With Kevin Hart's struggles this spring resulting in the plan to have Dan McCutchen start today's now-rained out Grapefruit League game against the Rays (McCutchen will now start a minor league game tomorrow as well to keep the rest of the rotation on schedule) and Kevin Hart starting tomorrow's Triple-A game at Pirate City, it's pretty obvious that the team is starting to hedge their bets with their earlier statements about Hart more or less having the fifth starter's job locked up. That's logical; spring training stats don't mean much, but when a guy walks 13 hitters in 4 2/3 innings it's damn near impossible to ignore it.

Still, the team obviously has a very high opinion of Hart and they think that his struggles are based on inconsistencies in his delivery and a difficulty carrying his bullpen work to the mound. This means that despite what most fans seem to think, this competition is not at all over. A good start by Hart tomorrow would likely earn him another chance in a Grapefruit League game and a good start there would probably put him back into the lead for the final rotation spot. Frankly, it probably doesn't matter at all what McCutchen does in his start today with the Pirates. The competition is completely dependent on Hart. The Pirates don't care what Hart's final line is in Florida, only that he proves he can throw strikes consistently.

This is obviously far from a sure thing, but we know that Joe Kerrigan has already been doing a lot of work with Hart. Using Joe Lefkowitz's PitchFX tool, I compared Hart's release points with the Cubs at Wrigley Field to his release points with the Pirates at PNC Park (the usual sidebar exists here: each park's PitchFX cams are positioned slightly differently and I didn't want to compare across parks, which is why I only used his home parks). The sample size for the Pirates is pretty small and since Wrigley and PNC are obviously different parks the comparison shouldn't be viewed as 1:1, but it certainly looks like the Pirate cluster is tighter than the Cub cluster. That matches pretty well with the idea that Kerrigan is trying to make Hart's delivery more consistent.

There are, of course, the questions of why the team so obviously prefers Hart and I guess some won't be satisfied with the answer that his stuff is better and thus his ceiling's higher, but it really is true. I know I've pointed to this FanGraphs post about Hart before, but I'll do it again for the sake of this discussion. Stripping away balls and strikes, Hart gets more hitters to chase pitches out of the strike zone (using FanGraphs and said post by RJ Anderson as a guide, he gets hitters to swing at 28.8% of pitches out of the zone for his career vs. 23.1% for McCutchen in his short stint with the Pirates last year) and to swing and miss at those pitches (hitter's make contact with 58% of those out-of-zone pitches that they offer with against Hart, vs. 63.9% against McCutchen), which boiled down to plain language means that he's harder to hit than McCutchen is (granted, in a much smaller sample size for McCutchen, but since we're already working with the hypothesis that Hart has better stuff than McCutchen we'll let this numbers be a loose confirmation of that).

If the Pirates were actually competing for something this year, they might be more inclined to force Hart to prove he's found his command in Triple-A while using McCutchen to limit damages in the fifth starter spot, but what they're really interested in is finding guys who can be more than rotation-filler for a longer period of time. Since Hart's stuff is good (probably better than both lefties in the rotation and maybe better than Ohlendorf as well, depending on who you think the real Ross Ohlendorf is) I think they're probably inclined to give him a decent-length look in Pittsburgh this year if he shows them even a flash of something before spring training ends.

I know its semi-old news that Pedro Alvarez was cut by now, but it's still pretty significant and worth mentioning, I think. I am happy that they waited until I left town to do it, because Alvarez was obviously one of the players I really wanted to see during my time in Florida and he got at-bats in every game I was at.

Spring training results obviously don't mean a whole lot, but the Alvarez I saw will definitely benefit from some more minor league seasoning. He was actually pretty passive early in a lot of at-bats, which often resulted in him falling behind in the count. He did rip a couple of balls and when he gets a hold of one the ball rockets off of his bat, but that only happened once or twice in the four games that I saw. I'm not at all trying to say he won't live up to the hype; he has a great swing and honestly didn't take too many ugly swings that I saw (which I was worried about given his strikeout total last year). I just think that he's not quite as ready as Pirate fans want him to be at this point in time.

Charlie's posted a couple times now about the dangers of rushing Alvarez to the Majors, especially given what's happened to Alex Gordon in KC, and I think it's an apt comparison. There's just no reason to rush Alvarez right now. He'll still be in Pittsburgh plenty soon.

When we laid out our travel plans for Florida this week, the one thing that I had wished we had more time for was a real trip to explore Pirate City. Staying in Fort Myers (about ninety minutes from Bradenton) with my brother in Immokalee and four games already on the schedule, there just wasn't time for more than the drive-by that we made after Monday's game to wander around the facility, snap some quick pictures, and take off.

