts, why wasn't this done in 2008 and 2009? If nothing else, it might have been fun to see how many more games Paul Maholm would have won with any kind of support behind him.

And even if the suits had already decided to blow up the team as part of the rebuilding, wouldn't things have been better with more reliable relievers? Surely the team didn't decide to deliberately ignore the 'pen in order to make the team less competitive so the demolition would be more palatable to fans...did they?

Sorry to go all Oliver Stone here, but when I see how much really good work the front office has done this offseason to address bullpen weaknesses, then compare it with the almost total silence on that front over the previous two offseasons...I wonder.

Unprovable conspiracy theories aside, we might quibble just a tad with the position player signings this winter. It's not that they're bad. It's that they weren't as good as they could have been and really, should have been given the softest free agent market in decades thanks to the recession.

Bobby Crosby? He's not an unreasonable gamble and he's not the worst one or perhaps two year bridge to our minor league middle infield prospects, but he's also not likely to recapture his previous form and he might fall off the table altogether.

Ryan Church? Yeah, he's got some skills and he's probably serviceable as a fourth outfielder, but he's been hurt repeatedly most years and there were better players on the market who wouldn't have cost much more than Church did, if they cost more at all.

A similarly favorable economic climate is not likely to be in the offing anytime soon, if ever. Thus it seems to me that the Pirates blew a real opportunity to snag some veteran impact position players for relative chump change, whether the team was rebuilding or not.

So as I said, this is a sort-of mea culpa. The team definitely made some smart moves this offseason, and it's certainly far better to be quibbling over which moves weren't made than it was to be howling about the aimless and hopeless McClatchy - Littlefield Reign of Error.

At the same time, it's hard not to wonder what took them so long to address the bullpen, and it's difficult to be particularly excited about the position players who were added via free agency. But all in all, the Pirates are in a better place now than they were just three months ago, and that's a good thing.

But, onward from here. The team looks at least semi-interesting as we get ready for Bradenton

(Will Pellas is considering a new sackcloth suit...sort of)

Pellas On The Pirates: The New Year Bucs Part Deux

I thought a little point-counterpoint discussion might be in order after reading GW's take on the current state of the Pirates as we look ahead to Spring Training in a few weeks. Ron's original writing is in italics, with my response in regular text after each paragraph.

OK, so how does the immediate future of the club look after three months of hot stove tinkering? Well, not a heck of lot different than it did when they were losing 99 games last year.

In general, I agree, "which is both bogus and sad", to quote the great Wayne Campbell.



There is, I believe, some small room for optimism, but there's no question the offseason has been, in general, a disappointment. Especially for a team that barely avoided 100 losses. Oh, that's right, I forgot: it "doesn't matter how many games we lose 'cuz we're rebuilding".

Got it.

Starting Pitching: Ross Ohlendorf, Zach Duke, Paul Maholm and Charlie Morton are in, pending some late wheeling-and-dealing; Dan McCutchen and Kevin Hart will go mano-a-mano for the last spot. Jose Ascanio has a shot to step in later during the year. Brad Lincoln is probably the only guy in the system with a chance to crack the rotation sometime during the season.

My grousing aside, the starting rotation might be the one spot on the roster that could significantly alter the look of the team for the better if/when a trade is consummated sometime during the 2010 season. There would seem to be a small but significant surplus of starting pitching on hand, and one would think that veteran lefthanders Zach Duke and especially Paul Maholm would be extremely desireable to many teams. Brad Lincoln will be two years removed from his Tommy John surgery, and he has little left to prove in the minors. He'll be at Indianapolis until June to avoid Super-Two arbitration status, but unless he implodes totally, he'll bring his Blyleven-esque curveball to Pittsburgh no later than the All-Star break. Daniel McCutchen would figure to have the inside track on at least the fifth starter's spot---I personally think he's better than that---but he looked at least capable in limited action late in 2009. I believe Kevin Hart is better suited for the bullpen (assuming he can handle even that much) but he's a big, strong, hard-throwing guy and maybe the lightbulb will come on for him. If nothing else he is depth that can be called upon. Therefore, a Pirates starting pitcher can---and should be---dealt in exchange for hitting, ideally a corner outfielder with at least some power. Unless a buyer's market veteran comes on board late in the offseason, which is certainly a viable option in the current economy. More on the outfield below....

