After Gerrit Cole's Grapefruit League debut yesterday, Jameson Taillon will start against the Red Sox today at 1:05 PM. Taillon probably won't get many spring training appearances with the Bucs this year since he'll be joining Team Canada for the World Baseball Classic shortly, which is an even better reason to pay attention to him today. 

You can read about Cole's outing against the Rays yesterday here. Clint Hurdle's quote about his appearance has a pretty fantastically loaded elipsis. That quote could literally mean anything with that thing in there. 

As Charlie notes, Gerrit Cole and pretty much every other interesting Pirate pitcher of consequence is taking the mound against the Rays today. I'm not much interested in spring training results but I am curious to see how Cole fares against big league hitters. He's high on my list of things to talk about during spring training and I'm particularly interested just to see how he fares in situations where he's out of his comfort zone. 

Speaking of things to talk about this spring, I've been thinking about how I want to do spring training and season previews and here's how it's going to go down: every day I'm going to try and answer a question about the Pirates in the coming season (stuff like "When will we see Gerrit Cole?" ). I have a long list of questions to tackle, but if you have anything on your mind leave it in the questions or holler at me on Twitter. If it's not on the list and I think it's interesting, I'll try to get to it. 

I did the Pirates' portion of the season preview for Big League Magazine this spring. You can check out an excerpt of it here. Their preview issue is a heck of a thing: bloggers and writers familiar with all 30 teams wrote a couple thousand word previews for each club in addition to other season preview articles. Which is to say that it's not free, but there's lots of stuff for the $4.95 that the preview issue costs. (Full disclosure: my payment is based on how many copies of the issue get sold.)

Jason Parks put out his Top 101 prospects at Baseball Prospectus yesterday. Parks loves high upside guys and that's reflected in his rankings of Pirates: Gerrit Cole is at #3, Jameson Taillon is at #11, Gregory Polanco is at #44, Luis Heredia is at #53, and Alen Hanson is at #66. That's about where Polanco and Hanson come in on other lists, but those are particularly high slots to find Cole and Taillon and Heredia in, I think. Not that I'm complaining, of course, just noting that most lists have those guys a bit lower. 

I'm doing World Baseball Classic previews over at The Outside Corner this week. On Monday I ran down the qualifying round, I did Pool A yesterday, Pool B will be today, and so forth. I'm shooting to have them run at 2:30 every day, if you're interested in checking back in. I'm also trying to pass them around on Twitter. 

Chris Jaffe of the Hardball Times notes that today is the 40,000th day since the Pirates reached the .500 mark as a franchise for the first time in their history. In general, the Pirates have been good enough that they're still above .500 as a franchise today, even though they haven't had a winning season in some 7,000+ days. They don't have much longer to turn things around, though, if they want to stay above .500 as a franchise: Chris estimates that if they keep losing they'll fall under the mark by about 2016. 

Baseball history is so cool sometimes. The Pirates less so. 

Tomorrow the Pirates will hold their "Black and Gold" intrasquad scrimmage game in anticipation of Saturday's Spring Training opener against the Rays. Nothing gets old quicker than spring training games (the first ones are exciting, then it's a month of blah before real baseball starts), but there's one pretty cool aspect to the Black and Gold Game this year: 

It will be Cole (Blacks) VS Taillon (Golds) in Friday's #Pirates intrasquad game at McKechnie Field. First pitch, Noon.

— Tom Singer (@Tom_Singer) February 21, 2013

Can you hear it? That's the future! It's bearing down on us! Instead of worrying about it (which I'm going to do plenty of in the next few weeks), let's just sit back and enjoy the fact that the #2 overall pick from 2010 is facing off against the #1 overall pick from 2011 in an intrasquad scrimmage in 2013 and that things have gone well enough since those drafts for this to be a pretty exciting event. 

*This post has been edited from its original form to reflect the fact that today is Thursday and not Friday. Which kind of sucks. I know.

It only takes about ten minutes of watching Starling Marte to understand why being a baseball scout is such a difficult job. Why even the best scouts pile up tons of misses for every diamond in the rough that they unearth. I am not a scout by any means, but since moving North Carolina 5 1/2 years ago I've watched plenty of minor league baseball. Most of that baseball has been Triple-A baseball and the reality of Triple-A baseball is that it's mostly a vast wasteland of Quadruple-A replacement-level talent, stowed away in case of big league emergency.

Still, watching the Durham Bulls regularly means that I've seen plenty of Tampa Bay's prospects come through, and when talented guys play in Triple-A, their talent tends to kind of pop off of the field. Maybe it's just confirmation bias (you know who the prospects are by the time they come to Triple-A), but in the vast Triple-A wasteland it's immediately apparent when Andrew McCutchen flicks his wrists through the zone and sends a fly ball screaming to the warning track or when David Price's slider keeps guys flailing, even if his control is a bit off. You can't help but notice Matt Wieters tower over everyone in the batter's box and understand that he's built differently than other catchers and that this is what the scouts rave about. 

