Where have you gone, Andy Van Slyke?

82 wins

2013-09-10T16:50:00.000-04:00

This is how it starts: in 1989 in a living room in front of an old cathode-ray tube TV, the kind with the power button that pulls out into a little knob to adjust the volume and the individual buttons for channels running down the side, with a four-year old asking his dad a non-stop stream of questions about the Pirates/Phillies game on the TV.

Or maybe this is how it starts: in a parking lot at Three Rivers Stadium where the same little boy is tailgating before his first-ever Pirate game, eating food out of the back of a car, then watching the Pirates dismantle the Expos 6-1 with his favorite player hitting a home run.

Or maybe it starts in the second floor hallway on the morning of October 15th, 1992. That's where he finds out that the Pirates blew the 1-0 lead they when he went to bed the night before in the most painful way possible and that, for the third season in a row they will not go to the World Series. The worst is yet to come, though, and no one has any idea how bad it can get.

Maybe it doesn't matter where it starts. Maybe, like so many things in life, it doesn't really have a beginning. To hear my parents tell it, I was captivated pretty much from the very first baseball game I ever watched in a way that they didn't really understand (my dad was always a baseball fan, though he always says that basketball was his favorite sport to watch until his oldest son turned into an inexplicable seamhead at the age of four or five). I've never spent much time thinking about it, but if I had to try and quantify it I'd tell you that it's because baseball has everything that I love; baseball is science and literature and a heavy dose of history that informs everything that happens all rolled into one.

For me, the Pirates have always gone hand in hand with baseball. I was five years old in 1990, which was the perfect age to get hooked by Van Slyke, Bonds, Bonilla, and Drabek. Those teams were incedible; they were talented and charismatic and fun. I would watch them on KBL and fall asleep with Lanny Fratarre's voice coming through the radio. I would listen to stories from my dad and my uncles about Roberto Clemente and Willie Stargell and the '71 Pirates and the '79 Pirates. I had a VHS tape that told the story of the first 100 years of Pirates' baseball that I'm pretty sure I watched until it wore thin. Looking back at all this now, well, how could anyone grow up in Western Pennsylvania in the early 1990s and not become a Pirate fan?

It's that beginning that's easy to explain, even though it all happened so long ago. What came next is much more difficult. At first, things didn't seem so bad. Bonds and Drabek left, but Van Slyke and Bell stayed and with Jeff King and Orlando Merced and guys like Al Martin were coming up. In 1993 it felt like maybe all the Pirates had to do was recalibrate. I don't want to rehash everything that happened next (that's what these posts were for), but by 1996 that plan had been torpedoed for a rebuild that would focus on a new stadium in 2001 and by 2001 that plan had been jettisoned for whatever the Littlefield era was. By 2007, the Littlefield regime had presided over a cosmic horror that would've given HP Lovecraft shivers. Even that was six years ago.

That was also around the time that I moved to North Carolina for grad school (my last full day as a resident of Western PA was July 31st, 2007; I drove from Hermitage to PNC Park with my dad, we got to the park, and the Matt Morris trade was announced on the scoreboard). When I would wear my Pirate hat around Chapel Hill back then, people would ask me why I was still a Pirate fan. "Why waste your time with a team that doesn't even want to win?" they'd ask. "What's the point?"

I never had a good answer for that question then. If we're being honest, I don't know that I do now. I want to tell you that I really haven't ever felt like the Pirates (or any sports team) owe me anything; one of the things that makes baseball great is that it mimics life in that so much of it is beyond our control, but that its consequences aren't really consequences at all in the grand scheme of things. I want to say that, but it seems like that's at least a little bit of ridiculous nonsense feelgoodery that fans of awful teams use to rationalize the awfulness. Being a Pirate fan has been awful more often than it hasn't. I was at the Home Opener where the Pirates turned a bunt into a home run and everyone threw their extendable flags on the field and booed mercilessly. I remember two separate occasions on which two Pirates stood dumbly at third base while they were both tagged, only to get off of the base in the wrong sequence and hand their opponent a double play. I remember Derek Bell and Jody Gerut and Raul Mondesi. For a time, Craig Wilson was an underappreciated folk hero. Craig Wilson. I don't believe in curses and it's relatively easy to point out where the previous front offices went wrong and how the team got to where it was at its lowest point without invoking superstition, but I'll never forget waking up on the day that PNC Park opened to read that Willie Stargell had died the night before. He died hours before the Pirates were going to open a new stadium by dedicating a statue of him. How can you watch history unfold like that without wondering if things will ever get better?

The reality, though, is that I never really ever considered not being a Pirate fan. Everyone needs places to escape to every once in a while, and baseball has always been one of those places for me. The Pirates have always been my lens for baseball, and I've never been able to see it any other way. The teams that I grew up with and the franchise's history is something that I interalized and made a part of me at the age when those sorts of things make impressions in a way that can't ever really be undone. Now that I've moved away, it's the Pirates more than almost anything else that act like an anchor back home for me (I say almost, because there are still plenty of Lackeys in Western PA and I'm not trying to slight them in any way, of course), and I mean that in a good way.

When people would ask me in 2007 or 2008 or 2009 or 2010 why I was still a Pirate fan, I started giving everyone the same response: "Because I've made it this far, and when it finally pays off it's all going to feel like it's been worth it." The thing about this 82nd win that makes it strangely gratifying is that I feel like it hasn't all been paid off yet. The 2013 Pirates won their 82nd game a week after Labor Day. They're in the middle of a heated of a division race. They're going to play at least one playoff game this year. The best player in the National League will wear black and gold until 2018. The 82nd win was a tour de force from a 22-year old starter that has mesmerizing stuff and a ceiling unlike any Pirate pitcher I've ever had the pleasure to watch. For years and years this number — 82 — has loomed over the Pirates. Now that it's here it feels weird to even think about celebrating it because it's clear that there's more work to be done, both this year and beyond.

More than anything, 82 is a relief. The longest losing streak in professional sports has been the defining aspect of the Pittsburgh Pirates since several years before they broke the old record in 2010. It always felt foolish to think big or dream big when the Pirates hadn't even managed to finish above .500 since the Bonds Era. I think that maybe the hardest part of the losing streak was its open nature; the last good Pirate teams are a distant memory now and they were immediately followed by this streak that refused to end. It's been an unending parenthetical aside that we, as Pirate fans, have been waiting to close off for forever, just so that we can get back to the main story.

As of this very second, just after midnight on September 10, 2013, the losing streak has been closed off. It is now a piece of Pittsburgh Pirate history, destined to fade into memory with all of the good and bad that this storied franchise has been through. It no longer has to define the Pirates' present. It no longer has to define the Pirates' fans' present. The streak is behind us and we can finally start thinking about the Pirates in different terms. The streak is dead, a weight has been lifted, and the best part about it all is that I need to decide if I should fly home for the start of the playoffs.

81 wins

2013-09-04T15:16:00.001-04:00

Good evening, good night, good morning, whatever. It is September 4th, 2013. The Pittsburgh Pirates are 81-57.

The last countdown ran its course, so let's do things this way: 70 wins, 71 wins, 72 wins, 73 wins, 74 wins, 75 wins, 76 wins, 77 wins, 78 wins, 79 wins, 80 wins.

I'm not even sure where to begin. My plan for these last two posts has been to give "81 wins" the historical context and "82 wins" the personal context. Maybe that's not going to work. I'm going to do my best.

Starting in 2011, which was the first year in the PNC Park era that the Pirates legitimately contended beyond the end of May and threatened to break .500 well into the summer, this question has existed: Is a .500 season something worth celebrating? Is an 82 or 83 or 84 win season really an achievment if it doesn't result in a playoff berth? My personal view has always been this: a .500 season or 82 wins should never be a baseball team's ultimate goal. The true crime of the Dave Littlefield era was that the organization as a whole lost sight of this and put snapping the losing streak ahead of everything else, to disastrous results. Celebrating 81 or 82 wins last September wouldn't have lessened the blow of the collapse; it would've made me feel terrible about celebrating one of the worst ends to any season that anyone could've dreamed up.

I've always thought of these two landmarks in particular as exactly that; something that you drive past on the highway on your way to something else. Not a destination; a waypoint to be acknowledged and moved beyond. If the 1997 Pirates had won 82 games instead of 79, would any of what happened in the following years or what's happened this summer be substantially different? Maybe it all would've, but it's hard to say from here.

What I know is this: the idea that 81 and 82 shouldn't exist as goals is always a concept that I've applied to the team. This is a milestone that's always been one marked by the fans. The more that people insist that it shouldn't be celebrated, the more I find myself asking why it shouldn't be. The players aren't popping champagne on the field. The Pirate organization has made it clear since 2008 what their ultimate goals are and no one is breaking stride with that today or tomorrow or whenever win 82 comes, and that's how it's supposed to be. But the fans? How can the fans not spend a night or two marking the passing of this occasion? How can we think back on all of the things that have happened since that October night in 1992 and not note that maybe now, in 2013, we can put all of that behind us.

What's great about this 2013 season is that it's clear that this is just the pre-party. This Pirate team is the favorite to win the NL Central, because that's what you are when you're in first place after 138 games. This team isn't falling apart like other Pirate teams. It's going to play one playoff game, and it's probably going to play at least one playoff series, and who knows what else they're going to do? We're not celebrating 81 tonight or 82 tomorrow as an endpoint; we're celebrating them as a necessary exorcism before we can get on to the real business of celebrating playoff berths, then living out the tense reality of playoff baseball that's been missing from all of our lives for such a long time.

It is almost impossible to give context to the Pirates' losing streak without feeling like you're dipping into parody. Since 1992, the Marlins, Rockies, Diamondbacks, and Rays have all come into existence and won pennants. The Marlins were created, won a World Series, tore that team apart and rebuilt from the ground up, won another World Series, and tore that team apart, and that was all by 2006. The Rays went from being the worst franchise maybe in baseball history to being consistently one of the best.