Bullpen: Bye-bye, Matt Capps and Jesse Chavez. 2010's firemen look like Evan Meek, Joel Hanrahan, Javier Lopez, Steven Jackson, Chris Jakubauskas, the loser of the McCutchen-Hart mashup (although McC could end up at Indy if they want to work him as a starter), and Jose Ascanio. Hanrahan and Meek will audition for the closers' role, although closer-by-committee could well be in the cards for 2010. There's a cast of thousands waiting if a seventh spot opens up.

I'm honestly not as worried about the 'pen as I was after John Grabow was traded. At least, I'm not as worried if Evan Meek and Joel Hanrahan are healthy. Javier Lopez---one of the few offseason signings to this point who could have any real impact in 2010---will do nicely as a LOOGY if he is the 2006-2008 BoSox version and not the 2009 edition who got shelled, then demoted. I'm guessing he's more the former than the latter. If we can find one more quasi-useful lefthander from among Donnie Veal and this year's spring training invitees, I believe our 'pen will be effective if not overwhelming. Our relief corps would go from effective to very strong if Octavio Dotel signs with the Pirates, as has been rumored to be in the offing.

Infield: It should be Garrett Jones, Akinori Iwamura, the winner of the Ronny Cedeno/Bobby Crosby cage match, and Andy LaRoche. What it will look like in August, if Iwamura goes and Pedro Alvarez arrives, is anybody's guess. Jeff Clements may get a shot at first, although we consider him a long shot. But the suits love him, so we'll see; he and Jones create a crowd. There's not much help in the upper levels yet; the cavalry is still a couple of seasons away from PNC.

That's not a bad starting infield, though still light on the hitting unless Crosby can somehow recapture his previous form and/or Cedeno has a career year and/or LaRoche starts looking more like he did while in the Dodgers system and less like he has for most of his major league career to date. Still, all the players GW mentioned are good or better than good with the glove, and if Jones continues his Roy Hobbs impression, ya never know.

I'd really like to see Iwamura at least be offered a contract to stay, though if LaRoche can handle second base, the best long term solution might be to move him there to make way for Alvarez. Alvarez, however, is no sure thing himself, as it remains to be seen whether he will eat himself off third base or not. In which case we have a logjam at first, unless Jones moves to right---which would figure to be Jose Tabata's position, unless---well, see below. Meanwhile I don't expect much from Pat Clement, but he was a first rounder once upon a time, and there's some thought that his mostly disappointing big league audition to this point in time can be blamed on his knee injuries. We'll see.

Catcher: Assuming they hold on to Ryan Doumit, he and Jason Jaramillo are set. But the question is: Can Doumit give them 135 games behind the plate? His history suggests not. So a position that was deep enough last year is iffy this season with Robby Diaz gone. We expect to see the Pirates pick up a veteran, good glove guy along the lines of Raul Chavez to split time with Eric Kratz at Indy. Minor league depth consists mainly of Tony Sanchez.

You could do worse than Jaramillo as a starting catcher, though he is better suited to be either a strong number two or perhaps a platoon semi-starter, but Jaramillo could be our number one sooner rather than later. It looks like the suits are determined to trade Doumit, in which case their axing of Robinzon Diaz (since inked by Detroit) is very strange, since he would have been no worse than Jaramillo's backup. What troubles me about moves like this one (if it happens) and the Iwamura acquisition is that they don't solve anything longer term; rather, they give us short-term fixes when no longer term options are on the horizon anywhere in the organization. Which means we would figure to have to go outside the organization, either in trade or free agency. Except that Pittsburgh is where free agents don't go even to die---well, not bigger name veterans, anyway---and the team does not yet have enough fungible minor leaguers who could be turned into big league veterans via trade on short notice.

Maybe the other shoe is about to drop, but ya gotta wonder.

Outfield: Start with Andrew McCutchen. End with Andrew McCutchen. Lastings Milledge will start, but has to keep improving and show some power. Who knows where Jones will end up? Rule 5 pick John Raynor will be all that Brandon Moss can handle; that should be one of the storylines of Spring Training. Jose Tabata could pop up in June, and Nyjo clone Gorkys Hernandez shouldn't be far behind. All in all, a competitive spot for Pittsburgh with a lot of possible end points.