And so by the same token, you can't miss Starling Marte on the baseball field when he's in front of you. When I watched him last spring, he was playing so shallow in center field that he might as well have been playing rover in slow pitch softball. On a couple of occasions I'd see a hitter rip a flyball towards deep center or left center, remember where Marte was playing, and think, "There's no way he's getting there." He'd be practically there waiting for the ball before I could even turn my head to watch the play. You notice it on TV, too. Remember the time Paul Goldschmidt thought he could stretch a single into a double with Marte in left field? Oops. At the plate, he can blister the ball. He homered on the first big league pitch that he saw and he tripled in three straight games. When he's on, he's magnetic. You can't not see him on the field or on your TV screen. 

And of course therein lies the caveat: he's not always on. He gets lost at the plate and can strike out a ton. When he's struggling at the plate, he presses in the field and weird things happen. He's already 24, which is not terribly young for a raw prospect. We can talk about his lack of time in the US or his relative inexperience due to not playing a full minor league season until the age of 22, but that doesn't change the fact that he's already 24 and that some of the stuff that needs to happen for him Marte to become star simply might not happen. Marte could literally be anything at this point in his career: he could turn into Michael Bourn or Carlos Gomez or Jacoby Ellsbury or Drew Stubbs or Alfonso Soriano or Andrew McCutchen. All I feel like I know for sure is that his speed and defense will make him a big league regular. After that? Who knows. 

This is frustrating, because there's nothing that could help the Pirates more in 2013 than Starling Marte having a breakout year as a hitter. The Pirates have Andrew McCutchen, who is a known superstar-level asset, they have Neil Wakler, who can be counted on to be a solid contributor at the plate if healthy, and they have Pedro Alvarez, who will probably fall somewhere in between with some danger of cratering. Marte will, at the very least, contribute real value to the team defensively, but the Pirates need more than that. They need another dynamic hitter that can help drive the Pirates' lineup to be something other than below average. They need Winter Ball Starling Marte, who drew 13 walks and only struck out 23 times in 120+ plate appearances to go with all of his extra base hits (four doubles, four triples, two homers). Starling Marte could be that hitter for the Pirates, but there's absolutely no way to be sure about it right now. 

I wrote about Travis Snider and whether or not I thought he was a breakout candidate last week. About halfway through that post I thought to myself, "This is silly. Starling Marte is way more important to the Pirates." His approach at the plate is one of the few things to keep an eye on in spring training that might be important for the coming season. Really, I think it's this simple: it's hard to imagine the Pirates being a good team in 2013 or 2014 without Marte becoming a legitimate top or middle of the order hitter and it's not a slam dunk that he will be. 

Remember when I said that this season was making me awfully nervous? This kind of thing is exactly why. 

Rob Biertempfel tweeted from Bradenton today that Jeff Karstens isn't throwing for a couple of days because he's being cautious with a sore shoulder. The whole thing is made to sound like it's not a big deal and that Karstens will be fine in a couple of days. That doesn't mean I'm not concerned, though. 

Let's play detective here. The Pirates were unwilling to even tender Jeff Karstens a contract this winter, despite being due a relatively modest raise to the ballpark of $4 million. They were unable to trade him as the deadline to tender him approached. Karstens became a free agent, and no one wanted to touch him even though Kevin Correia got a two-year/$10 million deal from Minnesota. The market for him was so poor that Pirates re-signed him for $2.5 million, a $600k pay decrease from last year. 

Presumably, part of the reason that there was such little interest in Karstens was his health. Karstens missed time in August of 2011 with a shoulder injury, then spent more than two months of the early part of last year on the disabled list with shoulder problems. Today, we get news about another sore shoulder. Literally just yesterday, Russell Carleton published a piece at Baseball Prospectus (no subscription required) about predicting pitcher injuries. You should read the whole thing, but the conclusion is that nothing predicts injuries better than previous injuries. Elbow injuries beget more elbow injuries and shoulder injuries beget more shoulder injuries. 

Jeff Karstens has had shoulder issues two seasons in a row. Jeff Karstens already has shoulder issues a week into camp. This is pretty concerning, no matter how much it's being downplayed right now. 

Rob Biertempfel says this morning that the Pirates have extended Clint Hurdle through the 2014 season with an option for 2015. We're at a slow point for spring training news (everyone's in Bradenton but nothing's going to happen) so I suppose this will probably get some play in the news for the next 18 hours or thereabouts, but I think that it's pretty uninteresting as far as news goes. 