Perhaps that's the most difficult thing about all of this for Pirate fans: while all of baseball swirls and changes around us, the Pirates have always been the same. Other franchises go up and down, and while it never happens at the same rate for any team, for a long time it seemed like it was happening to everyone except for the Pirates. Life is all about change; change is what we remember, it's what we celebrate, it's what we mourn. Change is how we mark the passage of time, and for so many years that applied to everything in life except for the Pittsburgh Pirates. No matter what, the Pirates were always the same. Al Martin became Brian Giles became Jason Bay. Jon Lieber became Jason Schmidt became Kip Wells became Ian Snell. The Pirates wore pinstripes or they didn't. They had sleeves or they didn't. They had grey caps or red-billed caps or maybe uniforms that looked like they belonged on a McDonald's worker, or maybe they didn't. None of it mattered, because the Pirates were always the same.

For the first time in a long time, the Pirates aren't the same. Everything in life changes, even the Pittsburgh Pirates. Isn't that wonderful?

80 wins

2013-09-03T14:50:00.001-04:00

Good morning. It is September 3rd 2013.

With last night's win, the Pirates are 80-57 Since 1992, the Pirates failed to win 80 games in the following seasons*: 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012.

There is another way to write that list up. It could be written like this: 1993-2012. It's fitting that the final years on the countdown are 1997 and 2012, because there are not two more memorable years that the Pirates have had during their 20 year losing streak.

The 1997 season was, of course, The Freak Show. As previously discussed, the Pirates jettisoned their entire post-Bonds core of talent over the end of the 1996 season and the following winter. The 1997 Pirates were supposed to be a lousy baseball team that would lose a bunch of games in the interest of laying a foundation for the 2001 Pirates, who would usher in a new era of Pirate baseball at PNC Park. The Pirates starting lineup on Opening Day of 1997 was: Tony Womack, Jermaine Allensworth, Al Martin, Mark Johnson, Kevin Elster, Jason Kendall, Jose Guillen, Joe Randa, and Jon Lieber. Kendall was an exciting young player coming off of a great rookie season. Guillen was 21 years old and had been skipped straight from the Carolina League (Advanced-A) to Pittsburgh, which created a bunch of buzz. Martin was a decent outfielder starting to enter his prime. That was pretty much it.

To be frank, the 1997 Pirates were not very good. The thing is, they weren't nearly as terrible as they were supposed to be, and that was good enough to stay in contention in the NL Central in 1997. The Pirates never got more than four games over .500 (they were 19-15 in early May), but after falling 3 1/2 games out of first place in late April, they managed to hang within a game or two of the Astros for the rest of May, June, and most of July. At the All-Star Break they were 43-43, but that was good enough for first place. They hosted the Astros in a four-game set after the break and promptly lost the first two games, then moved back into a first place tie with Francisco Cordova and Ricardo Rincon's combined ten-inning no-hitter that ended on a walk-off Mark Smith home run. On July 18th, the Pirates fell out of first place and never got back. They battled back after they dropped six games out of first in late July, but they never got closer than the 1 1/2 game deficit hat the Shawon Dunston game earned them.

The 1997 team was fun, though. It was only five years removed from 1992 (which felt like a long time back then, to be honest), and it seemed like even though the Pirates weren't really all that great, they were at least laying some kind of foundation with Kendall, Guillen, Randa, Lieber, Cordova, Esteban Loaiza, and Jason Schmidt. Because the team had promising guys like that and easy-to-root-for castoffs like Smith and Kevin Polcovich and Turner Ward, they were easy to cheer for. If you were a Pirate fan in 1997, you don't just remember the no-hitter and the Dunston game. You remember the sweep of the White Sox and Jon Lieber's complete game, that saw him face down Frank Thomas and Albert Belle in the 9th inning with a 3-1 lead and live to tell about it. You remember Rich Loiselle (Rich Loiselle!) striking out Barry Bonds with two on, two outs, and a three-run lead in the top of the ninth inning. Everything about 1997 felt like it was building towards something good, even if in the end the Pirates only won 79 games and finished in second place.

Now compare that to 2012. In 2011, the Pirates were much more like the '97 team; they hung around for a long time with a team that probably shouldn't have, but it felt like they were laying groundwork for the future for most of the season. The only real difference is that the 2011 team had an ugly collapse at the end of the year. The 2012 Pirates spent May, June, and July convincing you that they were a different team than the 2011 club. That they were a team that could finish .500 and contend until the end, and that even if they didn't finish with a playoff spot you'd end the year feeling much the same way that you did at the end of 1997.

The Pirates beat the Diamondbacks on August 8th, 2012, to go 63-47. They finished 16-36. They fell apart so completely that it was more or less impossible to see a bright side. In all of my years as a Pirate fan I've watched a lot of dumb, stupid, terrible baseball, but absolutely nothing was as hard to watch as the end of 2012. I still don't really like talking about it.

After 1997, it seemed like the Pirates had a bright future ahead of them. In 1998 they came crashing back to Earth and never recovered. After 2012, well, if a team that's 63-47 can't even finish above .500, you start wondering if it's ever going to happen. In 2013, well, that's a chapter that's still not completely written.

There are zero seasons left to cross off of this list. This is the first Pittsburgh Pirate team since 1992 to move across the 80 win barrier. This team did it on Labor Day with 25 games left on the schedule. This season is not over yet. There is work left to be done.

76-79 wins

2013-09-01T14:17:00.001-04:00

76 wins

Posted by Pat on Aug 24, 2013 15:11

Good morning. It is August 24th, 2013.

With last night's win, the Pirates are 76-52. Since 1992, the Pirates failed to win 76 games in the following seasons*: 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1998, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011.

I've told this story a thousand times before, but my primary memory of the Pirates' 1993 season is this: my dad spent the winter preparing me for my first really bad Pirate team (some of my absolute earliest and foggiest memories of anything are of watching baseball during the 1989 season, but much of what I think of as the foundation for my life as a PIrate fan was laid during 1990), then he went to the home opener in 1993, and the Pirates beat the Padres 9-4. I think that I intellecutally knew that things had to be different for the Pirates without Barry Bonds and Doug Drabek, but I was also eight years old. I figured that they'd rebounded from losing Bobby Bonilla in 1992 and come closer to the World Series than ever. Why should 1993 be any different?

As it turned out, 1993 was only different because the Pirates won 75 games that year and in doing that the 1993 club would be better than 15 of the 19 baseball teams that would follow it. Think about this: the Pirates lost he best player of a generation and went from a 96-win team to a 75-win team, and that 75-win team was still one of the very best Pirate teams to take the field between 1993 and 2012. Honestly: outside of Royals fans, there are very few people that understand the depths of despair that Pirate fans have been through.

One of the reasons for the absolute depths of that despair is 2003, which is the other season that was checked off of this list with last night's win. I talked at length about the Drive for 75 on Friday, but the real reason to remember 2003 is this: "Aramis Ramirez traded by the Pittsburgh Pirates with Kenny Lofton and cash, to the Chicago Cubs for a player to be named later, Matt Bruback (minors) and Jose Hernandez. The Chicago Cubs sent Bobby Hill to the Pittsburgh Pirates to complete the trade."

There was no way of knowing it at the time, but the club had accrued a bunch of debt in moving into PNC Park and the Nutting family was moving behind the scenes to wrest power from Kevin McClatchy (UPDATE: I semi-remembered the details wrong here; prior to 2003 the Nuttings floated the team a big loan so that they could make MLB's mandated debt/equity ratio, but they still needed to slash salary in 2003 and, as Tim Williams pointed out to me, with Kris Benson on the disabled list, their options were limited). Ramirez was a 25-year old third baseman entering his prime, but the Pirates felt that they couldn't pay him the $6 million he was due in 2004 or the arbitration raise he'd get in 2005 before he hit free agency.

Really everything about Aramis Ramirez is a microcosm for how the Pirates failed to capitalize on the Freak Show of 1997 and turn it into any sort of contending baseball team. They failed to protect Joe Randa in the expansion draft and lost him, which lead to Ramirez making his big league debut in 1998 at the age of 19. Ramirez wasn't really, truly ready for the majors until 2001, but by that point the Pirates had burned just about a full year's worth of service (Ramirez played a total of 163 games for them between 1998-2000), which shifted his pay scale by a year and lead to the awful trade in 2003.

There are only three seasons left on this list, but that doesn't mean that there's not work left to be done.

*The strike shortened 1994 and 1995. The '94 Pirates were on pace for 75 wins, but the '95 Pirates were terrible and only on pace for 65 wins.

77 wins

Posted by Pat on Aug 29, 2013 12:06

Good morning. It is August 29th, 2013.

With last night's win, the Pirates are 77-55. Since 1992, the Pirates failed to win 77 games in the following seasons*: 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1998, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011.

There are no new seasons left on the list, so let's spend today's post remembering the Shawon Dunston Game. It is inevitable that when a late-season Pirate trade acquisition makes his debut, someone will mention Shawon Dunston. Dunston, you will no doubt remember, was traded to the Pirates on August 31st of 1997 after Kevin Polcovich's injury really depleted the Pirates at the shortstop position (Polcovich replaced Kevin Elster early in the '97 season). Dunston showed up and hit two home runs and drove four runs in in his Pirate debut on September 2nd, practically single-handedly dragged the Pirates to a 6-4 win over the Indians. That win put the Pirates just 1 1/2 games back of the Astros with 23 games left to play, though ultimately the Pirates wouldn't catch them.

This is the thing that gets me about Shawon Dunston's Pirate career: you'd be hard-pressed to find a Pirate fan that remembers 1997 but somehow doesn't remember that game or four homers he hit in his first five games as a Pirate or the ridiculous tear that he was on for basically his entire Pirate career, but Dunston's Pirate career only lasted 18 games. Think about this for a second: one of the hands-down most memorable Pirates of the last 20 years, and the player that I think is probably most associated (or maybe the fourth-most associated, behind a three-way Francisco Cordova/Ricardo Rincon/Mark Smith tie) with the Pirate team that made it later into the season as contenders than any other Pirate team of the last generation didn't even play 20 games for the Pirates.

Think about what that says about the Pirates and what being a Pirate fan has been like over the last 20 years.

There are only three seasons left on this list, but that doesn't mean that there's not work left to be done.

*The strike shortened 1994 and 1995. The '94 Pirates were on pace for 75 wins, but the '95 Pirates were terrible and only on pace for 65 wins.

78 wins

Posted by Pat on Aug 31, 2013 13:08

Good morning. It is August 31st, 2013.