Honestly, that was fine by me. Just seeing these parks and getting to be in Bradenton and on the Gulf Coast after years of hearing about it has been an awesome experience. I had already made a mental note to make sure we blocked off a day to check out minor league games at Pirate City if we come back in the near future, but there's really only so much that can be done in a week. Then, before we left our hotel for McKechnie yesterday, I did a quick e-mail scan and saw a message from Trevor Gooby, the Pirates' Senior Director of Florida Operations, saying that he'd seen (via the PBC Blog) that I was at Pirate City and wondering if I was interested in coming back for a full tour.

Um, yes, please.

I really didn't know what to expect; most of the interior of Pirate City seemed awfully off-limits when we were there earlier in the week and so I sort of expected an extended version of the impromptu and unauthorized tour we'd given ourselves.  Regardless, I wasn't about to turn this sort of thing down and so me and the entire WHYGAVS traveling entourage (or, more accurately, my brother, dad, mom, uncle, and aunt) headed back to Pirate City (if you've never been down here, it's maybe a ten minute drive at the worst) after Wednesday's game at McKechnie to meet with Trevor, who was simultaneously making the drive back.

After everyone arrived, we were lead into the cafeteria where a large group of minor leaguers were eating. (Trevor told me I could take pictures of whatever I wanted to use here on the blog, but I really didn't want to take pictures of minor leaguers eating, killing time in the rec room, etc. Being there makes it abundantly clear that these guys are almost all college-age kids just living their lives and it seemed unfair to try and use that to my advantage for the blog) The caf was lined wall-to-wall with every Sports Illustrated cover in the team's history (this will be a theme later), but otherwise looked like a nice, upscale college dining hall. You know, one that makes healthy meals catered to different ethnic backgrounds and varies them up on a regular schedule so that the people that eat there regularly don't feel like they're always eating the same thing.

After the cafeteria, we moved on to the rec room, which looks like a typical lounge you'd find in a student union building, only way nicer (flat screen TVs with PS3s, several pool tables and ping-pong tables, etc.). Again, I didn't want to take pictures since players were in there (Trent Stevenson and Tim Alderson were playing what looked like a particularly involved and very, very tall game of ping-pong), but below there's a picture of the second floor room, which includes a nice little theater set-up.

I've always wondered how aware minor leaguers are of what the parent team is doing, and Trevor told me that all of the TVs have the MLB Extra Inning package and are required to be turned to the Pirates whenever they're on. This is ostensibly because some of the foreign players have no idea what PNC Park or Pittsburgh or the Pirates are like, but I secretly think that it's probably a bit of motivation as well since the guys that must grace those TVs fairly often rarely give the impression that winning a job in Pittsburgh is impossible.

Maybe the coolest feature of the downstairs rec room is that the giant mural of the 1979 team that used to be in Froggy's in the Strip has a prominent place on the wall. In fact, as we moved in to the hallways that contain the dorms, it became apparent that Pirate history is everywhere. Each wing of dorms is lined with amazing classic Pirate pictures, like the hallway pictured below, and as far as I can tell, there's not one picture repeated.

In fact, there are 80 dorm rooms and 76 of them are dedicated to the 76 All-Stars in Pirate history, with a picture of the All-Star in the room and a plaque mentioning it. I got a picture of an unused dorm (without beds, but you can use your imagination to fill in the room with two beds with the knowledge that behind me is a two-sink bathroom with a shower -- it's much nicer and bigger than my old dorm in Assumption Hall on the bluff at Duquesne). You can see the two pictures of an old Pirate in it, though I'm ashamed to admit that I don't know who it was (I didn't check the plaque as I didn't realize each room was dedicated to a former All-Star until later).

Maybe the coolest tribute in the dorm wing of the facility is room 231, which has been preserved (if it were properly numbered it would be room 228) in tribute to Roberto Clemente, who stayed at Pirate City every spring and always stayed in room 231.

After seeing the two floors of player living space, we headed up to the third floor and got to see the conference room that doubles as the team's war room during the draft.

After that, we walked down the hall, Trevor knocked on a door, slid into an office, and I heard him say, "Hey, Neal, can you come out here for a second?"

And so Neal Huntington came out into the hallway to meet the blogger and his family.  He was incredibly nice about being interrupted during his postgame work, and since this was a surprise visit I managed to repress the urge to ask him the endless stream of questions that I could've come up with (mostly centered on Kevin Hart after his ugly performance that day, probably) that would have set blogger-GM relationships back to about 1999. He said a lot of the things he says in public about the team and made some small-talk with us for about ten minutes before shaking our hands and going back to work.

