Within the last couple weeks or so, the projected PECOTA and CHONE 2010 standings were both released. Neither is particularly friendly to the Pirates; PECOTA predicts 70 wins and the worst record in baseball, CHONE predicts 74 wins and a tie for the third worst record in baseball ahead of only the Blue Jays (68) and Astros (73).

But then, no one that's really following the team should be surprised that an 18th losing season is imminent. We all know it's coming. What I'm curious about is what sort of record should we take as acceptable improvement towards preventing the nineteenth losing season? 74 wins isn't impressive by any stretch, but a 12-win improvement would probably be among the biggest improvements in the league, and it'd be done with a very different roster from last year and maybe even without much help from the minor leaguers closest to Pittsburgh. So if the Pirates won 74 games this year (their most since 2003) would that be enough? With their low payroll, the impending contributions from Pedro Alvarez, Jose Tabata, and Brad Lincoln (all who may help in 2010, though I think Alvarez is the only one of those three with a chance to make a real impact this year), and a few young guys already on the team getting better as they age, does the leap from 74 to 82 and beyond seem unrealistic in 2011?

Addendum: Gene from fellow Bloguin blog Favre Dollar Footlongs asks how reliable projections like CHONE and PECOTA are. Vegas Watch actually compiles and evaluates these things every year and last fall looked at how the projection systems stacked up over the last five seasons. He found that PECOTA was generally the most reliable, though they had a terrible year last year and since that terrible year coincided with Nate Silver going political it seems wise to take their projected standings with a grain of salt until they can prove they have things back on track. CHONE has been the best over the four years that it's existed, though, so it generally does a good job of these sorts of things. Of course take that for what it's worth; certainly none of these systems are perfect and there's a good bit of error in all of them, there's simply less error in CHONE over the past four seasons.

In light of the "Mario Lemieux wants to buy the Pirates" news and the whole Post-Gazette editorial and the resulting fallout, I think now is a good time to address some things that often slip to the backburner and that I assume people know, even though they're not explicity stated.

There are certain realities that face small-market baseball teams that will face any owner, be he Bob Nutting, Mario Lemieux, or King Midas. The Brewers, a team held up by so many Pirate fans as the paragon of what the club should be doing payroll-wise, has managed two winning seasons with an incredibly talented young core of players and right now, they're facing the reality of losing at least one of them and missing this window of opportunity entirely. That's because an $80 million payroll doesn't assure anything, and when $12.5 million of that is tied up in Jeff Suppan's stupid contract that you gave him three years ago when payroll was low and it didn't seem like an awful idea is suddenly a handcuff.

I could go on forever. Carl Polhad was so cheap as the Twins owner that he actually decided it would be more profitable to contract his team, but the Twins have spent the better part of the last decade winning because they're well-run. The Mariners rolled out a $100 million payroll in 2008, but because they had asked Bill Bavasi to spend that $100 million they were awful. The Marlins are owned by Jeffrey Loria, one of baseball's most notorious villians who choked the life out of baseball in Montreal with his own two hands, but they won a World Series during his ownership and they seem to always have one of the best young rosters in baseball. The Mets are one of the best financed teams in the league, but they're a punchline because no one knows what to do with that money.

In 2001 and 2003, the Pirates had $54 million and $57 million opening day payrolls, good for 19th and 21st in the league, respectively. That's fairly comparable to the two teams that everyone compares the Pirates to in terms of payroll, the Brewers and Reds, who were 16th and 19th in 2009, respectively. That little jolt of spending got the Pirates nowhere. In 2003, the team only won 75 games and in 2001, they lost 100. Their high payrolls in 2001 and 2003 got them nowhere because much of the money was spent on marginal veterans while the minor league system was largely ignored. As a result, Aramis Ramirez was shipped out of town to make payroll, and despite the increased spending the team went absolutely nowhere.

I'm not suggesting that money isn't a factor in baseball. That would be stupid. But money is only one factor and it's one that's both entirely out of my hands and not nearly as cut and dried as people like to suggest. What drives me crazy about the dialogue that's been opened since the Lemieux story broke is the assumption, be it by fans, Ron Cook, or the Post-Gazette's editorial board, that higher payroll = more wins. It's not that easy and it never will be that easy.

It's not that I don't care who the Pirates' owner is, just that I'm not particularly interested in that aspect of the team. What I am interested in is how the Pirates operate within the parameters set by ownership. If the teams like the Marlins, Rays, and A's,  have taught us anything, it's that a good management team is capable succeeding no matter what the set budget is. So long as the owner isn't really a meddler (and I don't have the impression that Bob Nutting does anything Frank Coonelly doesn't want him to do), it's possible even if it's not easy. So are Huntington and Coonelly doing that? Where are they going from here? Where do I think they should go from here? This is what matters most to the future of the Pirates, and those questions don't change, even if the owner does.

I try to make it a personal policy to not respond to brainless pieces writing about the Pirates that would require me to put in ten times more thought and effort than the original writer did, so I'm going to leave the PG Editorial Board's "Open Letter to Bob Nutting" alone because you all already know how I feel about this kind of thing. Frankly, if they're not going to think before they write about the Pirates, I'm not going to think about them period.