With last night's win, the Pirates are 78-56. Since 1992, the Pirates failed to win 78 games in the following seasons*: 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1998, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011.

There are no new years to cross of the list today, either, but we are in the final stretch of this countdown. That's because the only three seasons left (1997, 1999, and 2012) saw the Pirates win 79, 78, and 79 wins, respectively (remember; the season only gets added to the list when the Pirates surpass the win total from that season). That means that if the Pirates beat the Cardinals tonight, they will have matched their win total in every single one of the last 20 seasons by the end of August. That is how good these Pirates are. That is how bad those Pirates were.

There are three seasons left on the countdown. There is so much work left to be done.

79 wins

Posted by Pat on Sep 1, 2013 14:17

Good morning. It is September 1st, 2013.

With last night's win, the Pirates are 79-56. Since 1992, the Pirates failed to win 79 games in the following seasons*: 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011.

Let's not mince words: 1999 is the year that ruined everything. The Pirates took a step back after 1997's Freak Show, but in 1999 they had a lineup that featured Jason Kendall, Brian Giles, and yes, Al Martin and Kevin Young at the peak of their careers. The rotation had some young promise with Jason Schmidt and Kris Benson, and even Todd Ritchie and Francisco Cordova. With young players like Jose Guillen in Pittsburgh and Aramis Ramirez in the minors, this was supposed to be the group of players that lead the Pirates out of their post-Bonds-slump and into a new winning era of baseball at PNC Park.

For a while, it seemed like that's what would happen. They started 8-5 and they hung around .500 the whole first half of the season, getting as high as five games above it in June. That was good enough to keep them in the division and wild card race through most of June. They were still on the periphery of the race on July 4th. That's when disaster struck. Running out a bunt single, Jason Kendall turned his ankle over on first base and horrifyingly displaced it, popping the bone out of the skin and shearing all of the ligaments. Kendall was in the process of blossoming in 1999; he came up as a high-average guy without much power, but he homered 12 times in 1998 and already had eight homers at the time of his injury in '99. He was slugging .511 at that point, and heading towards a season that would make Andrew McCutchen jealous (his triple-slash line was .332/.428/.511).

Instead, the Pirates lost him entirely and panicked. They traded the massively talented but difficult Jose Guillen to Tampa for catching help — Joe Oliver and Humberto Cota. Guillen had been badly mishandled by the club (they jumped him from Single-A to the Majors in 1997, which could have made him arbitration eligible in 2000 at the age of 23), but he was still one of their best young talents. That trade coupled with the Jon Lieber-for-Brant-Brown trade that had happened over the winter prior to the 1999 season. This all signified something terrifying: Cam Bonifay had put together enough talent to build a winning club, but he had no idea how to polish into something more.

Instead of having a young core of Ramirez and Guillen and Kendall and Giles to lead them into PNC Park, they ruined the development of both Ramirez and Guillen by calling them up at incredibly young ages. They'd given up on Guillen already and they'd irreparably started Ramirez's arbitration clock. Because the 2001 team was a listless wreck floating at sea with an incredibly young manager that was in way over his head (Lloyd McClendon was 42 in his first year on the job), Kendall was allowed to play through a debilitating thumb injury that sapped his power for the rest of his career. Lieber was in Chicago putting up great numbers, and the Pirates were in the process of giving up on Jason Schmidt and sending him to San Francisco to do the same.

The pieces were all there in 1998 and 1999, but the Pirates let them slip through their fingers. Looking back, it was the Kendall injury and the Guillen trade that should've made that apparent. Instead of getting better, there was nothing but worse days ahead for these Pirates.

There are still two seasons left to cross off of this list. This job is not yet done.

70 - 75 wins

2013-08-23T14:45:00.001-04:00

In 2013 I ran a series of posts counting up to the team's 82nd win; they are reproduced in chunks here

70 wins

Posted by Pat on Aug 9, 2013 14:20

Good morning. It is August 9th, 2013.

With last night's win, the Pirates are 70-44. Since 1992, the Pirates failed to win 70 games in the following seasons*: 1994, 1995, 1998, 2000, 2001, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010.

The two new additions to the list today are 1998 and 2000, which I think represents the most destructive period in this ignominoious streak. The 1997 Freak Show Pirates were much like the 2011 Pirates; unexpected contenders with a roster composed of exciting young players and castoffs. Except for the weird 1995 season, the Pirates hadn't really plummetted too deep into the depths by 1997. Things didn't go according to plan in 1998, though. Cam Bonifay and Kevin McClatchy were hellbent on getting a winning team on the field in PNC Park in 2001, though, and they abandoned their rebuilding plan by trading young players for veterans (the Jose Guillen trade is the prime example of this, but far from the only one). The results were disastrous, and Bonifay was fired in favor of Dave Littlefield in 2001. You'll note that the seasons on today's list make up the seasons in which the Pirates didn't even make it to 70 wins. You will also note that more than half of them are from 2005-2010, all of which are either directly or indirectly attributable to the Dave Littlefield era. 1998 and 2000 were really terrible.

This is just 11 total seasons out of 20. There is more work to be done.

*The strike shortened 1994 and 1995. The '94 Pirates were on pace for 75 wins, but the '95 Pirates were terrible and only on pace for 65 wins.

71 wins

Posted by Pat on Aug 15, 2013 13:55

Good morning. It is August 15th, 2013.

With last night's win, the Pirates are 71-48. Since 1992, the Pirates failed to win 71 games in the following seasons*: 1994, 1995, 1998, 2000, 2001, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010.

There are no new additions to the list today, and so there are no new memories of past seasons gone by to share. Maybe after the four-game losing streak that the Pirates just snapped, that's for the best.

*The strike shortened 1994 and 1995. The '94 Pirates were on pace for 75 wins, but the '95 Pirates were terrible and only on pace for 65 wins.

72 wins

Posted by Pat on Aug 17, 2013 15:03

Good morning. It is August 17th, 2013.

With last night's win, the Pirates are 72-49. Since 1992, the Pirates failed to win 72 games in the following seasons*: 1994, 1995, 1998, 2000, 2001, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010.

There are no new additions to the list today, and so there are no new memories of past seasons gone by to share. That's only 11 seasons crossed off the list. There's more work to be done.

*The strike shortened 1994 and 1995. The '94 Pirates were on pace for 75 wins, but the '95 Pirates were terrible and only on pace for 65 wins.

73 wins

Posted by Pat on Aug 20, 2013 12:16

Good morning. It is August 20th, 2013.

With last night's win, the Pirates are 73-51. Since 1992, the Pirates failed to win 72 games in the following seasons*: 1994, 1995, 1998, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011.

There are three new additions to the list today, which means that 72 wins is one of two the most regular outcome of the last 20 years, tied with 69 wins. The 2002 Pirates were one of the worst offensive teams relative to their league in the whole bunch. They only had two regulars with an above average OPS; Brian Giles, who was incredible in 2002 (.298/.450/.622 with 37 doubles, 38 homers, and 105 RBIs), and Craig Wilson, who somehow couldn't really crack the every day lineup despite being one of the team's two best hitters. This was the year in which Aramis Ramirez spiked his helmet off of his ankle while charging the mound, badly injuring it and causing him to struggle all year. This was also Jason Kendall's first truly subpar year at the plate, as he was dealing with the aftermath the devastating thumb injury that would rob him of his power for the rest of his career. It's also illustrative of the difference in offensive eras. The 2002 Pirates hit .244/.319/.381 as a team. That gave them the worst batting average, the worst on-base percentage, and the second-worst slugging percentage in the NL that year. This year's Pirates are hitting .245/.313/.391. That's good for eleventh, eighth, and eighth in 2013.

The other two years, 2004 and 2011, are nice parallels. 2004 was the year that the Pirates really transitioned out of the Bonifay era and into the Littlefield era. It's hard to remember now, but there were some legitimately exciting things about that season; Jason Bay and Oliver Perez had come over from the Padres in the Brian Giles trade at the end of 2003, and they both had huge seasons in 2004. Bay won Rookie of the Year with his 26 homers and .907 OPS in 120 games, and Perez struck out 239 hitters to go with his 2.98 ERA. The Pirates hit .500 on Memorial Day Weekend after the Mackowiak double-header, they were 48-50 in late July, and even after a late-season swoon, it seemed like thing were moving in the right direction.

They wouldn't win 72 games again until 2011. You remember 2011 well, of course, and it's part of the reason that every loss this late in the year gives you acid reflux. Really, though, 2011 laid a base that 2012 and then 2013 could build off of. A lot of the same things that we're seeing emphasized in 2013 started that year; that was the season that Charlie Morton changed his approach to focus on ground balls, the first season that an emphasis on defense started, the season that Andrew McCutchen's underlying rates started pointing towards a breakout, and there were even some some defensive shifts (though I think those may have actually started back in 2010). The result was that an under-talented Pirate team found themselves in contention well into July, before they fell apart while the Brewers caught fire. Unlike 2004, though, it really was a sign that there were better seasons ahead.

That's 14 seasons we've crossed off the list. There's more work left to be done.

*The strike shortened 1994 and 1995. The '94 Pirates were on pace for 75 wins, but the '95 Pirates were terrible and only on pace for 65 wins.

74 wins

Posted by Pat on Aug 21, 2013 15:28

Good morning. It is August 21st, 2013.

With last night's win, the Pirates are 74-51. Since 1992, the Pirates failed to win 74 games in the following seasons*: 1994, 1995, 1996, 1998, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011.

The only addition to the list is 1996. This is what you remember from actual baseball from 1996: almost nothing. You remember the First Fire Sale, which started at the end of the season and carried through the winter. In August, the Pirates traded Denny Neagle to the Braves. In November, they traded Carlos Garcia and Orlando Merced (and Dan Plesac, but nobody every remembers that Dan Plesac was briefly a Pirate) to the Blue Jays. In December, they traded Jay Bell and Jeff King to the Royals. That was pretty much the entire post-Bonds/Drabek/Van Slyke core.