From there, we went back downstairs and saw the equipment room that's more or less the supply room for all of the minor league affiliates. All of the balls and bats that go to places like Indianapolis and Altoona come through Pirate City first. With only a couple weeks until minor league season starts, the room was pure chaos. Well, pure blissful chaos if you're the sort of person that loves the smell of a room full of baseball bats and balls and gloves (there are a few more rows just like this one that extend a ways back; the room is much larger than it appears in this picture).

Because there were still players in the locker rooms, our tour ended there, but on the whole, there are a few things that really stood out. The first is that running a minor league organization is an incredibly complex system with moving parts beyond what I could've possibly imagined before Wednesday. During spring training, every Pirate minor leaguer is housed at Pirate City for the entirety of camp and though the guys ticketed for the upper levels clear out when their season begins, all the extended spring training guys as well as the players ticketed for the Rookie League Bradenton Pirates stay in the dorms at Pirate City for the duration (the Marauders may as well, though I was told that decision hadn't been made yet). Since most of these guys consist of the youngest players in the system (Dominicans coming to America for the first time and high school draftees), the Pirate City not only houses them, but has to teach them how to live on their own. They have to teach some of these guys how to open bank accounts, how to eat right, etc.

In a lot of regards, it's seems to me that it's probably more accurate to think of Pirate City as "Pirate University" or "Pirate Academy." The players that live there are spending most of their time on the baseball field and when they're not on the field, the Pirates are doing their best to control what they do while they're in Pirate City and to know what to do with themselves once they leave the place. Instead of going away to college to figure out how to survive, these guys are going to Pirate City.

Consider this; right now in Bradenton, Pirate City is housing something along the lines of 150 minor league players, out of which maybe 20 or 30 will end up in the big leagues. They all know this, and on top of that they all know exactly where they stand on that list of 150 and who's directly ahead of them and thus in their way to being one of those lucky 20 or 30. And these are all competitive kids, the best of the best where they come from, and now they're all under one roof and while many of them become friends, they're still all their own competition. And they're mostly under the age of 22 or so, and so some of them are homesick, frustrated, scared, or any of the other things that come from going away to college only with the added pressure of being a professional baseball player. Keeping this somehow sorted out and organized is a daunting task.

I've obviously only ever seen one complex like this in my life, so I can't say exactly what the Pirates are doing compared to everyone else (it's my understanding that the Tigers are the only other team that keeps all their players on-site in college dorm-fashion like the Pirates, but beyond that I don't know much else), but having the curtain pulled back on Pirate City to see the gears turning was really an eye-opening experience. The Pirates have a huge, huge operation in Bradenton that's the lifeblood of most of their minor league-system.  It's been clear since Huntington and, by extension, Kyle Stark took over the system that the organizational philosophy has been to standardize everything and that coaches and players are held to a strict set of expectations. That was very, very clear in everything I was shown inside Pirate City.

Another aspect that really stood out (and it's probably obvious from what I focused on from the tour) was the emphasis on history. The Pirate uniform, the black and gold, the unique lettering and numbers, they all mean something to fans. We all have memories attached to the team and most of the players simply don't. Accordingly, I think it's really cool that the team is doing its best to educate the players on the history of the team that they've signed with. It's impossible to move around the interior of Pirate City without bumping into Pirate history and while that may not mean a whole lot for player development, it's still important to me as a fan.

There are a lot of things about the Pirates that I, as a fan, wish the team made more accessible to everyone. One of the great things about this experience was the chance to be invited inside not only as a fan, but as a blogger with the understanding that I'd be able to share everything I saw with my readers. The tour Trevor took us on lasted for over an hour and we fired questions at him non-stop, from the makeup of the staff that keeps Pirate City going to the grass mix on the practice fields, and he answered all of them, constantly reminding me that I could take pictures of whatever I wanted so that I could write about all of it.

And finally, I think that we all too often assume that Neal Huntington and Frank Coonelly and the decision makers that sit out front in the public eye are the entirety of the team's front office. That's just not the case; there are a lot of people like Trevor Gooby that work under them doing the day-to-day things that we all take for granted, but that need to be done so that the guys on the "baseball operations" side of things can do their jobs. Of course, when they screw up, no one writes scathing blog entries about them, so I suppose it's probably not all that bad of a trade-off.

My weeklong sojourn to spring training wound to a close today in Hammond Stadium at Fort Myers, the third stadium in six days, with the Pirates losing to the Twins. That's exactly what they've done all week in my presence, saving their one win and one offensive explosion for last Sunday's win over the Yankees (the one game I didn't have tickets for).