What I will do, however, is post Craig Calcaterra's (formerly of Shysterball Fame, now writing for NBC's Circling the Bases blog) mini-rant on "open letters" from a couple of weeks ago.

You wanna say something to someone, write them a letter. You want to tell your readers or viewers what you think of someone else, tell them what you think.  Open letters are lazy-ass gimmicks which allow the writer to smugly pretend that they're giving someone advice when he's really being a passive-aggressive condescending prick. They're the literary equivalent of "hey, I'm just sayin.'"  How about this: just say it.

Ah. I feel better now.

UPDATED TO ADD: This link from Traco Bucco in the comments just blew my mind.

UPDATED AGAIN: Please, please, please read Charlie's post on this. It's fantastic.

Is there a worse part of the interminable off-season than right now? Most of the interesting offseason moves are over and done with and the players are talking about getting ready for Spring Training, but it's just not quite here yet. Is there a longer, more boring part of the winter than this?

Lastings Milledge and Andy LaRoche are big question marks in Neal Huntington's plan to acquire blue chip talent after losing some luster. They're both talented players that will likely be productive on the big league level, but with a chance to exceed that level and grow into something more. Doing so would give the Pirates a much needed offensive jolt from beyond Andrew McCutchen, Ryan Doumit, and probably Garrett Jones (assuming he doesn't turn into a pumpkin). Most importantly, they're both young enough that if they perform anywhere near the high expectations that other teams had for them in the past, they shore up a position for the Pirates for the long haul.

Now that Baseball Prospectus has released their initial PECOTA projections (they still have some tweaking to do on the team standings and the PECOTA cards aren't out, but I'm fairly sure that the actual player projections aren't going to change much), we've got five major projection systems to build our roadmap for 2010 (please read this FanGraphs post by Dave Cameron before you start yelling at me about how unreliable projections are). The projections are fairly stable for both guys; each has one low outlier (MARCEL for LaRoche, ZiPS for Milledge), but beyond that everything is really pretty close. Here's what we have in terms of triple slash lines:

Andy LaRoche:

• PECOTA (beta)- .247/.344/.392
• CHONE- .259/.343/.408
• MARCEL- .245/.328/.380
• Bill James- .254/.338/.402
• ZiPS- .260/.345/.399
  

Lastings Milledge:

• PECOTA (beta)- .272/.343/.412
• CHONE- .284/.343/.423
• MARCEL- .278/.340/.418
• Bill James- .283/.340/.413
• ZiPS- .272/.329/.398

Links: PECOTA (subscription), ZiPS, LaRoche MARCEL/CHONE/James, Milledge MARCEL/CHONE/James

For this week's poll, I wanted to make it a discussion point. Which of these two guys is most likely to exceed these numbers? They both have reasons they might do it; Milledge battled a wrist injury that sapped much of his power last year and LaRoche took a big step forward after an abysmal start to his career in 2007 and 2008 while ending 2009 on a huge tear. Both are young enough (Milledge will be 25 in April, LaRoche turned 26 in September) that there's room for improvement.

So which one is more likely to exceed expectations in 2010? Why? Vote in the left sidebar, explain your vote in the comments.

Good catch by Charlie and his readers over the weekend: On Rocco DeMaro's broadcast from Piratefest yesterday, he asked Neal Huntington about Jose Tabata's age and Huntington, while acknowledging that both their records and the Yankees' records indicate that he's 21 as he says, responded, "He's not thirty," and "If he's 24, he's still a young player with great upside."

I've listened to the comments a couple times (first link, about 39:00 in) and I honestly can't tell if Huntington is saying, "Look, we think he's 21 and so did the Yankees, but people have been wrong about this sort of thing before and what exactly are we supposed to do about it if he is older than we think?" or "Yeah, he's probably 24." It obviously is a big deal if Tabata's 24 (22 is probably OK, 23 is pretty iffy, 24 means that suddenly he's been age appropriate the whole time in the minors and that makes the whole "We're moving him along and he'll develop power when he gets older" thing almost completely null), I'm just not sure if that's the conclusion we're supposed to infer from that statement.

A similar thing happened earlier in the weekend when Huntington was asked about Bryce Harper and made comments that I read as, "If we draft him it'll be because we scouted him and we liked him, not because of what someone else thinks," and others read as "He's not even in our top ten right now." I guess having such a candid GM can be a drawback sometimes.

As expected, word that Mario Lemieux might be interested in buying the Penguins lit the internet on fire yesterday. Here's a rundown of some of the fallout.

Both Cory Humes at Titletahn and Shawn Hoffman at Squawking Baseball note their reservations about Lemieux taking over.

The Pensblog checks in, of course.

Brian at Raise the Jolly Roger feels similarly to the way I do; it'd be cool, but just because Mario is a good hockey owner doesn't make him a good baseball owner and it's probably not happening anyways, so let's not worry about it.

At Bucs Dugout, Charlie talks to Frank D from Pensburgh about what kind of owner Lemieux would make.