You may also remember that this was done because Kevin McClatchy had just bought the team and had set his sights on the future. PNC Park was still just a dream in 1996, but McClatchy had set 2001 as the goal and he and Cam Bonifay recognized that the team that they had in 1996 was not the team to get them there. In and of itself, the fire sale was not a bad thing. The post-Bonds core was medicore at best and getting old fast. Pirates were awful in 1995 and the only standard by which they were any good in 1996 was The Pittsburgh Pirate Standard. The trades didn't go badly, either. For Neagle, they got Jason Schmidt. For Merced, Garcia, and Plesac they got Craig Wilson, Abraham Nunez, and Jose Silva. For Bell and King, they got Joe Randa. The real problems that would really doom the franchise didn't come until a couple of years down the road.

What I remember most about 1996 was the dawning realization that a good baseball team was not automatic, that it had to be built and earned. We'll talk more about this when 1993 crops up on this countdown, but as a young kid, I just sort of thought the Pirates would plug a few new players in and keep on trucking after everyone left in 1992. By 1996, it was very clear to me that baseball simply did not work that way.

There are still five seasons left on the countdown. There is more work left to be done.

*The strike shortened 1994 and 1995. The '94 Pirates were on pace for 75 wins, but the '95 Pirates were terrible and only on pace for 65 wins.

75 wins

Posted by Pat on Aug 23, 2013 14:45

Good morning. It is August 23rd, 2013.

With last night's win, the Pirates are 75-52. Since 1992, the Pirates failed to win 75 games in the following seasons*: 1994, 1995, 1996, 1998, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011.

There are no new additions to the list today, but that's perfect because it means we can talk about The Drive for 75. If you are a veteran of the Pittsburgh Pirate Internet — which is to say that you remember WHYGAVS when it was on Blogspot and Bucs Dugout when it looked like this and Irate Fans and you still have six bookmarks for Wilbur Miller's Pirate Player Profiles — then you remember The Drive for 75.

The Drive for 75 started in 2003. Over the winter of 2002-2003, a bunch of players had trouble finding work and later accused the owners of colluding against them to keep free agent prices down. Dave Littlefield cashed in on the depressed market, signing Reggie Sanders and Kenny Lofton after the start of spring training. Sanders and Lofton were excellent, as was Matt Stairs, who was also signed that winter. You remember other aspects of 2003, I'm sure, and we'll get to that when 2003 shows up on the list after the Pirates' next win, but the final result was that the Pirates won 75 games in 2003, then all of the free agent signings went their merry way and Littlefield spent the rest of his Pirate career trying to recapture the same lightning that he'd bottled in 2003.

This went poorly, of course. You remember the Walking Dead that followed those guys in the Littlefield era; Jeromy Burnitz, Joe Randa, Chris Stynes, Benito Santiago, and who even remembers who else. The Pirates weren't spending money on the draft. The Pirates barely had any international scouting operation at all. The one and only focus during Littlefield's reign of terror as general manager was to assemble a team of Major League veterans that could somehow win 82 games. There was no backup plan. There was no plan to build beyond that.

As a result, the Pirates didn't even get back to that 75-win plateau until 2012. Think about this: in the first 11 years of PNC Park, the Pirates failed to win at least 75 games ten times. This year, they have 75 wins with 35 games left on the schedule. This is how it should be. Seventy-five wins shouldn't be a speed bump, much less a destination. Littlefield's Drive for 75 was easily the most destructive thing that happened to the Pirates in the last 20 years.

Only the Pirates

2012-12-16T19:25:00.001-05:00

“If the Pirates decided to trade me, I would quit. I would not play for another team, only the Pirates.” Roberto Clemente as told by Vera Clemente to the crowd at the Byham Theater watching Game 7 of the 1960 World Series.

It’s hard to know where to start with the broadcast of Game 7 of the 1960 World Series. There are so many interesting and unique aspects to watching a previously lost piece of baseball history that I think I could watch the entire three-hour broadcast two more times and find something new to write about every time.

The game itself is a time capsule. Some of the players look like high school football coaches in 2010. They’re burly but not ripped like today’s players and they look pretty ridiculous in their saggy flannel uniforms. Some of the other players are skinny little beanpoles. The few guys that don’t fit either mold — Roberto Clemente (who in 1960 was built an awful lot like Andrew McCutchen is built in 2010), Maris and Mantle (who are both built more like modern players) — really stand out. The other thing that stands out is the quickness of the player’s hands, I think because they’re every bit as quick as modern players’ hands even though the players themselves don’t look nearly as athletic. Don Hoak fielding a groundball and whipping a throw to Bill Mazerosi at second and Maz nonchantly catching it is a thing of beauty.

The players in the game are the stuff of baseball legend. I mean, the Yankees bat Roger Maris, Mickey Mantle, and Yogi Berra back to back to back. Roberto Clemente is just hitting the stride of his career. Previously, most of the footage I’ve seen of Clemente is from later in his career; I’ve seen highlights from when Three Rivers opened, I’ve seen all of Game 7 of the 1971 World Series, and everyone’s seen his 3,000th hit. 1960 Roberto is different. In this game, he casually whips laser throws back to the infield after routine pop-ups, he makes ridiculous and unnecessary basket catches, and it’s his hustle to first base on a slow bouncer to no man’s land between the pitcher and first sets the table for Hal Smith’s dramatic home run. The early 70s Clemente I’m more familiar with was a great athlete, but one whose body had slowly betrayed him. He ran tenderly, he moved tenderly, and even though he could still swing a bat like few others, you can tell that he just wasn’t 100%. In 1960, he was a guy that was just realizing he could do absolutely anything he wanted to on a baseball field. If there were just one game in a vault somewhere of him playing between 1961 and about 1967, after he really started to figure things out but before injuries started taking their toll, I think I’d give just about anything to watch it after seeing this game. He doesn’t do much of anything exciting in this game and he’s still breathtaking to watch.

Everyone knows about Maz’s homer. Most Pirate fans probably know about Hal Smith’s homer, which was the single biggest hit in the game. A few people know about Dick Groat’s ground ball off of Tony Kubek’s throat that starts the Pirate rally that inning. That still doesn’t start to capture the frantic pace of the game’s last four innings. The Pirates take a comfortable 4-1 lead into the sixth, when Vern Law’s bad ankle starts to give out and Elroy Face comes in and promptly serves up a three-run homer to Yogi Berra. What if the Pirates don’t come back? That Berra home run might be a signature moment for him; a clutch hit to cap off a legendary career. The Yankees keep building their lead in the eighth and it’s 7-4 before the Pirates come up to bat in that inning. It’s one thing to see that in a line score, but another entirely in the context of a game. That’s a hard lead to overcome on a Tuesday in July against the Nationals, much less in October against the 1960 Yankees. But the Pirates get their improbable rally with Virdon’s grounder off of Kubek’s throat and Clemente’s infield hit and Smith’s giant home run that Mel Allen says will be remembered forever but was promptly wiped from everyone’s memory before the hour was even over. After Smith’s home run, they cut to the Byham audience giving the 80-year old Smith a standing ovation and Smith is grinning like he’d just hit the home run in again 2010. I’m getting goosebumps just thinking about it.

And somehow, after all that, it’s not even close to over. The Yankees, down 9-7, lead off the ninth with Series MVP Bobby Richardson (who was the only Yankee in the Byham crowd and who whispers to Dick Groat at one point, “This really is a great game” with tears in his eyes and you can tell that even though Richardson played on three World Series winners and three other World Series losers with the Yankees, this game is the one he wants another chance at) and then after a pinch-hitter have Maris, Mantle, and Berra due up. How could a two-run lead be safe against that? The game tying play is a sharp groundball hit to Rocky Nelson with Mantle on first. Nelson smoothly nabs the ball and steps on first but Mantle freezes, thinking Nelson caught the ball in the air. If he ran to second and got in a rundown, the tying run would’ve scored easily. Instead, he pauses, head-fakes Nelson, and dives back into first, just beating the tag. I don’t know how anyone but Mickey Mantle makes that play.

All of the great things leading up to Maz’s homer make the home run one of baseball’s iconic moments. It’s the one part of the game that everyone knows everything about, and in this context it’s kind of anticlimactic. It’s like opening a wonderful surprise Christmas gift, then opening something you really want, but that picked out yourself and watched someone buy for you. The game is about the home run, but the best part of it all is seeing everything about that isn’t the home run.

And I’m rambling on and on now and I still haven’t gotten to my favorite part of the MLB Network’s broadcast. I was skeptical when I heard they’d be including clips from the Byham and interviews with players and Bob Costas, but early in the game they pause between innings and go to the theater and Costas mentions that Vera Clemente, Roberto’s widow, is in the crowd. And he says that while some players are remembered and other players are loved, that Roberto Clemente is revered in Pittsburgh. That every time he appears on the 1960 broadcast, the 2010 audience buzzes even if it’s just a clip of him in the on-deck circle. And he asks Vera about this and you can tell that she’s moved by this whole event and by the love that the city of Pittsburgh still has for her husband. She says that she can feel Roberto with her and then she gives the quote that I opened this post with, saying that Roberto always told her, “If the Pirates decided to trade me, I would quit. I would not play for another team, only the Pirates.”

And that’s the best part about the entire presentation. Times are awful for Pirate fans right now, but the Pirates will always be the team that toppled the invincible Yankees in 1960. The Pirates will always be the only team Roberto Clemente played for and the only team he ever wanted to play for. A cynic would say that in 2010 fans root for laundry, but that’s not true. I root to be able to experience my own personal 1960 World Series. Right now the Pirates are a terrible 105-loss team, but they’re still Pittsburgh’s team and they’re Roberto Clemente’s team and Willie Stargell’s team and Bill Mazeroski’s team and Honus Wagner’s team and Andy Van Slyke’s team; they’re still the team that shocked the Yankees in 1960, that toppled Walter Johnson in 1925, that beat the incredible Orioles’ rotation in 1971, that overcame a 3-1 deficit as a Fam-a-lee in 1979. And even though they haven’t won anything of significance in 18 years, they’re the team that I grew up watching with my dad and my uncles and my brothers and my friends and that makes them my team, too. And it may take five or ten or 18 or 31 more years, but the Pirates will eventually get back to the top of baseball and when they do, that chapter of Pirate history will be my chapter of Pirate history. And I think it will all be worth it.