Today did give me the opportunity to see the Pirates take batting practice. Since I didn't fly in until Saturday morning, I missed that chance last week at the Red Sox game and since they bat first in the games at McKechnie, there's not much batting practice to be seen there. Today, though, they came out at 11:15 and hit for an hour while I literally stood as close as possible to the field to watch. The Twins' ushers were nice enough not to make me move. (ADDITION: I should also add here that I finally got a chance to meet Dejan Kovacevic during BP, as he was down on the field talking to players, and he was kind enough to talk to me for quite a bit. As a result, I wasn't exactly paying a ton of attention here and that's why my below observations are not great.)

With the wind blowing pretty strongly out to right (all five homers in the actual game went that direction) it was a little tough to judge who was really crushing the ball and who wasn't, but Jeff Clement and Garrett Jones (Tangent alert! Remember last spring when some of us [read: me] were laughing about the writers who kept talking about how huge Garrett Jones is and how hard he hits the ball? Holy crap, Garrett Jones is an enormous human being. That probably seems obvious, but standing like four feet away from him as he towered over a couple guys he was doing an interview with made that abundantly clear. I suddenly understand why so many words were devoted to that last spring.)  both put a couple balls over the fence. I'm not sure if Alvarez did, but he does hit everything hard and he hits it hard to both right field and left field. Righties like Milledge and Tabata were spraying line drives all over the field, though maybe only a couple balls total went over the left field fence. It was nice to see the Pirates could hit the ball at all, though, because through three games this week I'd only seen six total runs.

It was also interesting watching guys take infield while BP was going on. Pedro Alvarez was really actually pretty slick with his glove and he showed some nice range. He muffed a line drive in the game (sitting above third base, it looked like he already focused on first base to try and double the runner there off and just took his eye off the ball), but after watching him in practice, I think he'll probably be able to handle third in the big leagues at least for now. My uncle and I tried to find players to compare his build to and settled on Bobby Bonilla. He's big and a bit bulky, but definitely not too big, per se. He also took about ten minutes to sign autographs after he was done hitting, which I thought was pretty cool since he certainly didn't have to do something like that.

Close attention was being paid to Brandon Moss, who later extended his 0-for-19 skid to 0-for-22.

Moss mostly looked like he felt like this all day:

After BP, my dad, uncle, and I walked over to our seats and below us I could see a huge crowd around Joe Mauer as he signed autographs on his way from the bullpen to the Twins' dugout. The old couple behind us during the game were laughing at how everyone in the crowd called Mauer, a St. Paul native, "Joe" like they knew him. Once he finished batting, a portion of the crowd left. Honestly, I wonder there's another big leaguer as popular among his own team's fans as Mauer is. I'm not sure there is.

After yesterday's Kevin Hart disaster, Ross Ohlendorf was a sight for sore eyes on the mound. He worked quickly and threw a lot of strikes. There were several balls hit hard off of him (Jim Thome's monstrous homer and Justin Morneau's long flyout stick out in my memory), but he also didn't get a lot of defensive help. Of the four hits he allowed, one was the aforementioned lapse by Alvarez and one was a poor route by Garrett Jones in right field that let a ball drop in. The Alvarez play lead to the Twins first run, which went down as earned but really wasn't. All in all, he changed speeds really nicely to keep hitters off balance, his fastball touched 93, and he really had the sort of outing that you'd expect at this point in the spring

Here's Ohlendorf pitching to Mauer.

On the offense side, there wasn't much to write home about given that four runs was a pretty solid output compared to everything else I've seen this week. The Pirates scored four runs on a double (Ronny Cedeno) and three homers (Jason Jaramillo, Delwyn Young, and Jeff Clement). Young and Clement both hit their homers pretty well. Young is the one guy that I'd say has been hitting the whole week I've been down here, and it was nice to see Clement get his bat moving a bit.

No one else really hit, though. Guys like Brian Myrow and Steve Pearce were actually pretty passive at the plate, compared to the Twins' scrubs who were up there to hack away at Brian Bass and eventually ended up winning the game for the Twins. It wasn't a bad game by any measure; it was really an illustration of why no one takes spring training games too seriously. The Pirates' starters got a lead, left the game, and subs blew the lead and the team lost. I still would've liked to see more offense this week.

Anyways, that concludes the 2010 WHYGAVS Gulf Coast Ballpark Tour. I still have a ton of pictures to post online, which I'll do over the weekend once I get back home, and I have a really, really awesome story from yesterday to share that I'll have in a post for tomorrow to go up while I travel back on home to North Carolina. After that, it's gonna be full speed ahead into the season to try and work on some season preview stuff before the real 2010 season begins in earnest.