McCutchen is the crown jewel, though I still want to see him hit like he did in 2009 over an entire season. But he's still far and away the best we've got even if he regresses with the stick. So no worries there. Milledge definitely said and did all the right things upon coming here, so maybe he's grown up a bit, but unless I'm mistaken, isn't he arbitration-eligible after 2010? In which case, why was he acquired in exchange for much-cheaper-for-far-longer Nyjer Morgan? Yet again: a short term acquisition who would seem a problematic fit, if at all, for the longer term.

However, there is more depth in the outfield than at some other spots, so Milledge might be auditioning for other teams, anyway, no matter how well he does in 2010. I really like John Raynor and believe he will beat out Brandon Moss in Bradenton. Moss might still make the team, but would surely figure to be on the next train out of town once Tabata is promoted, perhaps as soon as June though more likely in August. Tabata, another guy I really like, is not, however, a true power hitter. I am very concerned about the kind of pressure he might be facing from Pirates fandom and maybe even the front office. I believe he will be a Jose Cruz Sr type of hitter, ie, high .200s to low .300s with lots of doubles and 80-90 RBI, but probably not more than 15 HR most years. There's nothing wrong with that kind of production, but Cruz Sr was also an excellent basestealer and defensive player and Tabata is not overwhelmingly fast nor exceptional with the glove. He might be, in other words, the classic "tweener". Here's hoping he's more Cruz Sr than Melky Cabrera.

Count me as one who does not expect much, if anything, from Gorkys Hernandez. I'm looking further down in the minors at players like Robbie Grossman and Starling Marte.

Bench: Delwyn Young. Jason Jaramillo. Ronny Cedeno/Bobby Crosby loser. Brandon Moss/John Raynor winner. We think Ramon Vazquez, despite his $2M deal, is on thin ice. Steve Pearce and Neil Walker have options left, so we expect them to be at Indy. That final spot on the pine could easily be filled with a late-signee from the free agent market that can play the corners and has a little pop.

Let's hope there will be a veteran, "professional hitter" type who will be signed before we go to Bradenton, for professional and competitive integrity if nothing else. I liked Marlon Byrd a lot for this role, but he just joined the Cubs on a 3 year deal. There are still a number of attractive options out there.

Overall: Lots of questions remain. They're still a couple of years from filling the gaps with internal talent, and don't seem likely to bring in a difference maker until the dots are connected, so any dealing will be for prospects, not players.

The offense counts on Jones, Milledge, LaRoche, and Doumit producing and a shortstop that can put up at least Jack Wilson-like numbers. The pitching should be OK, but the lack of an ace stopper hurts. Capps was going sooner or later; so it's time to get the bullpen merry-go-round in gear.

The pieces are slowly starting to arrive, but not soon enough to make the 2010 club a contender.

Adding Dotel and a productive veteran hitter would make this team much better on the field at PNC while we wait for the farm system to hit full production. I remain skeptical that current ownership and management will actually step up and make intelligent investments in a few carefully-chosen homegrown and veteran free agent players, either now or in the future. Just saying "the kids will save us" is NOT enough and certainly does not, in and of itself, constitute a coherent and honest attempt at fielding a winning team in Pittsburgh. While real improvement in our minor league system was the organization's biggest need, and while that real improvement has definitely occurred, it is unlikely to produce a winner without additional reinforcements via trade and free agency.

Pellas on the Pirates: Coming Full Circle

Today is the day I came full circle as a Pirates fan.

For a long time I was in the "traditional fan" camp. Get 'em next year, let's go Bucs, and all that. With the arrival of each spring training, I'd look hard at our roster, try to project how well (or poorly) our players would perform, formulate a couple of trades or modest free agent signings that would presumably get us over the top, and root the team on.

Unfortunately, it soon became clear that for a variety of reasons, the entire Pirates organization was broken and in sore need of fixing. Along the way, it also became clear that whatever priorities the organization had, fielding a winning team at the major league level wasn’t one of them.

Thus, it seemed that the entire “traditional fan” paradigm was no longer valid; it simply wasn’t possible to root-root-root for the Pirates in the traditional sense because the whole appeal of sports is based on the ideal of (more or less) pure competition, and the uncertainty of the outcome of that competition, and the emotional investment you make as a spectator in that uncertain outcome, and the joy that comes with your vicarious participation when the team wins.

But the Pirates were too badly broken for all of that.