Today is Andrew McCutchen Day

2012-07-09T14:53:00.001-04:00

There are a million things that I’d like to write about over this All-Star break because the storybook first half that the Pirates just finished up lends itself to a million different stories. I’ve been waiting for this kind of thing for forever, really, and now that I have a few days without baseball games I want to write about all of them all at once. I’ll do my best to get through them in the next 72 hours or so, but before we launch into this in earnest I wanted to take some time and talk about Andrew McCutchen.

I started WHYGAVS in April of 2005. It’s no coincidence that this is when I started paying much more attention to things beyond the final on-field product in Pittsburgh. The more I wrote, the more I became interested in all of the things that went into building a successful Major League organization (and the more I realized how hopeless the Pirates were at the time). In June of that year, the Pirates drafted Andrew McCutchen. If you check back through my old Blogspot archives, I was pretty reserved about the pick at the time. Dave Littlefield loved himself some toolsy outfielders and McCutchen just seemed so, so raw in 2005 that he was more of an enigma than anything. They projected him as a five-tool player, but what skinny, speedy 18-year old outfielder that dominated his high school league isn’t projected as a five-tool player?

Still, McCutchen became the first Pirate prospect that I really followed. He rewarded the Pirates pretty quickly; he started 2006 in Single-A Hickory and hit 14 home runs with a .291/.356/.446 line in 114 games. The Pirates responded by skipping him over Advanced-A and sending him to Altoona for 20 games as a 19-year old. That proved to be an aggressive placing and his power dipped a bit in both 2007 and 2008, when he was in Double-A and Triple-A, but young for both levels.

I’ve told this story a million times before, but the first time I saw him in person was in Durham towards the end of the 2008 season. I saw him before the game and was incredulous; he’s listed as 5’10”, but there’s no chance he’s that tall. I couldn’t believe that this prospect that’d I’d invested so much time and hope in was this short, skinny little guy. In the first inning, he stepped into the box against David Price and his hands flashed through the zone and he crushed a flyout to deep left center field and immediately the light bulb went on in my head. I’m not a scout and I’m not good at identifying the difference between minor league talent and Major League talent, but in one swing it was immediately apparent to me that McCutchen had something special. I never wondered about him again.

Pirate fans are familiar with the arc of his career from this point on; he impressed in spring training 2009, but was sent to the minors for some final seasoning and to delay his arbitration clock. His power came back in 40 games with Indianapolis that year and he blasted the door to PNC Park down so emphatically that the Pirates felt they could trade Nate McLouth away once he was ready. He didn’t miss a beat; in his first 108 games with the Pirates he had a three-homer game and hit a dramatic walkoff off of Brad Lidge that resulted in an iconic celebration that no one that watched will ever forget. Through 2011 and 2012, various aspects of his game improved bit by bit. His power grew, his patience grew, he learned how to use his speed to his advantage in the field. Before 2012 started, you could point out all of the disparate parts of his game that have improved since his debut in 2009, even if his numbers every year seemed to be static.

This all became a conversation point when he signed his extension this winter. He got basically the same contract as Justin Upton and Jay Bruce; two incredibly talented young players that were both younger than McCutchen when they inked their deals. Some people wondered if McCutchen was in the same class or if he was already plateauing at his 120-130 OPS+ level. It’s not that McCutchen wasn’t a good player from 2009-2011; he was an excellent one. But the contract the Pirates gave him this winter designated him as a franchise player, not just a building block but the cornerstone for a franchise that’s been foundationless for almost a generation; Pirate fans hoped he could be that player, but no young player is ever guaranteed to make the leap from good to great, from star to superstar, from building block to cornerstone.

Five months later, it seems impossible that anyone could’ve thought that. At the All-Star break, McCutchen is hitting .362/.414/.625. He has 18 home runs, and they’ve all come since May 8th. In fact, since his first homer on May 8th, he’s hitting .391/.439/.730. He’s leading the NL with both that .362 average and that .625 slugging percentage. His 193 total bases lead the league. In the last week or so, pitchers have gotten the idea that the way to get him out is to pitch him outside. Four of his last five home runs have been to right field or right-center and the fifth came to nearly straight away center field. How can a guy so small generate so much batspeed? He plays in a park that kills right-handed power and during a season in which Casey McGehee’s .252/.328/.408 line is just about average and it hasn’t stopped him one bit. His line looks more like a typo than anything else right now.

He’s been so good that even though I want to sit here and wonder about his walk rate (career low 8.2%) and his strikeout rate (career high 18.7%) and his insanely high BABIP (.407 vs. .324 career), I just can’t do it. Why would a guy that’s being pitched to and hitting the ball square like he is ever draw a walk? Shouldn’t a guy with his speed that hits a line drive a quarter of the time have an enormously high BABIP? Who am I or the laws of the universe to tell Andrew McCutchen what he can or can’t do?

The ultimate Andrew McCutchen game, for me, was last Tuesday’s comeback win against the Astros. Everyone remembers the Garrett Jones homer and the Drew Sutton walkoff and Sutton’s emotional interview after the game was over, but McCutchen was the glue at the seams that made everything else possible. Early in the game when the Astros had a 4-0 lead, it was McCutchen’s opposite field bomb that brought the Pirates back into the game and kept things manageable when the Astros tallied two more runs. In the seventh inning, with the Pirates having clawed to within one, he lead off with a bouncer to short. Instead of throwing his bat down and accepting a routine groundout on one of the few balls he hasn’t hit squarely in the last seven weeks, he bolted out of the box like someone possessed and beat Jed Lowrie’s throw for an infield single on a ball that by all rights should’ve been a pretty easy out. One batter later, Garrett Jones hammered his two-run homer to give the Pirates a lead and to set the stage for the ninth inning dramatics. It’s been like that all year; some nights McCutchen’s the guy that gets the big hit or hits, other nights he’s the guy doing the little things behind the scenes to set things up for his teammates, but any way you cut it, pretty much every night, he’s done something that’s helped the Pirates win.

I don’t normally care about the Home Run Derby. It’s three hours of meaningless pomp and bombast; it’s Chris Berman’s and ESPN’s and Bud Selig’s annual shrine to their own excesses. It’s everything that’s wrong about baseball in a number of ways; it glorifies a relatively small part of the game while dropping all of its beautiful subtlty and it’s interminable in such a way that it’s not even remotely interesting or exciting to me. Tonight, though, I’ll be watching, because tonight some of that ridiculous excess will be focused on McCutchen. The same Andrew McCutchen that I’ve watched since Day 1 of his career, the same Andrew McCutchen that has the Pirates in first place at the All-Star break, the same Andrew McCutchen that might finally start to repay all of the hopes and dreams that we Pirate fans have poured into the minor league system over the last 20 years. If anyone deserves this spotlight, it’s him. Up until today, Andrew McCutchen has been the best-kept secret in baseball; a guy really only appreciated by Pirate fans and hardcore baseball watchers. Starting tonight, we’re going to have to start sharing him with everyone. I’ve been waiting a long time for something like this to happen.

The Road to 17: Watchmaker

2009-03-12T17:05:00.001-04:00

We gaze continually at the world and it grows dull in our perceptions. Yet seen from the another’s vantage point, as if new, it may still take our breath away.
-Watchmen, Chapter IX

It is March 31st, 2008. In twelve seconds, a fly ball will drop harmlessly between Nate McLouth and Jason Bay, allowing the Atlanta Braves to complete a five-run rally to tie the Pittsburgh Pirates at 9 in the bottom of the ninth inning. I will type incomprehensibly into two live-blogs, seven instant message windows, an e-mail, and do it all why howling in pain on the phone with my father. That’s in twelve seconds. Until then, I am happily watching Matt Capps take the stretch position on the mound with the assumption that Capps will be able to close out the Pirates’ 9-7 lead. Ten seconds now. Nine.

It is September 8th, 1990. I am five years old at a tailgate in the Three Rivers Stadium Parking lot. It is my first Pirate game. My dad tells me that Doug Drabek is pitching. My dad’s friend asks me if I like pigeons because our seats are so high up in the ballpark. I chatter excitedly about the game to anyone that will listen. In the park I ask my dad about everything. He tells me about the Expos, the scoreboard, and every player I ask about. The Pirates win 6-1. My favorite player, Andy Van Slyke, hits a home run. Sid Bream also hits a home run.

It is two years, one month, and seven days later. I sit up in excitedly in bed and run down the hall to find my dad. I breathlessly ask him if the Pirates held on to the narrow lead they had in Game 7 of the NLCS against the Braves, the same Atlanta Braves I am watching in 2008, and clinched a spot in the World Series. The winning run was scored by the same Sid Bream I saw hit a home run. My dad sadly shakes his head. Tears well up in my eyes.

Matt Capps sets. Seven seconds.

It is August 13, 1991. The Pirates beat the Phillies 4-3. I attend the game with my dad as bunk beds are being installed in my bedroom. Doug Drabek again gets the win for the Pirates. In the car on the way home, we listen to the Cardinals/Mets broadcast coming out of St. Louis on a cloudless night. As we drive past a billboard for a Howard Johnson, Howard Johnson hits a home run off of Omar Olivares.

It is 2001. During breakfast, I read a headline in the Sharon Herald about Omar Olivares having the worst ERA in the National League for the Pirates.

Matt Capps kicks his leg up. Six seconds.

It is October 10, 1992. I am at Three Rivers again, watching the only playoff game of my life in person. The same Atlanta Braves lead the Pirates 2-1 in the NLCS. Braves’ fans taunt us in the parking lot before the game. John Smoltz leads the Braves to a 6-4 victory and leaving the ballpark, I feel certain that the Pirates will never leave me more brokenhearted than they do on this night.

It is July 28, 2004. I am 19 years old and at PNC Park with my brother. Oliver Perez pitches brilliantly, but the Pirates fail to score despite 11 hits in the first eight innings. John Smoltz records the save for the Braves in the ninth. I again leave the ballpark in disgust.

The ball leaves Matt Capps’ hand. Four seconds. It makes contact with Brian McCann’s bat. Still four seconds.

It is September 19, 1991. I am in the back seat of the family car as we drive through Chicago late at night. On the radio, the Pirates are playing the Cardinals. They enter the ninth inning down 1-0. After two consecutive singles, they chase the Cardinals starting pitcher, Omar Olivares. The Pirates tie the game and with two outs, little used utility man Curtis Wilkerson steps to the plate. As our car passes under an overpass, radio reception flickers out. As we emerge, we realize that Wilkerson has hit a walkoff grand slam to right field. Our family goes wild in the car.