Man, this vacation thing is wearing me out. Just like Monday's post, I've got a slew of pictures and observations from today's game to share. The absolute first person I saw today when I walked up to the field today was the one and only Lloyd McClendon, overseeing his Tigers take batting practice.

Memories! Lloyd was a popular guy today, spending a lot of time talking to various members of the Pirates' coaching staff. I've told my dad several times that I think Lloyd will get another chance to manage. Seeing him today confirmed that he really is a popular guy among the players and other coaches. And after the Jim Tracy era, I can definitively say that Lloyd isn't even close to my least favorite Pirate manager.

After that my brother and I walked down to the batting cages to watch Steve Pearce hit some extra BP with Don Long, while Long worked a bit on his form. There really wasn't anything too exciting going on there; I just like watching coaches coach. In this case, Long was working with Pearce keeping his left arm in by having him hold a ball under the arm before he swung.

The Tigers got off the field shortly after that and the Pirates again took the field to stretch and warm up right in front of the stands. Bobby Crosby was the first guy to head towards the dugout today.

Jose Tabata followed him out. In my unofficial tally, I think Tabata's signed more autographs for fans than any other player in the two days I've been at McKechnie this week. He seems like an incredibly friendly guy.

Meanwhile, Kevin Hart warmed up on the warning track. If only we all knew what was about to hit us. I'm really, really surprised to see him listed as 6'4". He didn't look nearly that all while he was out there warming up today.

As the other players took the field and stretched, my brother looked at me and said, "Look at Andrew McCutchen! The dude just exudes coolness. Like, anything he does just seems like it's probably awesome." It's really hard to disagree with that.

Akinori Iwamura agrees with that assessment.

Without Milledge there to mess around with McCutchen, Brandon Moss and Garrett Jones amused everyone by screwing around with fake swings followed by imaginary home run watching.

Finally Pedro Alvarez headed towards the dugout chatting with Bill Virdon. Holy crap, that was cool.

After that came the National Anthem, which included maybe the best moment of the game (and let's be honest, the game itself didn't provide many moments). A really young (we're talking three years old young) little girl was singing the anthem. She got totally lost in the rocket's red glare and was starting to repeat lines and clearly getting scared when suddenly, everyone in the crowd picked up the singing and helped her finish. Cool stuff from the McKechnie crowd, even if there were a lot of Tigers fans in there.

Then, Kevin Hart took the mound. And he walked a hitter. And then he struck out Don Kelly on three pitches, which was encouraging. Then he walked another hitter. Then he picked a guy off. Then he walked another hitter and another hitter. Look! I got a picture of Hart pitching with runners on base!

His line for the first inning was crazy: 0 H, 0 R, 2 K, 4 BB. His second inning wasn't much better. He got two quick outs, hit a batter, walked two more, gave up a hit, and got yanked while Jeff Karstens cleaned up his mess, which he did nicely.

I don't know if I can say this strongly enough: Kevin Hart cannot start the season in the Pirates' rotation unless something drastically changes in the next two weeks. His 1 2/3 innings were torturous to watch. He just couldn't get the ball near the plate. I understand that there's a lot of potential somewhere inside of him, but he's just got to show something before he gets a spot in the rotation. He's got an option left. Use it.

On the flip side of things, Tony Beasley exhibited some of the worst third base coaching I've ever seen in the first inning today. With Andrew McCutchen on second base, Garrett Jones singled sharply into right field where Ryan Rayburn was waiting. 'Cutch cruised into third and started to pull up with no signal from Beasley, who then decided to wave 'Cutch home after Rayburn's throw had already left his hand and was sailing home. No one, not even Andrew McCutchen, is that fast. Ugh.

Bobby Crosby and Ryan Church did team up for a run in the next inning, with Church doubling Crosby in after a walk and then scoring later on a balk. Crosby crushed a few foul balls today, though he didn't have any hits to show for it. It's nice to see the bench guys hitting well, I guess.

After Hart and Karstens, most of the bullpen guys struggled quite a bit. DJ Carrasco gave up two runs (though a weird dive by Akinori Iwamura over the ball cost him an out and may have let both runs score in the long run), Brendan Donnelly gave up two more, and then Vinnie Chulk put four guys on base (two walks, two hits), struck out two hitters, and gave up another run. Maybe I should stop telling people that pitching is going to be this team's strength.

In any case, here's a picture of Carrasco warming up as an excuse to link Jen Langosch's excellent article about Neal Huntington owing Carrasco a quarter.

After the Tigers rolled up their 6-1 lead, the Pirates did get one more run. It started with Pedro Alvarez lacing a double over the Tigers' center fielder's head. Whoever was in center for the Tigers should've made the play, but damn, the ball just rockets off of Pedro's bat.

