Another normal week for the Pirates—a 3-game winning streak (prompting Bucco Blog to announce that they’ve turned a corner—“I'm sorry.. but even 14-year pessimist Joliet Jake here sees the light now. This is no fluke. My eyes are wide open.”) followed by a 3-game losing streak full of bad pitching, bad hitting, and bad defense. Your typical young team, or your typical Pirates? You decide.
Good
* The Pirates are 21-21 since the All-Star Break, which is better than the 30-60 before the Break, and therefore it counts as a good. It’s only August, and the Pirates seem to get fans’ hopes up by playing good ball in August after the season is lost, but hey, minor details. For most of the last month, they’ve played against teams who are still in the playoff hunt, and they’ve held their own...except against Houston, anyway, who has taken 6 of 7 against them in the last month. But these are happy bullets, so ignore that.
* Freddy Sanchez still leads the league in hitting. After going 3-for-5 against the Cubs yesterday, his average is .349. Miguel Cabrera is in second place at .337.
* Now seems to be a pretty good time to remind our six loyal readers that Jason Bay really is one of the best outfielders in the National League. This year he’s batting .291 with 29 HR’s, 93 RBI’s, a .401 On-Base % (meaning he’s gotten a TON of walks this year thanks to the fact that people like Joe Randa and Jeromy Burnitz have been batting behind him most of the year), and a .545 Slugging %. Great numbers. He’s streaky as hell, but those are great numbers.
* Damaso Marte got a win this week!! Why is that big news? Because the “solid ERA, but don’t you dare pitch him in a clutch situation” lefty reliever had started the season 0-7, that’s why. Losing streak over!
* Top prospect Andrew McCutchen, a 19-year old outfielder from Florida and the Pirates’ #1 pick in last year’s draft, was recently promoted to AA Altoona and, after a few weeks there, is still crushing the ball and batting .345. That can’t be a bad thing...as long as, as I said last week, he doesn’t get promoted to Pittsburgh too soon. Ken Griffey Jr. was able to jump to the majors at 19, but that doesn’t mean just anybody can.
* The Beaver County Times continues to press on with the "Dave Littlefield might be fired" angle. Honestly, I should probably put this under the 'Bad' bullets because it's just a big tease to GM-hungry bloggers like myself, but I'll be a naive optimist and put it here.
Bad
* After taking 2 of 3 in Atlanta, the Pirates came home and played four games against Houston, three of which were in front of sellout crowds. They were outscored 28-11 and lost 3 of 4, including a 13-1 Sunday debacle. But then again, Shawn Chacon started that game, so I guess that was to be expected.
Damn, and I thought I might get through an entire Rant™ without mentioning his name.
* The Pirates’ front office continued their ongoing trend of playing down injuries, then quietly putting a player on the disabled list when nobody is looking. In the last couple weeks, young starter Tom Gorzelanny went from “We’re going to hold him out a start—he’s got stiffness in his left arm” to “We’re going to skip him another start or two” to “Yeah, he’s going on the DL with tendonitis—he’s likely done for the year.” Closer Mike Gonzalez, who has 24 saves and a 2.16 ERA this season, and who absolutely dominated in his last three appearances went from “We’re not pitching him this weekend because his arm is tired,” to “Yeah, he’s going on the DL with tendonitis—he’s likely done for the year,” in about four days. Yes, it’s better to sit these guys than to risk injury, but after five years of this, you get kind of tired of the misdirection.
* Not only did the Pirates get dominated in front of record crowds last weekend, but they also hired a punk cover band to entertain the crowd during a fireworks show Friday night. This may be shocking, but...it didn’t go over well. What, you say? A punk cover band didn’t make a bunch of Western Pennsylvania families happy? Shocking, I know.
Seriously, whose idea was this? Why do they still have a job?
* Speaking of still having a job, here's a piece from Sports Illustrated (employer of a former roommate of mine, so I hate to bag on them...but I have to) in which Jon Heyman suggests that Dave Littlefield really is a good GM who just hasn't been given enough money to work with. All I can say is, he was given money this year. He spent $20 million on Jeromy Burnitz, Joe Randa, and Sean "Thrown out on a grounder to left field" Casey. When he was hired in 2001, they won 62 games. At the moment, they're on pace for 62.5 games this season. If they lose tonight, that pace is an even 62. That's an improvement of somewhere between 0.0 and 0.1 wins per season. He has failed his audition, and it's time for him to go.
Blog
Lots of good stuff from the blogs this week...impressive since most people have switched their attention to football season...
Here's Bucs Dugout on next year's payroll projections:
Dave Littlefield says that next year's payroll will be "plenty." Which, after the listener stops laughing, begs the question: "plenty" enough for what? Another 100-loss season? If it weren't so easy to call the Pirates on their BS, I'd be tempted to suggest that we look at this article again in a year, when the Pirates will again be near the bottom of the standings. By then it will have turned out that either the payroll was not, in fact, "plenty," or that Littlefield just can't get it done.Here's Romo Phone Home about the "forbearance of the Pirate fan":
My keyboard player and I did an unplugged gig at Atria's next to the stadium after Saturday night's game, and after we were finished, I engaged in a friendly but heated discussion with a Pirates fan who disagreed with my propensity for going on the radio and berating Pirates management. To this guy, it seemed patently obvious that the Pirates are now doing things right, that they have finally distanced themselves from the mistakes of the past, and that with the young players now on the field, they are poised to contend in 2007.Here's Where is Van Slyke, noting that it could always be worse:
I find this point of view startling. It seems that, by now, I should hardly have to verbalize a statement such as "We have the worst general manager in baseball," much less justify it with examples. That we have the worst general manager in baseball should be obvious to anyone paying the least bit of attention. 14 losing seasons. Craig Wilson for Shawn Chacon. Ed Creech. Brian Bullington and B.J. Upton. Tell me when to stop...
...
I don't claim any superior intelligence here. At best, what I have is a higher level of interest and engagement with the game of baseball than the average person, which may have as much to do with pathology as it does with intelligence, and the interest and engagement, I daresay, result in my paying closer attention and therefore being better informed than the average fan.
I had a similar experience at a preseason event at Atria's in March, in which KDKA ran a marathon pre-season talkfest in which I was asked to participate. The room was abuzz with optimism resulting, as near as I could tell, from the acquisitions of Burnitz, Randa, and Casey, and the consensus was overwhelmingly in favor of the notion that the Pirates were about to end their long run of futility. When I got up to the microphone, like Tobermory in the short story by Saki, I silenced the room when I said, "If the Pirates play .500 ball this year, I'll walk from here to Philadelphia."
If the Pirates continue their post-All-Star-break run of mediocrity (when compared to abject ineptitude, mediocrity impersonates success), look for the post-season optimism to arise again, defying all sense and reason.
I did a lot of complaining about Jim Tracy early in the year. Since about June he's tended to shut his mouth, stopped blaming his players for everything that went wrong, and stopped praising his staff for everything that went right. He's shifted towards playing mostly younger players, and in general given Pirate fans very little to complain about. I'm still not sure he's a great manager (and this isn't an analysis of his work this year), but as stupid as he can seem, he's never said anything as mind bogglingly stupid as this Dusty Baker quote:Until next week, when I'll have a nice, fresh sunburn from Saturday's tailgating. It's football season!!"On-base percentage is great if you can score runs and do something with that on-base percentage," Baker said... "Clogging up the bases isn't that great to me."Of course, a special thanks to Fire Joe Morgan to alerting the world to just how stupid the people that run baseball can be at times.
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