It is May 28, 2004. I am sitting in right field at PNC Park with my dad. The Pirates are tied with the Chicago Cubs at 5 in the ninth inning when Chicago native and Pirate utility man Rob Mackowiak steps to the plate. He hits a walkoff grand slam to right field. I, my dad, and several thousand friends that we don’t know go wild in the park.

McCann skies a pop-up over the infield. The camera pans to the outfield. Three seconds. Two seconds. Jason Bay closes in on the ball. One second.

It is 1994. I am at the home opener as the Pirates misplay an Expos bunt into a home run.

It is 1995. My uncle and I are getting beer dumped on us during the home opener.

It is 2003. The home opener is snowed out.

It is 2007. A man heckles Jim Edmonds for wearing a coat under his jersey. It is 40 degrees out.

The ball impossibly drops between McLouth and Bay. I am 24 years old, sitting in an apartment in North Carolina. I am 5 years old, running around the Three Rivers parking lots. I am 19 years old at PNC Park. I stare in disbelief at the TV screen. I type furiously. I say I have never seen anything like this before. I am six as Omar Olivares imperceptibly intersects with my life twice. I am 16 and it happens much more noticeably. In 2008, I feel sick to my stomach. In 1991 and 2004, utility men hit walkoff grand slams.

In fifty-two minutes, the Pittsburgh Pirates will win the game and I will smile and breathe a sigh of relief.

Inspired, of course, by Chapter IV of Watchmen.

WHYGAVS has moved

2008-12-02T20:01:00.002-05:00

It's official. WHYGAVS now has a new official home. It's actually at WHYGAVS.com, which means that it's the same as the old home, but I'm off Blogger now, which means that this old link won't redirect. You'll have to subscribe to a new feed if that's how you read WHYGAVS, but beyond that things are going to be mostly the same.

Links

2008-12-01T23:19:00.004-05:00

For reasons that will become shortly apparent, I've been working on cleaning/updating the sidebar links. That means that I've got some new links to add to the sidebar, as well as some other things for your general perusal.

Cory Humes, Geeves, and Alan from Bucco Wire are all blogging again at MVN under the header Pirate Revolution.

There's also The Green Weenie and The 'Burgh Blues, two blogs I should've added some time ago.

Meanwhile, Dejan's series about the Pirates' presence in the Dominican is awesome. I'm sure most of you have been checking it out as it's been published, but if you haven't I can't recommend parts one, two, and three, Renee Gayo's list of the top 5 prospects yet to play in America, and everything else that DK's put on his blog on the subject enough. It's an awesome look in to the Bucs' international operation and how things have changed since Bob Nutting took the lack of Pirate presence in the region personally.

On a more depressing note, Wilbur Miller runs down the Pirates' drafts from 1999-2007 (via Bucs Dugout).

Jay Bell is eligible for the Hall of Fame this year. As the sponsor of his Baseball-Reference page, I feel like I have to mention this. His career highlights include a bajillion sac bunts in 1990 and 1991, a Gold Glove in 1993, scoring the winning run in the 2001 World Series, and hitting a grand slam in the exact inning some potentially clairevoyant lady said he would, winning her a million dollars.

The Pirates are talking to Mark Loretta

2008-12-01T23:19:00.001-05:00

There are a couple of possible reactions when reading that the Pirates are talking to Mark Loretta. The easy reaction is, "Well, so long as he's replacing Chris Gomez, I'm fine with that." That's true. Loretta's a useful utility infielder that can still handle a bat fairly well and can play just about every position in the infield in a short-term capacity. In fact, he's probably a better hitter than Gomez and he can't really be a worse fielder. That may make him more the successor to Doug Mientkiewicz, which is fine by me as well.

But then I started thinking. Aren't we trying to trade our shortstop away? Isn't "successor to Jack Wilson" a position that needs filled on the depth chart at the moment? I mean, I know Huntington's not looking at Loretta as a starting shortstop next year ... but what if he is?

This is how the offseason drives people crazy. You can go months and months without hearing any rumors, then as soon as rumors start show up, you project your highest hopes and biggest fears on to everything that you hear. After watching Huntington work for a year, I'm confident that he doesn't want Loretta for anything more than utility work, and yet, I still can't help but jump a little when I hear about the Pirates negotiation with someone like this. I suppose if Huntington keeps doing his job, I'll get over this in time.

How defense affects pitching

2008-12-01T14:15:00.000-05:00

Every year, David Pinto at Baseball Musings releases the Probabilistic Model of Range, his very good defensive metric which measures batted ball characteristics like velocity and location in order to determine how many outs teams should have made on those batted balls relative to how many outs were actually made. This year, he also gave the PMR for defense behind pitchers, which Beyond the Boxscore translated into runs and ERA.

If you doubt that defense can make much of a difference behind the pitchers, look at how the numbers ran for the Pirates. Ian Snell lost 0.63 of a run on his ERA, which would've brought his ugly 5.42 down to 4.79. Tom Gorzelanny adjustment is almost as big, while Zach Duke only lost about a tenth of a run to defense, according to this metric. Of course, looking at our pitchers' adjusted ERAs is still depressing because it really drives home just how poor our pitching staff was this year.

The other interesting thing that leaps off the page at me is that Snell and Gorzelanny, the two pitchers that induce the fewest ground balls, were hurt most by the Pirates defense while Duke, who's GB% is higher than either of the first two, saw little effect. Paul Maholm, who gets the most groundballs of the four by a pretty good amount, was actually helped by the defense this year. I guess intuitively that makes sense as the infield, save Freddy Sanchez, was actually kind of good defensively last year. On the other hand, we know there were issues in the outfield with just about everyone that played out there (we've discussed McLouth a lot, Nady consistently ranks as one of the worst right fielders by PMR, and Jason Bay doesn't usually score well either ... if you take the time to look through Pinto's data you'll see the Pirates ranked below average in all three outfield slots).

As with any defensive metrics, you can make of this what you will. Still, I think the disparity in the groundball and flyball pitchers is worth noting, if only for future reference when trying to figure out what the team is trying to do.

The Road to 17: 1999

2008-11-30T22:53:00.001-05:00

The Road to 17 is a longer-form look at each losing season that the Pirates have had since their last playoff appearance in 1992. The object is not to wallow in the misery of the Pirates, but instead remember just what it is that makes us Pirate fans in the first place. Every team has their great moments, the Pirates' are just fewer and further between. Today, we hit the seventh stop on the Road to 17: 1999.

Perhaps the analogy I'm about to use is a bit of a stretch, but it's predominate in my mind at the moment so I'm sticking with it. On Sunday, I left Hermitage at 8 AM for my 8-hour trip back to North Carolina hoping to get back in time for most of the Steeler game. Thanks to a wonderful combination of a huge travel day and horrendously crappy weather, my 8-hour trip took almost 11 hours. The only positive thing was that the dense cloud cover from Washington, PA onwards somehow carried the 1170 signal with Bill, Tunch, and Wolf out of Wheeling (one that my dad says he's never picked up south of Morgantown on I-79) all the way to my apartment. It was one bright light in an disappointing day.

Similarly, the 1999 Pirates had Brian Giles. Except for Giles, most of '99 was disappointing. We can get to the other parts later, but let's start with Giles. After Cam Bonifay acquired him in exchange for only Ricardo Rincon in the winter of 1998, he lead the NL in OPS with an insane .315/.418/.614 line that saw 39 homers and 115 RBIs from a lineup that batted Al Martin (.337 OBP) and an empty hole in front of him after Gene Lamont moved Jason Kendall out of the leadoff slot on May 1st. In 1999 (and later in 2000, 2001, and 2002), Giles was just about as good at the plate as anyone in Pirate history. That seems insane to say, but it's true. Had Giles spent his prime somewhere other than the Indians' bench and with the Pirates, he'd be remembered as one of the best players of the late 90s and early 00s. Instead, he's an All-Star and nothing else. It's a shame, but I guess it's how it works out sometimes.

Beyond Giles, though, 1999 will be defined by Jason Kendall's horrific ankle injury. The Pirates came into the 4th of July at a game above .500 and certainly in the thick of the NL Central and wild card race. Then, in the sixth inning of a game in which the Pirates trailed 3-0 (after two straight losses to drop them near the .500 mark), Kendall tried to make something happen with a leadoff bunt for a hit. As he raced down the first base line, he stretched out, hit the base funny with his right foot, and completely dislocated his ankle. The bone stuck out of his leg, his foot dangled off at a precarious angle, and his season ended. The Pirates lost the game, briefly went above .500 again at 42-41, and then fell off to a 79-win season, even though they had their best Pythagorean record of the 17 year losing streak (775 runs scored, 782 allowed).

The Kendall trade also went on to some disastrous reprecussions. After Keith Osik failed to fill Kendall's shoes, the Bucs traded Jose Guillen to Tampa for Joe Oliver and Humberto Cota. The Pirates mishandled Guillen in just about every way possible, from the way they called him up early, to keeping him up when he struggled, to giving up on him at the age of 23. They could have mishandled him worse, but the only way they could've done that was if his name was Aramis Ramirez. At least the Pirates had the sense to keep him in the minors for most of 1999 after his disastrous debut as a 19-year old in 1998.

Presenting Giles as the only redeeming factor of 1999 is a bit misleading. Giles was the difference between the awful 1998 offense and the respectable 1999 one. He was the reason that 1999 was disappointing and not disastrous. There was, however, another player that Cam Bonifay rescued from the scrap heap that was a key component to the '99: Todd Ritchie. He went from Twins castoff to 15-9/3.49/1.29 for the Pirates, leading what was again a very good Pirate pitching staff (except for Pete Schourek ... he was awful).

Good turns from Ritchie, rookie Kris Benson, and Jason Schmidt should have portended a good Pirate pitching staff for years to come. Instead, they were the last Pirate pitching staff to finish with an ERA+ of over 100 (though they did finish right at 100 in 2002 and 2004). A lot of this can probably be blamed on the decline of Francisco Cordova, who fell off in 1999 after 220+ innings in 1998 and was never the same again. He probably wasn't 27 years old like he said he was at the time, but losing him from the rotation was something the team never really seemed to recover from.