Jose Tabata batted next, which let me take this "OOOOOOOO! THE FUTURE!!!" picture. He drew a walk.

Alvarez did eventually score. The inning ended on a pop-up by Gift Ngoepe. I tried to take a picture of him batting, but he's so short you can see him over the umpire.

He did make a couple slick plays in the field, including sticking with a hard grounder that he booted a little bit to end the top of the eighth inning. So I'd like to make up for making fun of his height by also including this picture of him coming off of the field with the rest of the infield (from L to R that's Doug Bernier, Steven Jackson, Ngoepe, and Steve Pearce).

So the Pirates lost again, and Hart imploded and the bullpen was terrible and so far in three spring training games I've only seen the Pirates score six runs, but it was incredibly cool to see Ngoepe play. And Pedro Alvarez doubled and McCutchen played well. Seriously, I'm not complaining here, folks (even if I am terrified of what happens if Hart makes the opening day rotation).

Somehow, we managed to pick a week to come to Florida where the Pirates actually have an off-day. Since we're actually staying about 90 minutes away from Bradenton (for the reasons I mentioned yesterday), heading to Pirate City to check out some minor league workouts and scrimmages isn't really the best option (we're making the drive twice for games), but we did drop by the complex yesterday just to walk around and see it with our own eyes. If you want action shots, Wilbur Miller was there over the weekend for the B-game between the Pirates and Orioles and got some great shots of prospects.

And a shot of the huge, huge facilities there that doesn't even begin to capture the number or size of the fields:

Anyways, I'm headed for more beach-related activities today, but I have some links and some news to comment on.

First up is my big realignment opus on FanHouse, written in light of the floating proposal by Selig's committee last week. Just trying to have fun with a few different ideas that aren't very likely, but are always interesting to talk about.

Second, the first two rounds of cuts have happened since I got here over the weekend, sending Brandon Jones, Ramon Aguero, Ronald Uviedo, Gorkys Hernandez, Argenis Diaz, and Brian Friday down on Sunday and Donnie Veal, Brad Lincoln, Tony Sanchez, Bryan Morris, Jeff Sues, Justin Thomas, and Virgil Vasquez down yesterday. Aside from me wanting to see Lincoln and Sanchez in action while I'm down here, there's not much to say about any of these moves. I thought Veal might have an outside shot at making the team as a lefty reliever, but both Javier Lopez and Jack Taschner have looked good so far, which gives the Pirates plenty of room to let Veal pitch in the minors. That's certainly something he needs, so it's good a couple other guys are pitching well enough to allow it.

For as long as I can remember, I've heard about McKechnie Field. Today, I finally made it there.

Seriously, look at those palm trees. Ahhhhh, Florida.

In my two-plus years in Chapel Hill, I've grown to appreciate the little touches that separate minor league baseball from big league ball, that make it feel much more personal. Many of those things are apparent in Spring Training.

If you couldn't tell from the lineup and didn't already realize it, today's opponent was the Phillies. The Red Sox fans in our hotel (we're staying near Fort Myers because we're going to two games there, plus it's close to where my brother lives, which means our hotel is full of Sawks fans) were more than happy to remind us that the Phillies and Pirates are in the same state.

We rolled in to McKechnie around 11:30 this morning so we'd have plenty of time to explore. The Pirates' batting practice was over already (hopefully we'll see them take BP on Thursday against the Twins since they'll be the road team), but the Phils' BP was in full swing.

Howard and Rollins spent most of BP screwing around in the outfield and behind the cage, which was funny to watch because Howard is a giant and Rollins is, well, not.

I wasn't there to watch the Phillies take BP, though, so while they were on the field I checked out the bullpen and the batting cages along the right field line, watching various Pirates hit and throw. Finally, I decided to hop out on towards the field to try and get some pictures of the Pirates as they came out to stretch. When I got out there, Ken Tekulve and the Pirate Parrot were amusing the crowd with Teke soft-tossing rubber balls that the Parrot was bashing into the stands. Amusingly enough, Teke slings soft-toss with rubber balls just like he pitched.

Finally, the team took the field. First out was the guy that's seemingly hit his way on to the team since I've arrived in Florida, Delwyn Young.

As the players stretched, a group of six Navy Seals parachuted out of a plane high above McKechnie, pulled some crazy maneuvers in the air, and landed in short center field. Most of the players stopped their stretching to watch. Here's Jose Tabata doing just that.

At one point, Andrew McCutchen was jogging out and back and was very nearly obliterated by a landing Seal. He's laughing in the pic below, but I was pretty scared there for a second.

Just like Howard and Rollins during the Phillies BP, 'Cutch and Lastings Milledge were more or less inseperable as the Pirates stretched before the game.

