For the last couple of weeks, it’s been very fun to watch my team play pretty damn well and still have plenty of things to rant about. Since the last rant, in which I said the Pirates had proven themselves incapable of winning three in a row, they have proven me right once again—they won four in a row, not three. They followed that up by splitting the next four, meaning they’ve now won 8 of their last 11 games. And to commemorate the occasion, I’ll talk about the good before I talk about the bad...but just this once!
Good
* Jason Bay – your reigning NL player of the month (the Pirates’ first since September 1992), which is what happens when you bat .321 with 12 HR’s and 35 RBI’s (with a 1.090 OPS). Trading Brian Giles for Bay and Ollie “Schizo” Perez has definitely been the highlight of the Dave Littlefield Era...though being that the previous terrible GM managed to swing a Ricardo Rincon for Brian Giles trade, we’re definitely still in Blind Squirrel and Nut territory here.
* Jose Castillo – your reigning NL player of the week (the third in a row for the Pirates, strangely enough), which is what happens when you bat .478 with 4 HR’s and 15 RBI’s. He’s raised his average, I dunno, about 800 points in the last month or so. Well done.
* 4-Game Sweep of the Brewers – Granted, it sounded like the Brew Crew played awful for three of the four games (the Pirates won the first three games by a combined score of 32-5), but the fourth game included a dramatic 2-run, 9th inning rally against Derrick Turnbow, the Brewers’ closer who normally dominates the Buccos.
* The Pirates moved to 6-2 in games after the Rant™ (and 16-34 in all other games).
* Today is the one day per year (other than the day when the Revenue Sharing check comes in) when it pays to have sucked the year before. That’s right...it’s Draft Day!! Let’s ignore the fact that, in Dave Littlefield’s first draft, he passed on BJ Upton, Jeremy Hermida, Prince Fielder, Nick Swisher, Scott Kazmir, Jeff Francoeur, Jeremy Guthrie, and Russ Adams, and selected Bryan Bullington with the #1 pick in the draft. Let’s move right along to the fact that it appears his last three #1 picks (Paul Maholm, Neil Walker, Andrew McCutchen) all seem to working out relatively well.
* The Pirates are now on pace for 61 wins!! Why the happy exclamation points? Because that pace was in the 40’s a few weeks ago.
Bad
* The Pirates are on pace for 61 wins.
* Despite my attempt to ignore it, Bryan Bullington was projected, at the time of his being #1 in the 2002 draft, to be a “possible #3 starter”, while all of the names I listed above have potential to be stars (in the case of Swisher and Kazmir, “potential” has already turned into more than that).
* Sean Casey returned last week, which in and of itself is not a bad thing. For one, he seemed to spark a 2-game, 26-run explosion against the Brewers. But here’s the thing: as Bucco Blog points out, Casey’s obviously not 100%. And judging by his constant stretching and his current 1-for-18 slump, it’s safe to say that he’s not even 60%. But hey...at least the Pirates want to sign him to an extension because he’s such a great guy. And it’s not like he has a gigantic history of injury or anything. Oh wait...he does? My bad.
* The Pirates were shut out, 1-0, on Sunday by a young Padres pitcher named Chris Young. What’s so awful about that? Well, Chris Young was brought up in the Pirates’ system before being traded to Les Expos for Matt Herges. Herges had a great Spring Training with the Pirates...and was released. He was picked up by the Giants and had a strong season. Young, meanwhile, had a strong debut season with the Rangers last year before settling in with the Padres and having a heckuva season. His sub-4.00 ERA would be #1 on the rotation at the moment. But hey...who needs to keep young talent? It's not like Young, Bronson Arroyo, Duaner Sanchez and Chris Shelton would actually be helping this team any right now...
Blogs
Here’s my weekly Best Of from the blogosphere...
Honest Wagner (on hope…for 2010):
By 2010, perhaps DL will: be terminated by a new owner that values winning, graciously resign, or have his severed head (on stick) jubilantly hoisted above a lawless mob that has overtaken PNC. Anyway, there's a chance that by 2010 the Bucs could be contenders, and that a new ownership group and GM could coach this year's draft to a championship. Never surrender your dreams. All hail hope!Bucs Dugout (on playing like a team that’s only 5 games under .500):
251 runs scored indicates that the Bucs are nearly an average offensive team. If, at the beginning of the season, you told me the Pirates would be anywhere near an average offensive team, I'd have been shocked. And even now I'm a little surprised, since there have been stretches this year when it didn't look like the Bucs could hit anything. But they've been respectable on offense so far, and two big reasons why are Craig Wilson and Freddy Sanchez. Subtract those two players from the lineup, as the Bucs seem to want to do, and the Bucs' impersonation of a decent offense will probably stop. And if that happens, the Pirates will probably play a lot more like a 19-34 team than a 24-29 team.Where’s Van Slyke (on the ever-mentioned “potential” of Jose Castillo):
We can stop using that dirty "P" word with Jose Castillo (potential... get your mind out of the gutter). If Manto and Tracy deserve credit for anything, it's finally getting him to do what Perry and Mac talked about for years, sitting back in the box and hitting to all fields. Remember, he's only 24. True, it's only been a week, but only two other second baseman have homered in five consecutive games in like the past 50 years, and one of them is Ryne Sandberg (and I forget the other one). If he can concentrate and bear down in the field, we might have something special on our hands.Romo Phone Home (on the idea of re-signing Sean Casey...for the record, Kevin Young was a young Pirates hopeful who had one good season and was signed to a ludicrous contract...and proceeded to lay stinky egg after stinky egg until he was released):
This is Kevin Young all over again. Worse, because when the Pirates signed Young, his future looked better than Casey's does now and, unless I'm forgetting someone, we didn't have another much better option already on the team. Unless someone with foresight had realized back then that we had a young guy on the team, considered a catcher at the time, who could give us great offensive production at first base for many years at a reasonable price...a fellow named Craig Wilson.
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