There are a million other mini-plots from this year we could talk about. There's the mystery of Warren Morris, who was a solid .288/.360/.427 rookie second baseman in 1999, then never hit ever again. There was the continuing awfulness of Brant Brown and Mike Benjamin, who spent most of the year in the starting lineup despite being awful. We also had Mike Williams' first disastrous stint as closer but a solid bullpen because of Scott Sauerbeck, Brad Clontz, Marc Wilkins, and Jeff Wallace -- a bunch of guys that mostly never came close to matching their 1999 seasons.

When you view the Pirates' 16-year journey as a full story, 1999 was the year that things finally hit the fan for good. In reality, the Kendall injury followed by the Guillen trade was what officially transitioned things from attempting to build a decent team for the future to the "Drive for 75." That's not to say that Bonifay didn't misstep here or there before the Guillen trade, but at the midway point of the '99 season the Pirates had guys like Kendall, Giles, and Jason Schmidt with young guys like Guillen, Ramirez (again, in AAA in '99), and Kris Benson. When they ditched Guillen for a poor-hitting veteran catcher with a good defensive reputation and a middling catching prospect like Cota was an attempt to finish .500 in a year when .500 shouldn't have been the goal. Leading up to'99, Bonifay was making his name by pulling guys like Ritchie and Turner Ward and Kevin Polcovich off the scrap heap and turning in reasonable production from them. After '99 he made some good moves, but mostly signed terrible players like Pat Meares and Derek Bell to terrible, crippling contracts. The focus of the front office shifted from trying to slowly rebuild to trying to put a superficially decent squad on the field in 2001 when PNC Park opened.

I've been in the car for too long today. Thinking about 1999 more than this is a bad idea.

Post-turkey links

2008-11-28T11:11:00.000-05:00

I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving. I am officially back in Western PA for a few days, goggling my eyes at the snow. We don't have that in the south.

With the Winter Meetings looming, Dejan's back at the PG. His first story updates the offseason to this point, mentioning that Grabow, Paulino, Sanchez, Wilson, and LaRoche are available while Huntington is looking for any and all pitching.

Rinku and Dinesh posted about signing with the Pirates. They're pretty excited. They looked up Pittsburgh on the internet.

Charlie had a good post about the Rule 5 draft earlier this week, based on this list of players made up by the USS Mariner.

Finally, Pittsburgh Sports and Mini Ponies found a video of Rinku Singh's motion, and there's also one on YouTube of Dinesh Patel throwing as well. They're embedded below, but if you're hoping to see something crazy, you won't find it. They look pretty traditional.

Links

2008-11-26T08:00:00.000-05:00

Who's the Rockies' new bench coach? Well, if you look at the guy in the uniform you'll probably recognize him as former Pirate manager Jim Tracy. (via Bucs Dugout)

Keeping the Jack Wilson rumors rolling, the Dodgers are interested in Jack but not his current price.

The plans for the Marlins new stadium are moved back a year. Does anyone think this stadium is actually happening?

A weird effect of the economic downturn is that many of the companies the government's been bailing out are big advertisers of sports. First there was AIG, the insurance giant that advertises on Manchester United's kits. Now, there's Citi Field, which NY officials want re-named "Citi/Taxpayer Field." Because THAT makes everything better.

Stunningly, we can no longer joke that the Pirates will have a winning season when Axl finally releases Chinese Democracy (if you read one review of Chinese Democracy, read that one). This is one long losing streak we're mired in, folks.

A blast from the past

2008-11-25T12:43:00.000-05:00

Google recently added the Life Magazine photo archive to its image database. I was browsing through recently and was absolutely blown away by this image of Bill Mazeroski turning a double play. The beauty of baseball is in the little details like this.

More on Patel and Singh

2008-11-25T00:47:00.000-05:00

First things first, Patel and Singh officially signed. I thought it was important to note that news from a site that didn't need a babel fish to figure out what was going on.

Secondly, I mentioned their blog second-hand in my earlier post and I know that a lot of you checked it out through the Walkoff Walk post I quoted, but if you haven't read it yet you really have to do it. There are a million things I could quote, but to give you an idea of what these guys have been thrust into, read this post:

Tonight we were celebrating the Halloween Holiday here in America. we are not sure what the holiday comes from, but kids dress up in all kinds of crazy outfits and then go to houses asking for sweets. if people in the house no give the sweets then the kids put toilet paper in their trees.

I hope no one took the to a college Halloween party. Their heads might've exploded with all the naughty nurses and Playboy bunnies around.

I can't even begin to describe how weirdly surreal and awesome this whole thing has been. The bottom line here is that the Pirates saw some high upside 19 year old arms and signed them. That's good, whether these guys work out or not. But they won a reality TV contest. In India. And they have a blog. Can this even possibly be real? I mean, I know it is, it's just really hard to wrap your brain around.

One thing to remember is that even if Singh and Patel are awful, Neal Huntington just managed to make the Pirates the favorite team of a billion people, though it is unfortunate that it's in the one region of the world where piracy is actually a problem in the 21st century (as an aside ... does the rise in prominence of Somali Pirates mean that global warming is over?). If nothing else comes from this venture or the signing of Mpho Ngoepe, Huntington has increased the Pirates' presence in the world more in a year's work than Littlefield did in seven. Maybe nothing will come of it, but there's only one way to find out.

Pirates Sign Indian pitchers

2008-11-24T15:03:00.003-05:00

Indian as in, "from India." I just got an e-mail from Rob Ircane at Walkoff Walk informing me that the Pirates have just signed Rinku Singh and Dinesh Patel, two Indian pitching prospects, to minor league contracts. I can't really put the weirdness of this news into proper context, but here's what Rob wrote at his blog:

As you know, Rinku and Dinesh won the Million Dollar Arm contest on Indian TV by displaying awesome arm strength and a desire to become baseball players. They've spent the last nine months in California learning the rules of the game and, most importantly, how to throw fastballs and brushback pitches. Their blog has been a constant source of amusement to us, and their recent audition for major league scouts even caught the attention of mainstream media publications.

Lest you think this is a joke, NPB Tracker has a post about it and I'm fairly certain that the truth is contained somewhere in this article. I present, for your amusement, the Google Translate version of the Japanese article:

First! Pirates pitcher who signed a contract with India
Daily Sports - 2008/11/24 10:39

Major League Baseball, Pittsburgh Pirates and the Indians pitcher who signed a minor league contract to 22, sources said.
According to sources, the two universities in India to attend a 19-year-old physical education. The right arm is 189 centimeters tall, thin links with the fastest fastball in the second half of the 80 miles (140 km), the tall left-hander's 180 centimeters DINESHU MAX92 PEITERU miles (148 kilometers) to throw a sharp slider. In the audition shows both the country's more than 30,000 applicants were selected from a "phenomenon", he said.
However, India has a thriving baseball than cricket country. Both of them close to the baseball novice, for a tryout in November, America in May. Arizona and a former major leaguer Tom House's leadership after a major 30 team earlier this month, the 11th of 19 teams showed off a pitch in front of scouts. Meanwhile, the Pacific have a strong interest in the military.
This season, including the United States in the majors, the players played in 17 countries, the official said, "is a minor player, but not Indian nationals. This agreement is an historic achievement," he said. Once the two, returned to India. MAINAKYANPU from April 01 to participate in the plan.

Add these two to Mpho Ngoepe and I guess we can really believe Neal Huntington when he says he's going to be looking everywhere for talent.

The Road to 17: 1998

2008-11-24T14:00:00.000-05:00

Tony Womack, 2B - .686
Adrian Brown, CF - .765
Jason Kendall, C - .874
Kevin Young, 1B - .841
Jose Guillen, RF - .709
Turner Ward, CF - .771
Freddy Garcia, 3B - .941 (though please note the career on-base percentage of .283 in 439 PAs)
Abraham Nunez, SS - .322
Sean Lawrence, P

Now, that list brings back a lot of memories and I'll get to them in a second. One memory it doesn't bring back? Sean Lawerence. Who the hell is Sean Lawrence?

Who remembers the Jose Guillen saga in 1998? After his promising breakout in '97, he got stuck in the Domincan Republic in the spring of '98 and missed a bunch of Spring Training. If I recall correctly, the situation had something to do with visa problems relating to his marriage over the winter. I could be making that up. More accurately, he could've been making that up. In the end, he ended 1998 with an OPS of .712, identical to his number in 1997. It was alarming, though, to see a guy so young (he was 22 at the time) make absolutely no progress at all during the year. The problem was, of course, that the Pirates had zipped him directly from A-ball the year before and he wasn't ready physically or mentally for the Majors. Unfortunately, as we'll see when we get to 1999, the Pirates didn't really learn from this lesson.

All told, the Pirates' team OPS+ in 1998 was 84. To give those of you who might not be as sabermetrically inclined an idea of what an OPS+ of 84 is like, Ronny Paulino's OPS+ in his massively disappointing 2007 was 83. The way Ronny Paulino performed relative to the National League in 2007 is how the Pirates performed relative the National League in 1998. It was seriously that bad.

I do have one other 1998 story to share that's only tangentially related to the Pirates. Despite growing up smack in the middle of Pittsburgh and Cleveland (Hellooooooooooo, Hermitage! I'll be home on Wednesday!) , I didn't make my first voyage to the Jake until late in the 1998 season. I thought I was at one of the Orioles/Indians games from August 13th-16th, but my brother remembers being at a Rangers/Indians game and after talking to him, the schedule shows that the Rangers were in town right before the O's and Esteban Loaiza started one of the games for the Rangers. This seems to ring a bell, so maybe he's right (this isn't as crazy as it sounds -- an acquaintance of the family gave us a bunch of tickets to a couple Indians games that week and I'm almost positive my uncle, grandpa, and a couple cousins were at the 12-inning Indians/Orioles game on Thursday of that week ... please don't ask why I remember that).

Anyways, this story is getting long and it's meandering away from the point. The point is that we saw a young outfielder that night play for the Indians named Brian Giles. The Pirates traded for him that winter, and I remember digging up my scorecard from that game and confirming that he did play. I was really excited by that trade, even though my dad didn't remember being impressed by Giles, because we were trading for a guy with decent numbers that just didn't have a place to play in Cleveland.