Check out former Pirate and new infield/first bas coach Carlos Garcia. I took like four pictures of him today and he looks just like this in every one. Dude's all business. Also, check out Neil Walker's new number. Guy grew up in Pittsburgh in the early and mid-90s. Wonder who his two favorite players were. I have a guess ...

After awhile, JR walked out among his charges. Please notice how short Delwyn Young is, especially when juxtaposed with Garrett Jones. And look who's chatting in the background!

As the stretching wound down, Pedro Alvarez and Don Long headed towards the dugout.

As stretching finished up, the three guys who might help determine whether the Pirates' offense this year is pitiful or kind of average spent some time talking.

And here's a better shot of Andy LaRoche playing catch.

Finally, everyone moved towards the dugout. Here are some of the players milling around.

And here's a similar shot with Gary Varsho and Joe Kerrigan. Honestly, I really like this coaching staff. I'm going to be sorry when the Pirates finish 70-92 and the fans peer-pressure the front office into canning a bunch of them.

At some point, the game actually started, so we headed up to our seats. I got some pictures from there, though the safety net does make an appearance in all of them. First up is Zach Duke's first pitch of the game.

Most of the accounts of the game made it read like Duke really struggled today, but I thought he looked pretty good, to be honest. He fell behind in some counts in the first and put two guys on, but he changed speeds well and worked very quickly, zipping through the second and third innings without much difficulty at all. It was pretty easy to see from where I was sitting that his curve was buckling a few knees, which I took to be a very good sign. He clearly wasn't as sharp as he would've liked, getting into that jam in the first and another in the fourth, but for a mid-March spring training game I was pretty happy with how he threw on the whole.

On the flip side of things, Roy Halladay went for the Phils. Andrew McCutchen lead off for the Bucs and immediately squared around to bunt, raising my blood pressure to unhealthy levels.

I can't really judge how Halladay threw, because he was given an incredible strike zone by the home plate ump. Jeff Clement was really victimized by this, when he had two strikes called against him that Carlos Ruiz was obviously reaching into the right-handed batter's box for pitches that were being called strikes anyones. Clement, Vazquz, and Milledge all jawed a bit at the ump, which struck me as awfully rare for a spring training game.

Perhaps the single most impressive Pirate today was Neil Walker. He made some incredible plays in the field at third base, moving easily to both sides and making great throws. He was awesome. I have no idea if his bat will ever come around, but if Adrian Beltre and Pedro Feliz can find consistent work as starting third basemen ... Anyways, I got a picture of Walker hitting, cropped to include the big team logo behind the plate. Something about him growing up in Pittsburgh as a Pirate fan etc. etc.

I don't think there's much else to say. The offense was almost non-existent today, even after Halladay left and the strike zone evened out (a little bit). A few guys hit balls hard off of Halladay, though. LaRoche ripped a couple of foul line drives, Doumit doubled down the first base line and Milledge immediately followed it up with a hard single through the infield to score the lone run. Javier Lopez looked great out of the bullpen and Evan Meek did a nice job of bailing out Zach Duke's mess in the fourth, though he really struggled in the fifth and probably cost the team the game.

Like I said on Saturday, I've got a lot more pictures (and higher res versions of all of these), but I may wait until the week ends to upload them to a picture sharing site (both because they slow the site down when I put them here and because my internet is really, really bad right now). Tomorrow's an off-day, but I have a few pics from today's side trip to Pirate City to put up, plus some news to link and dissect a bit.

After a canceled Friday night flight, a 4:30 AM wakeup call, a flight to Atlanta and a connecting flight to Fort Myers, I did successfully arrive in Florida around 10:00 AM, with plenty of time to spare before the first pitch of the Pirates/Red Sox game at City of Palms Park in Fort Myers, which also goes down in my personal history as my First Spring Training Game Ever.

With a slew of Lackey family members in attendence and my brain already a little bit fried from the long travel day, I didn't do a whole lot of wandering around the park in the name of amateur blog photography or deep baseball analysis, but I do, of course, have a few things to share. (Note: The pictures here aren't hi-res, as I'm working on slow hotel internet and I'm also trying to keep the page loading time down. I'll upload the full versions to a picture sharing site in the near future.)

It's been almost three years since I've been able to regularly attend Pirates games, so just seeing the guys in black and gold up close was a welcome sight, even if a bunch of minor leaguers were mixed in.

I think this may have been the first time I've seen Garrett Jones somewhere other than a TV screen. He's huge. Now I understand why JR and the coaching staff were raving about his size and power last spring.

As the pre-game warmups ended, Dave Kerwin and his braintrust left the bullpen for the dugout.