Hurdle's contract was due up at the end of 2013 and "lame duck" status for managers is something the media loves to drum up into controversy, so this takes care of it. The reality is that 2013 is probably Neal Huntington's last shot at putting a winning team on the field at PNC Park. If the Pirates are disappointing in any way this year, Huntington will be out the door and if he goes, Hurdle will almost certainly follow him. The actual status of his contract probably doesn't matter much.

Over at Baseball Prospectus, Colin Wyers rolled out this year's first Playoff Odds Report last night. He goes into quite a bit of depth explaining what the Playoff Odds Report is here ($), but the long and short of it is that they take the preliminary depth charts and run a bunch of simulations using PECOTA as a baseline to project what's going to happen over the course of the season. There are, of course, a million caveats (spring training battles and injuries and PECOTA's strengths and weaknesses and so on and so forth), but it's usually a pretty instructive way to understand exactly how thigns stand at this point in the pre-pre-season. This is how the first run of the odds sees the NL Central: 

A 17% chance of making the playoffs! A better-than-one-in-ten chance of making the division round! Almost a full percentage point of a chance of winning the World Series! 

Look, I know that celebrating this seems sarcastic or cynical or worse, but I'm posting this to be legitimately hopeful. It's been a long time since any pre-season projection program has seen the Pirates as a near-.500 team that could make the playoffs more than a handful of times in 100 simulations. As I've been saying all winter, the Pirates aren't quite there yet and you still have to do some dreaming to imagine this group of players as a playoff team, but at least there's less dreaming to be done than in previous years. 

While reading Baseball Prospectus's list of nine potential breakout candidates yesterday, I was legitimately surprised to find Travis Snider at number six on the list. Then, I thought about it some and decided that I was surprised to find myself surprised to find Travis Snider at number six on the list. I was excited when the Pirates traded for him in July and he actually played pretty well until the hamstring injury messed up the end of his season. I puzzled some more and I realized that I really don't have much of a handle on my expectations for Travis Snider for the 2013 season. Snider, or at least the concept of finding a second dynamic outfield bat to help Andrew McCutchen carry the load o in the lineup, is pretty important to the Pirates in 2013, so it's probably a time to try and figure out what to expect. 

The good news is that by Valentine's Day, most of the projection systems have churned out their numbers for the Pirates. Let's look at what the various projections see for Snider: 

PECOTA ($): .249/.308/.419 with 11 homers in 336 plate appearances. That's a TAv of .264, which is just about average for Random Hitter X, but probably a little on the low side for a corner outfielder.

ZiPS: .253/.310/.403 with 13 homers in 497 plate appearances. That's a wOBA of .309, which by rule of thumb is below average in general. 

Steamer (link goes to FanGraphs page, where Bill James and Oliver projections can be found, as well): .267/.334/.459 in with 19 homers in 530 plate appearances. wOBA is .341.

Bill James: .278/.345/.468 with 11 homers in 312 plate appearances. wOBA: .352

Oliver: .262/.324/.437 with 16 homers in 482 plate appearances. wOBA: .328

In short, we've got two systems (Steamer and James) that see a breakout year for Snider. Two systems (PECOTA and ZiPS) that see disappointment in his future and one (Oliver) that basically splits the difference. Of course, no projection system is perfect. James's projections, for example, are almost always hitter-friendly. Oliver uses a unique MLE calculator for minor league numbers which tends to make it useful for young players. ZiPS and PECOTA both use historical comparisons and adjust for aging with various levels of complexity.

The important question with regards to Snider at this point is probably this: just how much do his minor league numbers still matter? His ZiPS and PECOTA projections are below-average because he's been a mostly below-average Major League hitter since 2009. The question we should really be asking at this point is if there's any good reason to believe that this is a poor conclusion to draw. 

Snider's first month as a Pirate was fairly promising. He hit .301/.385/.422 in 28 games. His power was noteably below expectation (he had only five doubles, a triple, and a homer among his 25 hits), but he also only struck out 17 times in 96 plate appearances. That's noteably lower than his 26.7% career big league rate and lower than even his 22.8% minor league rate, so it seemed like maybe the Pirates had him working on his swing. It was hard to tell, though, because he was already struggling with the hamstring by late August and it got pretty bad in September. He finished the season terribly (.156/.204/.156 post August 31). 

Here's what we have heading into 2013 with Snider: a 25-year old that's now four years removed from being one of baseball's best prospects, 1,062 big league plate appearances with an OPS+ of 94, and a few flashes of his talent peppered here and there throughout the five years that he's spent part of in the big leagues. What does that mean? Given the other options (Clint Robinson and Gaby Sanchez getting more time at first base, Jose Tabata, Alex Presley), I think that the right field job should be Snider's to lose and that he should get some substantial at-bats at least in the early part of the season. From February, he's young enough that he deserves one more chance and he's almost certainly the Pirates best option. It's just that I can't really find anything to convince me that he's going to make any more with this chance than he already has. I hope I'm wrong.