Tuesday Pirates Rant™ - Less than a week till Opening Day!

A quick Rant™ today as we get closer to Opening Day. Here’s some Pirates news in bullet form...

• Freddy Sanchez, defending NL batting champ, will most likely start the season on the DL after spraining his knee early in Spring Training. He’s missed most of Spring Training, and considering how his batting style is based totally on timing and a quick bat, that’s not the most encouraging news.


• Jose Castillo, the 2006 winner of the “Worst and Fattest 2B in Baseball” award, lost his starting job this year. However, thanks to Sanchez’ injury, he (at least momentarily) got it back. Goodie. Last week, Orel Hershiser said Castillo “has a lazy approach to the game,” but thanks to injuries, he’s still a starter.


• Chris Duffy promises that his .163 Spring Training average (with a massive walk total of 1) should not remind anybody of the fact that he batted <.200 for the first few months of the season, then got sent down to AAA, had a mental breakdown, didn’t report, and basically wasted the first four months of the 2006 season. Nope. “Everything’s going to be fine.” Good to know.


• Promising lefty Tom Gorzelanny, who did pretty well in August and September last year and was slotted to be the #4 starter this season, is now the #5 starter—with a teeny tiny leash—after a wretched Spring Training. Lefties Sean Burnett (their #1 prospect in ’04 before getting Tommy John surgery...which will soon be named Promising Pirates Pitcher surgery) and Shane Youman were absolutely dominant in Spring (despite neither being able to actually strike people out), and both were sent down to AAA last week.


• Brad Lincoln, the Pirates’ new #1 pitching prospect, has avoided getting Promising Pirates Pitcher surgery, against all odds...at least for the time being.

I will now wrap up this mini Rant™ with a blurb. I bought Doug Decatur’s Behind-the-Scenes Baseball last week. It’s a pretty interesting little book. The middle section of the book is a “GM IQ Test” (I think you can see where this is going already) in which you take a 100-question quiz of a bunch of things every GM should know but doesn’t. Let’s read Question #1, shall we?

Question 1. "The correlation between total team runs and which spot in the batting order is the strongest:

(A) leadoff
(B) second
(C) cleanup
(D) 8th in the NL and 9th in the AL

Without a doubt, Pirates GM Dave Littlefield would answer (A) to this question.

Answer: second

From the 1986 Baseball Abstract: "[T]he correlation of runs scored in the number two slot to the total runs scored by the team is closer than for any other position--that is, the teams which got a lot of runs out of their number two hitters, also got a lot of runs period."

There are two explanations here from the Abstract: (1) "This could also be taken to reflect the marginal nature of the position. Everybody has at least one good hitter to hit third, so that doesn't tell you that much about the offense, but the only teams which have good hitters hitting second are those which have five good hitters, hence score lots of runs."

The Pirates have 3 good hitters—Jason Bay, Freddy Sanchez, and Adam LaRoche. Needless to say, 3 is not 5.

(2) "[M]any managers tend to waste the second spot in the order by putting somebody there who isn't one of the better hitters on the team....Too many managers will say 'bat control' as if these words were a magic wand, and place some .260 hitter with a secondary average of .150 batting second....”

Jim Tracy absolutely insists on batting Jack “Magic Wand” Wilson in the 2 slot because of his bat control. Jack Wilson’s career batting average is .265. His career secondary average is .161. Just thought I’d point that out.