Not a lot of time to spend on this today (I'm sure you're heartbroken), but I'll mention a few things...
So I'm reading the new Bill James biography, The Mind of Bill James: How a Complete Outsider Changed Baseball (as I've covered before, I'm a geek), and a far-too-close-to-home passage hit me on page 13.
Bill noted that two recurring motifs in the Abstracts were that poorly run organizations leave promising young players on the bench in favor of established mediocrities and "tend to project their weaknesses onto their best players, and ultimately will dwell not on what the player can do, but on what he can't."In the case of the obviously poorly run Pirates, I'd add "And after dwelling for years on everything this given young player cannot do, the general manager will then attempt to trade said young player for another organization's #1 prospect." At this point, it's almost like an annual rite of passage. This year, fill in Craig Wilson's name. Rumor has it (if you don't believe Peter Gammons, anyway) that the Pirates have asked the St. Louis Cardinals for Anthony Reyes in a trade for Wilson. Who is Reyes? You guessed it, the Cards' #1 prospect. Who is Wilson? A solid outfielder/first baseman who is just about better than any healthy outfielder St. Louis has at the moment. He's also somebody who the Pirates have crapped on for most of the last five seasons, doing their best to convince fans, newspaper writers, and anybody who will listen that he's just not all that good and not deserving of playing time over Reggie Sanders, Raul Mondesi, Jeromy Burnitz, Daryle Ward, and whatever other washed-up free agent they've brought in in the past few years. While the Pirates are thinking about re-signing the slow, always-injured (not to mention older) Sean Casey, they pretty much have to dump Wilson, who's been screwed over so much by the Pirates that there's just no way in hell he could possibly think about re-signing with them end of season.
Of course, this is all assuming that the Pirates are "sellers". According to the GM, this is still up for grabs. Gotta love the headline there: "GM Will Eye Trades If Team Fails to Contend". Um, 25-39, last place in the NL Central, is failing to contend. I guess if they rip off 10 wins in a row, they can consider themselves in the wildcard race, but I'll just say that if they win 10 games in a row, it will have nothing to do with Jeromy Burnitz, Joe Randa, and the other overpriced veterans that Dave Littlefield signed this year.
All this said, the Pirates are actually playing good ball at the moment, coming off a 4-3 road trip (impressive considering they were 4-22 on the road when they embarked on this road trip). The only reason they didn't sweep the Giants last weekend was because they blew a 4-2 lead late. Rookie Ian Snell moved to 7-3 with 7 shutout innings this weekend. According to this lovely article by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Stats Geek, Snell has a 1.35 ERA in the month of June so far. Also in that article, you'll see that the Pirates have four of the six full-time starters in the NL who are 24 or younger. This is a good thing. Now ditch Burnitz, Randa, and even Sean Casey (who's admittedly hit QUITE well over the last week...even though he's running even slower than normal thanks to his bad back), ditch maybe Kip Wells (when he's off the DL) too, and build around the young guys. Doesn't seem that hard.
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