He and Maholm were having a pretty good conversation, from what I could see.

Maholm threw well, too, tossing three shutout innings at the Sox, though the sharp wind blowing across the field held fly balls up in the air in left field all day for both teams.

From my spot on the right field lawn, I was within shouting distance of Brandon Moss. Moss hit a couple balls on the nose, but they stayed up in the wind and nothing came of either of them.

Jose Tabata was patrolling center field, and he really does seem to have slimmed down quite a bit since the end of last season.

With the wind, the game was more or less a pitcher's duel. Maholm and Javier Lopez threw well and Jack Taschner got himself into and out of a big jam in the fifth, and Delwyn Young launched a long homer in the top of the sixth to give the Pirates a 1-0 lead. Then Chris Jakubauskas came in and laid an egg, giving the Sox three runs in the seventh. By that point, mass substitutions had already started.

Gorkys Hernandez covers a lot of turf in the outfield and made a really nice throw from center, though he had no chance at the runner at the plate.

Andy LaRoche really played a slick third base, and Pedro Alvarez was a late sub. He's a big guy.

And just for the heck of it, here's a shot of a bunch of the late-game Pirates taking the field.

I know these last couple pictures don't look so hot so small, so I'll do my best to get the hi-res stuff up soon. But for now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to pass out for about 16 hours. I don't have tickets to tomorrow's game against the Yankees, but I do have them for the other three games during the week and so we'll be doing this again soon.

I'll be headed out of RDU for Fort Myers tonight and since I've got a lot of things to take care of before then this will probably be my last post before then. Once I hit F-L-A tonight, you'll be able to find real-time updates from wherever I am via the constantly updated WHYGAVS Twitter feed. Starting tomorrow, I'll be pretty much wherever the Pirates are on the Gulf Coast through next Thursday (actually, I think there might be one game I don't have tickets to, but I'd have to double check with my uncle because he has the tickets) and I'll post nightly updates with lots of pictures, but since this is also doubling as my vacation I may not post immediately every day. If you're in Florida and you see this guy (well, soberer, probably, and definitely with shorter hair, but possibly in the same shirt and hat; you get the idea) wandering around, feel free to say hi.

Anyways, some traveling day links:

RJ Anderson at FanGraphs thinks giving Kevin Hart a spot in the rotation is worth the risk for the Bucs. Also at FG, the Pirates have four of the top 50 NL prospects.

Also, Brian Giles retired yesterday. In some ways, he's like the Ralph Kiner of the last 17 years; an incredible talent that was trapped on an awful team. He was incredible to watch at the plate in his 4+ years with the Bucs and he provided some amazing memories (the grand slam off of Billy Wagner, the amazing leaping catch over the short wall in left, etc.). In other ways, he's got quite a reputation as a huge jerk, and I'm sorry that I felt the need to compare him a classy guy like Kiner, who's place in Pirate history has been unfairly buried by the bad teams he played on. Seriously, we need to get that guy a statue better than that weird hand-thing that sits under the stairs in PNC's main rotunda.

I know no one likes to hear excuses, but between finishing up lab work before I head to Florida on Friday, trying to get everything together for the trip, the Penguins game in Raleigh tomorrow night (er, crap, later tonight, where does the time go?), team primers for FanHouse, and a huge FanHouse piece that I'm probably unheathily excited about writing, I'm just really short on time this week. So for right now, I've got a few quick (and I do mean quick) thoughts on last night's televised Pirates/Orioles game, plus some links that I've been meaning to share for a while.

First, last night's game:

• When Pedro Alvarez makes contact with the ball, it explodes off of his bat. Even his flyout to the warning track in his second AB was awesome in the sort of way that an Andrew McCutchen groundout that should be routine but he turns into a bang-bang play is awesome. But it's only fair to also note that his last AB, against veteran lefty Will Ohman, was terrible. Ohman completely twisted and turned him around for an easy strikeout. He's still got things to work on in Triple-A.
• Dan McCutchen needed 18 pitches to cruise through two perfect innings. You're up, Mr. Hart.

RJ Anderson at FanGraphs just spent two pieces examining the chances of Rajai Davis stealing 80 bases for the A's this year. Could you imagine how incredibly fast an outfield with Davis, Nyjer Morgan, and Andrew McCutchen would've been? Would a fly ball ever land for a hit with all three of them out there? It's best to never think of the trade that sent Davis to San Francisco ever again, I think.

Great post by Joe Posnanski about the Rule 5 draft, which talks quite a bit about Branch Rickey's hand in rebuilding the Pirates in the 1950s. Can you imagine what would've happened if the Pointy-Haired Blogger existed while Rickey was sacrificing wins left and right to stash talent?