Finally, DK has an update at the Post-Gazette today with one very interesting paragraph about halfway down about Lemieux and Burkle's potential plans:

Each team's television rights are owned by FSN Pittsburgh, and each is generally satisfied with its rights fees. Another possibility is starting a fledgling cable network, which is becoming more common for sports franchises. Those tend to need more than one major league team to sustain year-round programming.

In news that's guaranteed to prompt the most angry phone calls to drive-time radio talk hosts in Pittsburgh, Mario Lemieux and Ron Burkle apparently approached Bob Nutting about buy the Pirates a few months ago and were rebuffed, according to Dejan Kovacevic. My only opinion on this story is this: Bob Nutting has never, ever even remotely hinted (at least not publicly) that he's interested in selling the Pirates and any discussion about a potential sale is only going to be frustrating for everyone. So let's not discuss it.

UPDATE: OK, I realize that I owe everyone a lot better than to be all "whatevs" about it, as my friends at the Pensblog put it.

I, like any other Pittsburgh sports fan my age, love Mario Lemieux. I don't remember a lot about the Pens' two Stanley Cup runs because there's only room in my brain for so much and most of my pre-1994 sports memories are Pirate memories. I know they won, I know it was cool, but that's about it. When baseball went on strike in 1994 and didn't come right back, I was sports starved and I started watching hockey. I was captivated by Jaromir Jagr and the Pens in their own lockout shortened season. As my dad noticed me watching more and more hockey, he told me, "If you think this is fun to watch, just wait and see what happens if Mario Lemieux comes back."

He was right. When Mario returned to the ice the next season, I knew I was watching something amazing, even though I hadn't played or ever really watched much hockey to that point. Even on pre-HDTV, it was like he drew your eyes to him whenever he touched the ice. When he was out there and healthy, it was like everything else slowed down around him.

Like everyone else, I got chills when he scored on a breakaway in what seemed sure to be his last game at Mellon Arena in the 1997 playoffs. The night of his comeback in late December of 2000 is always going to be one of the single best, most inspirational sports memories of my life. When things started going downhill after that season, my friends and I at Duquesne would still Student Rush Penguins games to see him, even if he was a broken shadow of his former self. When he pulled the Penguins out of the fire, first buying the team in 1999 and then striking a deal for a new arena in 2007, he saved a piece of my connection to my city. Seeing the Penguins beat up in the Hurricanes in the RBC Centre with a couple thousand Penguin fans in the Eastern Conference Final last year was an amazing experience. Five hundred miles south of Pittsburgh, we all felt at home in the same building. Mario wasn't on the ice, but he was the only reason that was possible.

There are several reasons my initial instinct was to brush this story off. The first is that it's going to get a lot of yinzers fired up, and I honestly just don't want to deal with that. As much as Mario Lemieux means to me (and to a lot of Pittsburghers) personally, Bob Nutting owes him absolutely nothing when it comes to the Pirates and it's silly to expect him to want to sell the team just because Lemieux and Ron Burkle have asked him about it. Nutting has said time and time again the team is not for sale and there's no reason not to take him at his word.

The second reason is that even if Ron Burkle and Mario Lemieux buy the Pirates, Pittsburgh doesn't get any bigger. The team's contract with Fox Sports Pittsburgh doesn't get any more lucrative. The relationship between the Pirates and the city of Pittsburgh doesn't change. The same fans who will "NEVER GO TO ANOTHER GAME AGAIN" and then continue to go to their one or two games a year and complain about the Pirates will call in to radio shows and write letters to the newspaper about how great this is and how they're on the phone to buy seasons tickets, and then they'll keep on going to their one or two games a year until the Pirates actually start to improve. And as much as Mario is a Pittsburgh icon and as rich as Ron Burkle is, neither of them got to where they are in life by being stupid, and so the money that goes into the Pirates will still be tied closely to their revenue streams and that won't greatly change until the product on the field does. Which means that the Pirates will have to continue to make good decisions to build a farm system to put a good product on the field. To extend an analogy I made earlier this week, if I'm on a road trip from Chapel Hill to San Francisco and I change cars in Tulsa, I'm still in Tulsa.

Which is simply to say that if Bob Nutting were interested in selling the Pirates and the Lemieux/Burkle group were interested, I'd find that news exciting but only with the knowledge that there's still tons of work to be done and though the ownership group's net worth and loyalty to Pittsburgh would have improved, the actual situation that the Pirates are in would be largely unchanged. And since Nutting isn't interested in selling, this is more likely to cause unnecessary wailing and tooth gnashing than anything else.

Tim Alderson answered questions from some Baseball America readers today. Certainly worth a read if you've got the time.

I know that a lot of people disagree with me when I say this, but I still like John Russell a lot. Today, his sentiments on payroll echo my own:

"Payroll has never and will never be an issue with me," manager John Russell said Thursday. "Our talent level has increased tremendously over the past couple years. We are very much looking forward to moving forward with a very talented group of major league players, with very talented players on their way from our system. The players are looking forward to this season, too, and they know the talent we have."

I understand that payroll is always going to be an issue for a team like the Pirates, but can we stop talking about it? Just, like, two days off would be super.