So, I reinvented myself as an interested observer in how the whole train wreck might be repaired. Along the way, I abandoned my “traditional fan” perspective because, after all, it’s unrealistic to expect---much less demand---even a mildly competitive big league product on the field at PNC when there’s little or no talent coming up from the minors and when there’s no hope of outspending the Yankees, Red Sox, Dodgers, Angels, and Cubs. Or even St. Louis, really.

Being a “fan”, then, became less about wins and losses and more about hanging in there, learning about the entire operation from rookie league to Pittsburgh and all points in between, and vicariously participating that way.

To be sure, going through that process has been highly educational and, honestly, pretty interesting. In a strange sort of way, it might even be more fun to be involved with the Pirates from that point of view than it would be to be a BoSox or Yankees fan---after all, those folks pretty much know they’re going to be in the postseason every year unless something truly remarkable occurs. And if they’re not, they just import the latest and greatest gazillion dollar free agents and spend everyone else into oblivion. Not much fear of failure or anticipation of an uncertain outcome in all that.

But then came the bloodletting of 2008 and especially 2009.

The "team" the Pirates front office put on the field over the second half of 2009 was criminally incompetent. The result was arguably if not probably the worst stretch of baseball this city has ever seen. Yes, most of the veterans that the Nutting-Huntington-Coonelly regime inherited had to be dealt in order to speed the transfusion of talent into the system because that system was, in fact, broken.

But ALL of them? Nate McLouth in the first year of his quite reasonable contract extension? John Grabow when there wasn't a lefthander anywhere in the entire organization who could even begin to replace him? Really?

And even if we swallow hard and look the other way in that regard, well then: where are the handful of intelligently-chosen veterans this offseason? Guys who will both make us better in the short term and who can police the clubhouse and show the kids the ropes? Hello? Bueller? Anybody? BUELLER?

The truth is that there are any number of mid-range, "professional ballplayer" veterans who could and who definitely would help this team be more competitive. Right now. No questions asked. Want proof?

The fondly-remembered 1997 team was all about that sort of player. Kenny Lofton, Matt Stairs, et al, and all of a sudden we're sort-of interesting even into September. What, I ask, is wrong with that? Oh, I see, we're "rebuilding", as all the sabremetric wonks tell us, so therefore it's somehow totally wrong to even try for moderate (but real) improvement on the field while we wait for the kids to arrive.

Baloney!

As I said, I’ve come full circle. To be sure, every Pirates fan has to accept significant pain and disappointment, at least in the short term, because a significant teardown-rebuild was, in truth, the only kind of strong medicine that had any hope of laying the foundation for a return to winning baseball. But a “significant teardown-rebuild” is emphatically not the same thing as a “total demolition and wins and losses be damned because the kids will save us”.

I refuse to believe our product on the field doesn't matter because, well, you see, it’ll all be better someday and then no one will care. I do not accept that entire premise, not anymore.

If only from the standpoint of professional and competitive integrity---what they used to call "being a big leaguer"---you owe it to your sport and to your fans to put a team on the field that will, at bare minimum, make the other guys sweat to beat you. If you can't, or won't, do even that much, you are not a major league organization and you should sell or be contracted. Period.

(Sounds like you can add Will to the list of disgruntled fans!)

Pellas On The Pirates: Offseason Moves, Volume One

Interesting that others in the blogosphere have also --- independently? --- suggested that it would be a good idea to trade Zach Duke to Milwaukee for J. J. Hardy, a notion that we kicked around here on The Green Weenie a few days ago.

All of which got me thinking, in my best If-Only-I-Were-Neil-Huntington mode, about what should be done this offseason so 2010 will not resemble the train wreck that was 2009.

I would be on the horn to Milwaukee immediately re: Hardy. Even if his bat never comes all the way back to what he showed in 07-08, he is an athletic player who has plus power for his position and a plus glove.

I'd deal Duke for him in a heartbeat and have an open competition in spring training for Duke's spot among Daniel McCutchen, Brad Lincoln and Kevin Hart and see what happens. I'd hope Lincoln would go north with the team as he really has nothing left to prove in the minors, and Hart, I suspect, is better suited to bullpen duty. This would mean all 3 pitchers would make the team, with McCutchen and Lincoln at the back of the rotation.

While this would leave us a bit thinner in terms of overall pitching depth, we still have Jeff Karstens and, possibly, Phil Dumatrait as long men and/or fill-ins in the event of injury or ineffectiveness, and presumably some of our young guns will soon be within shouting distance of Pittsburgh as they come up through the minors. We could also, of course, either make a big splash with a veteran starting pitcher free agent, or we could go trolling through the junk bin (where we got Dumatrait).

