Among the first things new Pirate manager Clint Hurdle preached to his men at a January minicamp was some rubbish about how \u00e2\u20ac\u0153championship teams make good outs.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d\u00c2\u00a0 \u00c2\u00a0Really, what championship teams do is get on base, hit the ball over the fence, and prevent their opponents from doing the same.\u00c2\u00a0 Pittsburgh\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s trouble has been the quantity of outs, not the quality.<\/p>\n
Those outs should come a little less frequently than they did in 2010.\u00c2\u00a0 The Pirates are a younger and better offensive team than they were at this time last year.\u00c2\u00a0 But as to how they are going to get opposing batters to make bad outs, good outs, or any other kind of outs \u00e2\u20ac\u201c that remains unclear.<\/p>\n
The nucleus of the club consists of four promising hitters \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Andrew McCutchen, Pedro Alvarez, Neil Walker, and Jose Tabata.\u00c2\u00a0 McCutchen went flat mid-season last year before rebounding to nearly duplicate his solid 2009 production.\u00c2\u00a0 Alvarez was streaky and strikeout prone, as one would expect from a rookie slugger, but ended up with 16 home runs and 64 RBIs in just 95 games.<\/p>\n
Walker, a former first round pick, had disappointed throughout his minor league career, but he finally appears to have adopted a more mature, selective approach.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 His BABIP (batting average on balls in play) was .340 last season, which probably is not sustainable, but even if his production tails off a bit he could be the long-term answer at second base.\u00c2\u00a0 Tabata, the Bucs\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 speedy 22-year-old left fielder, held his own as a rookie but unless he develops some power \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s no hard evidence that he will \u00e2\u20ac\u201c he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s looking at a future as a fourth outfielder.<\/p>\n
Pittsburgh appears to be slightly below average at two power positions \u00e2\u20ac\u201c first base, where the still useful but slightly musty Lyle Overbay takes over, and right field, where Garrett Jones, coming off a disappointing sophomore season, will platoon with free agent pick-up Matt Diaz.\u00c2\u00a0 Two other spots look like complete disasters.\u00c2\u00a0 Ronny Cedeno, for reasons known only to God and general manager Neal Huntington, returns at shortstop, while catcher Ryan Doumit has lost his \u00c2\u00a0job to former Diamondback Chris Snyder.\u00c2\u00a0 Snyder is better behind the plate, but Doumit\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s career OPS versus right-handers is more than 100 points higher.<\/p>\n
In short, despite plenty of question marks, there is hope offensively.\u00c2\u00a0 The pitching, on the other hand, is just dreadful.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 James McDonald came up from AAA and pitched sensationally at times, while Ross Ohlendorf was more effective than his 1-11 record suggests.\u00c2\u00a0 So there you have two decent starters.\u00c2\u00a0 Paul Maholm eats a lot of innings, but his ERA has been below league-average in four of his five seasons.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 And then it gets frightening \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Brad Lincoln, Charlie Morton, and Jeff Karstens, along with free agent signings Kevin Correia and Scott Olsen. \u00c2\u00a0Two of those guys will end up in the rotation, but it would be an upset if Hurdle got more than a handful of victories out of any of them.\u00c2\u00a0 \u00c2\u00a0Lincoln, the fourth overall pick in the 2006 draft, might pan out someday, but he went 1-4 with a 6.66 ERA in nine starts last season and is a long shot to make the club this spring.<\/p>\n
The relief corps is in similar straits.\u00c2\u00a0 When the Bucs can get to the eighth inning with a lead, they should be fine.\u00c2\u00a0 Set-up man Evan Meek and closer Joel Hanrahan are power arms who were dominant for long stretches last season.\u00c2\u00a0 But the rest of the bullpen is up in the air, with a mess of rookies and career journeymen scrambling to claim spots.<\/p>\n
Clearly, there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not enough talent for the Pirates to compete this season.\u00c2\u00a0 The bigger problem is that it probably won\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t get significantly better for a while.\u00c2\u00a0 Pittsburgh\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s impact prospects are pitchers who are just a year or two removed from high school and still a long way away.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 Tony Sanchez, who might be up by 2012, projects as a solid major league catcher but probably not a star.\u00c2\u00a0 \u00c2\u00a0Although Huntington has tried repeatedly to bring in young talent via trades, the results have been mostly disappointing.\u00c2\u00a0 This is nothing new \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Pittsburgh\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s ineptitude in player evaluation has carried over from one regime to the next, like some kind of airborne pathogen that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s been planted in the a\/c unit.<\/p>\n
By the time the big guns like right-hander Jameson Taillon establish themselves in Pittsburgh, McCutchen and Alvarez will be in their primes.\u00c2\u00a0 But unless the front office veers from tradition, they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll be enjoying those peak years in some other uniform.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 Smart teams with supportive ownership try to lock their best young players into long-term deals, but that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not what Pittsburgh is doing \u00e2\u20ac\u201c not yet, anyway.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 \u00c2\u00a0To their credit, the Pirates have spent money on the draft the last few years, and they have the top overall pick in June, so perhaps soon they will finally have the consistent stream of prospects that small-budget teams need in order to compete.\u00c2\u00a0 But a couple of good players coming through every five years isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t enough.<\/p>\n
This year\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Pirates look similar to the Bucs of 2000 and 2001.\u00c2\u00a0 Those clubs had a few guys who could hit, especially Brian Giles, but the pitching staffs consisted largely of failed prospects, reclamation projects, and whatever wavier wire jabronis happened to show up in the parking lot each morning.\u00c2\u00a0 Not coincidentally, those teams lost with regularity.<\/p>\n
The Pirates are improving \u00e2\u20ac\u201c slowly.\u00c2\u00a0 The organization is no longer the top-to-bottom embarrassment that it was Huntington took over.\u00c2\u00a0 But that magical winning record is at least a few years away.\u00c2\u00a0 And the path that leads to the playoffs? \u00c2\u00a0Still nowhere to be found.<\/p>\n
James Forr\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s book, <\/em>Pie Traynor: A Baseball Biography (co-authored with David Proctor) was a finalist for the 2010 Casey Award.\u00c2\u00a0 He also was the 2005 winner of the McFarland-SABR Baseball Research Award. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Among the first things new Pirate manager Clint Hurdle preached to his men at a January minicamp was some rubbish about how \u00e2\u20ac\u0153championship teams make good outs.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d\u00c2\u00a0 \u00c2\u00a0Really, what championship teams do is get on base, hit the ball over the fence, and prevent their opponents from doing the same.\u00c2\u00a0 Pittsburgh\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s trouble has been the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":734,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12088","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12088","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/734"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12088"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12088\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12088"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12088"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12088"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}