Somehow, even after the debacle of 1998, I was excited about baseball for 1999.

Fire up the Jack Wilson rumor mill again

2008-11-24T08:00:00.000-05:00

Yes! It's finally time to talk about the Hot Stove! The Pirates aren't likely to do a whole lot of interest this winter, but they're probably going to do something and the past few weeks have been brutal in their absence of Pirate news. On Sunday, the Detroit Free Press reported on the long-running "Jack Wilson to the Tigers" saga, which is unsurprisingly being revisited again this winter. There's not a lot of new stuff in that story, but I found this quote from Neal Huntington interesting:

At the general managers' meetings this month, Pirates GM Neal Huntington said, "If we get the right return, then we'd move Jack.
In a perfect world, you trade Jack for a young shortstop, but there may not be that scenario out there. We have to accumulate talent right now."

How often do you hear a GM talk about a player by name like that when trades are being discussed? I'll be shocked if Jack's back in Pittsburgh next year.

Right now the rumor that's been floating around the Wilson-t0-Detroit rumor is that the Tigers are looking to add a catcher this winter. Ken Rosenthal shot down a three-team rumor that involved the Pirates, Tigers, and Marlins and had Matt Treanor going to Detroit. My gut reaction is to say that the because the Pirates have good catching depth they would be stupid to let at third team get involved here, but the Tigers don't have much to offer beyond Rick Porcello, who they certainly won't be giving up for Jack Wilson and Ronny Paulino, so maybe the Pirates are looking to shop someone else to Florida in order to pull a better return here. I doubt anything happens before the winter meetings, but it's always something to keep an eye on.

Let's talk about John Russell

2008-11-23T22:37:00.001-05:00

About a week ago, ACTA Sports and the Hardball Times were kind enough to send me a preview of this year's Hardball Times Annual. The topic of the preview that they sent me was an interesting one-- quantifying managerial performances. If making a good fielding metric is hard, finding a way to quantify managerial performance has to be nearly impossible. They designed a "Manager of the Year Tool" that compares the team's expected record based on preseason projections (revised for playing time, trades, injuries, etc.) with their actual Pythagorean record and their actual linear weight runs, then compares the team's actual record with their Pythagorean record, then considers the number of wins generated by stolen bases. As a result, Cecil Cooper and Mike Scioscia come up as the best managers in their respective leagues, with John McLaren/Jim Riggleman and Bud Black coming up as the worst. It's not a perfect tool as it relies fairly heavily on projections, which aren't perfect, but it does put some thought into the process of picking the best manager, which is likely more than can be said for the writers who picked Joe Maddon and Lou Piniella without really thinking.

Anyways, I don't want to bore you with the sabermetrics of managing for too long, but I thought it was a good springboard to talk about John Russell, who scored a -3.9 on the THT's scale, good for fourth worst in the National League. Is that really fair? Was Russell terrible last year? Certainly, he had his maddening traits. He loved bunting in all situations, leading to the Jose Bautista debacle during the home opener. He often stuck with his young starters an inning too long, leading to some frustrating meltdowns. But does that make Russell a bad manager?

Take, for example, Joe Maddon. By all accounts, Maddon's done a wonderful job in Tampa with the Rays. He's a bit quirky, he does a nice job matching traditional and unconventional, and most importantly, he understands his team's strengths and weaknesses and managers accordingly. But last year, when the Rays pitching was disastrous and the hitting didn't come around quite as quickly as they needed it to, Maddon would have been the worst rated manager in the AL using the metric that THT came up with.

The difference, I think, is that the manager of a team that's full of young players has to manager differently then the manager of a team that's in contention. When he leaves a pitcher with a reasonable pitch count out for the seventh inning and he melts down and the Pirates lose, then justifies it with, "Our young pitchers have to learn how to pitch deep in the game," isn't that statement kind of true? I mean, what's the difference between 66 and 67 wins for the Pirates? Wouldn't their bullpen blow half those games anyways?

What I liked the most about Russell this year was his demeanor. I mean, yeah, I made fun of his monotone a lot, but an even keel is probably the best way to handle a team like the Pirates. With the caveat that in NC, I see a lot less post-game stuff then most people do, it seemed like he kept the respect of the players a lot better than Jim Tracy did. Maybe it seemed like the Pirates quit down the stretch, but I think that had a lot more to do with the circumstances surrounding the trades than Russell himself.

I think that two years ago, Russell would've driven me insane. This is mostly because I saw Nate McLouth square around to bunt several times this year and that's really something that should give smart baseball fans an aneurysm. But Russell is far from the only manager in the league that would have a "fast" player like McLouth bunt from time to time. That's how baseball is coached. It's wrong, but it's not going to change anytime soon. After years of watching baseball, it really seems to me like the most important thing a manager does is manage egos (I can't take credit for that alone, it's mostly what my dad, who coached Little League forever, thinks). Is it more important to a team that Nate McLouth lays down a few bunts or that Andy LaRoche gets comfortable in the batters box?

JR is far from a perfect manager, but I guess the point is that most managers are far from perfect. Kosuke Fukudome played most of the second half after he tanked in Chicago. Joe Torre was starting Juan Pierre, even in the playoffs. Joe Maddon and Mike Scioscia tend towards small-ball far more than their lineups call for. Russell's quiet intensity seems pretty well suited to a team like the Pirates. We'll probably learn a lot more about him this year then we did last year. Last year, he spent 2/3rds of the season with guys playing their hardest to get out of Pittsburgh, then the last 1/3 with a combination of young guys who were over their heads and old guys were pissed they weren't traded too. This year, he should have a much better opportunity to leave his mark on the team. And so long as that means he doesn't like Doug Mientkiewicz teach everyone how to run the bases like a moron again, I'm not sure that's necessarily a bad thing.

Alex Ramirez is MVP in Japan

2008-11-22T17:27:00.000-05:00

It's amazing how one headline can bring back a rush of Pirate memories. Over at Bucs Dugout, I saw this post about former Pirate Alex Ramirez winning MVP of the Japanese league with a monster year for the Yomiuri Giants.

Over the winter in 1999, the Pirate signed Wil Cordero to a contract. He came to the Pirates and mostly killed the ball, though his inability to field and off-field issues predicated a trade back to where he came from: Cleveland. He went to Cleveland and Alex Ramirez and Enrique Wilson came to Pittsburgh. Ramirez had a lot of pop, but not a lot of patience and the Pirates seemed to quickly get frustrated with him. After part of just one year and 123 plate appearances, the Bucs shipped him off to Japan. I distinctly recall talking about the move as a "current event" in our 10th grade goverment class, as our teacher was so lazy that we were allowed to give three current events a day, each worth a bonus point, so that she could just give everyone a 100% in the class (hooray, Kennedy Catholic!). My recounting of the transaction was something like this:

The Pirates sold Alex Ramirez to Japan today, probably because Cam Bonifay is so stupid that he forgot that 10 million yen isn't actually a lot of money.

Of course, no one knows what would've happened with Ramirez had he stayed in Pittsburgh. The history of international baseball is filled with guys like Tuffy Rhodes who raked in Japan but were average at best in Pittsburgh. Still, Ramirez has more than 250 homers and over 800 career RBIs with the Giants and Yakult swallows. It somehow seems appropriate that the Pirates' most significant transaction with Japan in the past decade hasn't been to acquire talent, but rather to give talent away.

The John Van Benschoten era ends

2008-11-21T15:49:00.000-05:00

There have been a lot of casualties of the Pittsburgh Pirate organization over the past sixteen years. Countless fans have fallen off the bandwagon and there's been more than a fair share of players who have had their playing careers ruined by the Pittsburgh Pirates. John Van Benschoten can probably write his name down on the latter list, as he's filed for minor league free agency and informed general manager Neal Huntington that he won't be returning to the Pirates' organization next year.

Pirate fans give JVB a lot of crap and certainly, he's never performed well with the Pirates (save his monstrous home run against Arizona in one of his first few starts back in 2004. But his arm problems were never his fault, nor was the way his transition from first baseman/closer to starter was handled/botched. Watching him was like having teeth pulled, but it was never actually his fault. If he ever finds the strike zone, he might be a useful reliever some day. I'm not really counting on it, but I won't be mad at him if he ever pulls himself together.

Roster additions

2008-11-20T23:38:00.000-05:00

With the winter meetings and the Rule 5 draft approaching, the Pirates had five spaces open on the 40-man roster to fill with players that need to be protected. They filled all five slots today, putting Neil Walker, Jose Tabata, Jeff Sues, Steve Lerud, and Ronald Uviedo. Jennifer Langosch makes it sound like these five are the last five additions before the draft. I don't know if that's the case (there's still some dead weight on the 40-man, if you ask me, though I don't know when the roster has to be set for the December 11th draft), but if it is, it means that Kyle Bloom and Jamie Romak will be exposed to the Rule 5 this year. It's a calculated risk, but given how raw Bloom and Romak are and how unlikely they are to be big-time producers in the big leagues, it's probably not a bad one.

The most interesting name on the list of people added to the roster is probably Lerud. He hasn't really hit well at any level and he's only got 47 AA at-bats after his age 23 season. Robinzon Diaz and Raul Chavez were both already on the roster to go with Doumit and Paulino. I'd guess that the Pirates will be shopping Paulino this winter given his nice AAA numbers, his nice run in winter ball, and the fact that the new management seems to want nothing to do with him. Still, I find it hard to believe there was a risk that Lerud was going to be picked in the draft, while I feel like Bloom might be.

Links

2008-11-20T12:23:00.000-05:00

This interview with Nyjer Morgan has me laughing out loud, though I'm not sure that's the intended effect.

Don Wakamatsu was hired by the Mariners to be their next manager. He's the first Asian-American manager in big league history.

I fail to understand why a good player on a non-playoff team can't be valuable. Without Pujols, the Cardinals win like 75 games this year. You can argue that the Phillies wouldn't have made the playoffs without Ryan Howard, but they also wouldn't have made it without Jimmy Rollins, Chase Utley, Pat Burrell, Shane Victorino, or Jayson Werth, who were either more or comparably valuable to Howard. Picking the guys with the most RBIs on a playoff team isn't the best way to decide who's the most valuable; it's lazy. All hail Albert Pujols, the best hitter on the face of the planet and therefore, the most valuable.