But the main point is that we have some pitching depth from which to deal---for once. Hardy would be an ideal buy low player whose star has dimmed but who is unquestionably young enough to bounce back. Plus, he'd be ultra-motivated against Milwaukee, and we can't punch them in the nose enough times to suit me.

I'm not sure about Andy LaRoche, whether at third base or at second. Certainly his so-so bat would play better at 2B than it did at 3B this season, but it's so hard to say with him because his minor league career was uniformly excellent and with his very good defense I would be willing to try him again at third next year, at least until Alvarez comes up. On the other hand, Alvarez may well be a first baseman, in which case maybe we ought to move Andy to second and take an extended look at Neil Walker at third.

Yes to Rick Ankiel as an offseason signing, except of course for the unfortunate fact that he has satan as his agent. Xavier Nady---another name being suggested in some circles---does, too, by the way. I wouldn't mind either of those guys because Ankiel is way better than Brandon Moss if he can return to his 07-08 form (he's also better defensively) and Nady, even with his elbow, is way better than Steve Pearce, who shouldn't be anywhere close to our roster next season or any season after that. But there again, we have Garrett Jones to consider, and we have Alvarez to consider.

FWIW, I'd move LaRoche to second at least temporarily so we could evalute both him and Walker until the All Star break. Jones would be my 1B with Ankiel in right until Alvarez comes up. (I don't believe in Clement at Indy.) If Alvarez is in shape, he becomes the 3B with Walker moving to a Jose Bautista 3B-OF utility role.

If not, he becomes the 1B and Ankiel would then switch off with Jones and Milledge and even McCutchen when he needs the occasional day off. Moss would probably be gone by this point, if in fact he even made the team at all out of spring training. It's hard to see where he would fit if we sign Ankiel or a similar player in the offseason.

Anyway, Ankiel would allow us to keep Tabata at Triple-A until after the All Star break, at which point we could bring him up and work him in gradually (again, no role for Moss, unless we want to save the bucks and not bother to sign Ankiel in the first place; either way Tabata is the future at one corner spot).

Evan Meek would be my closer in the 'pen, and I'd bring Mike Gonzalez back as fast as possible to be our main lefthander. Etc and so forth.

This is of course very preliminary and off the cuff. But our lineup would look like this:

CF Andrew McCutchen
2B Andy LaRoche
1B Garrett Jones
RF Rick Ankiel
C Ryan Doumit
SS J. J. Hardy
LF Lastings Milledge
3B Neil Walker

Rotation: Maholm, Morton, Ohlendorf, D. McCutchen, B. Lincoln (or a veteran placeholder until Lincoln is called up)

Long Relief / Spot Starters: Jeff Karstens, Phil Dumatrait (though either or both could be replaced this offseason and both have had some health issues)

Short Relievers: Jesse Chavez, Mike Gonzalez, Matt Capps, Joel Hanrahan, Kevin Hart; Dumatrait would be the second lefty here if healthy, though Hart might be the man if we decide to keep just one leftie, and either Hart or Dumatrait or both could end up back at Indy.

This hurts me personally because I've always liked Dumatrait and the guy can unquestionably pitch on the rare occasions when he is physically sound. It's just that he's never physically sound. Well, almost never. Anyway, someone here is probably going to get bumped, because the Pirates won't go with a 12 man pitching staff. But because I'm not yet sure how this will shake out, I'm listing 27 players here instead of 25.

Closer: Evan Meek

Bench: Delwyn Young, Jason Jaramillo, Brandon Moss (until Tabata is ready), some combination of 3 other players, likely 1 internal and 2 veterans signed in the offseason. Jack Wilson just might be back. Or the team could choose to keep Cedeno around, only this time as a backup rather than as the starter (something I would much prefer, and which is a no-brainer if we get Hardy). And so on.

That's not a great team, but it's not bad on paper, and I think we'd have at least a fighting chance at ending our run of losing seasons. And of course, we're now getting to the point at which our internal reinforcements coming up from the minors should---emphasis on "should"---start telling by the middle of next season. I'd gladly take my chances with this roster for a year or two while we wait for the kids to get here.

(GW regular Will Pellas puts on his GM cap, and presto - the 2010 Buccos! His piece is certainly a strong starting point for the winter's hot stove league. Ya listening, Neal?)