The Pirates and Mets play again tonight, as the Pirates gun for their second straight win, which is apparently something that baseball teams are capable of doing from time to time. Jeremy Hefner is starting for the Mets. You may remember him as that guy that was on the Pirates' 40-man roster for no reason anyone could understand for two weeks this winter, then was gone. He's not very good. Jeff Locke is pitching for the Pirates. He's been decent in some of his starts this year, but he's yet to put together a really solid five or six inning performance. 

No one will be talking about this game, because Frank Coonelly announced this afternoon that he's got full confidence in Neal Huntington and his baseball ops team. I will of course work on putting together a post about that tonight. First pitch is at 7:10.

My complete disinterest in Pirate games these days and my rising level of lab work to do have put me way behind on the news cycle lately, but yesterday long-time Pirate and Jack Wilson announced that as soon as the 2012 playoffs end he'll be retiring from baseball. Wilson was released by the Braves at the end of August, but has apparently been hanging around the team for their stretch run and will be in Pittsburgh with them to close out the 2012 season. 

I always had a pretty complicated player/fan relationship with Wilson; his defense was nothing short of spectacular, but for his best seasons we didn't even have the imperfect fielding metrics that we have now. He was playing in an era of offense when everyone's understanding of offense was increasing, with his real value tied up in something that most fans (myself included) had a hard time properly evaluating. As a result, I spent a lot of time pointing out that Wilson's offense wasn't nearly as good as it was sometimes played up to be, but I never realized what a truly great shortstop he was until after his time as a Pirate had ended. 

Going by Defensive Runs Saved, Clint Barmes has been worth about 14 runs in the field to the Pirates this year. That's pretty good; his defensive WAR at Baseball-Reference is 2.2, which means that he's the sixth-best defensive player in the National League this year. That means that as putrid as Barmes's bat has been, he's still been above-replacement as a shortstop this year. In 2005, DRS says Jack Wilson was worth 32 runs at shortstop. That gave him a dWAR of 4.1, which lead the National League by almost a full win (Craig Counsell was second with 3.4 dWAR). In 2004, Wilson's career year at the plate, he hit .308/.335/.459 with 41 doubles, 12 triples, and 11 homers. His WAR that season was 4.5. In 2005, his offense dipped badly, to .257/.299/.363 with 24 doubles, 7 triples, and eight homers. His glove was so spectacular that year that his WAR was still 3.9. He never played anything that resembled a full season after 2005. 

In the Bucs Dugout thread about Wilson yesterday, Vlad posted this defensive highlight reel. It's long, but you should find time to try and watch it today. What's most impressive to me is that in his prime, there was no play Wilson couldn't make. He could range all the way to his right to backhand the ball and make an off-balance jump-throw strike to first from shallow left field. He could bare-hand a dying quail in front of second base. He could make plays behind second base with enough presence of mind to flip the ball to a second baseman, who would be better positioned for the throw. He could leap to snag a liner or track a pop-up all the way down the left field line, and if there was ever anyone on base for those plays he was always immediately ready to snap a throw where it needed to go to catch a sleeping runner. 

Watching Wilson play short as a Pirate was always a pleasure, but I think that maybe he's the sort of player that can only be fully appreciated when he's gone. When Clint Barmes comes to town and has a solid season with a glove, but you notice every single time his feet get tied up on an off-balance throw or he can't quite get to a ball in the hole and you can't quite figure out why, but then you watch the Jack Wilson highlight video and you realize that Barmes is fine, he's just not quite Jack Wilson and that that's what your brain expects a good defensive shortstop to look like. As it turns out, that's not really a fair standard to judge anyone by. 

I want you to imagine, just for one second, that on April 1st someone would've told you that by September 26th, Pedro Alvarez and Andrew McCutchen would both have 30 home runs and Garrett Jones would have 25. After you had some time to process that information, that same person would tell you that Wandy Rodriguez would have five wins as a Pittsburgh Pirate on that same date. 

What would you assume the Pirates record would be through 154 games? What kind of narrative for the season would you have written in your head, knowing nothing else about 2012? How giddy would you be about Pedro's 30 homers? Would you even bother to ask if he got his strikeout rate under 30%? How would you explain Wandy? Would you just assume McCutchen was an MVP candidate with those 30 homers or would you want to know more? 

I'm not asking these questions to try and remove context to make it seem like the Pirates have had a good season ("Context is everything," Chuck Klosterman once wrote, and he was right). Instead, I'm just illustrating what a supremely weird season this has been for the Pittsburgh Pirates. The things we thought were important in spring training turned out to matter a little bit less than we thought they would. Pedro Alvarez and Andrew McCutchen and Garrett Jones have hit 85 home runs between them (at least!) and that's still not enough to get the Pirates over .500. Who any part of that sentence coming just a few months ago?

The Pirates play a game tonight against another baseball team. Two guys will pitch. The game is probably at 7:05, or thereabouts. If you are watching the Pirates right now, you are clinically insane.

While I started gathering thoughts for my post about Neal Huntington's future with the Pirates over the weekend, I kept getting stuck on the idea of how much blame a front office (or a coaching staff, or the players, or anyone really) should get for a collapse like the one the Pirates have endured this season. This is not to say that no one deserves blame for this sort of thin, this is to say that this kind of thing is not at all a normal event in baseball and  so while it's easy to say, "It's happened to Hurdle two years in a row, FIRE HIM!" or "It's happened to Huntington two years in a row, FIRE HIM!" I'm not at all certain that that's the right or best way to look at things. 

At the end of July, as the Pirates' play started to trail off a bit post-All Star break and some of the more skittish fans started to worry about the team collapsing, Rob Neyer looked at the chances that the team would fold up like they did in 2011 and came to this conclusion: 

Now, it wasn't difficult to predict that the [2011] Pirates would not finish in first place, or qualify for the postseason at all. It would have been exceptionally difficult to predict they would utterly collapse, going 22-46 the rest of the way and finishing 24 games out of first place. A collapse of that magnitude is moderately historic and simply cannot be predicted.

Which is why, without knowing anything else, we would not predict a similar collapse, or even much of a collapse at all, for this year's Pirates.

He then went on to detail all of the things that, to that point, made the 2012 Pirates better than the 2011 Pirates. In other words, we all knew the 2011 Pirates weren't as good as their 100 game record, but that collapse was still hugely unlikely. To that point we had every reason to believe that the 2012 Pirates were better than that, and even if they weren't that much better, well, that sort of collapse is difficult to duplicate. 

Of course, we know now that the Pirates haven't just duplicated last season's collapse, but surpassed it. Jayson Stark tells us that this is the worst collapse after 108 games in baseball history and frankly, by the time this wretched season is all said and done, it won't even be close. Two years in a row, I've tried to tell myself (and anyone that reads this site) that expecting the Pirates to collapse because they played over their heads through 100 games is just gambler's fallacy and two years in a row, I've been wrong. 

Instead of finding out some way to assign blame for this whole thing*, I just feel like throwing my hands up in the air and screaming "WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY?" There was no obvious reason for this collapse looming behind the scenes on game 101, there's no obvious link between what happened last year and what's happening this year. There must be some connection, of course, but it's not something that we can say, "THIS! THIS IS WHAT NEEDS TO CHANGE AND ONCE THIS CHANGES IT WILL ALL BE OK FOR THE PIRATES!" To be honest, even if you believe that these successive collapses are entirely the work of a front office that is incapable of building a good roster or a manager that can't keep his players focused for 162 games, the statistical probabilities of this happening for two straight years are staggering.

I'm a scientist. I like real answers. I don't like ascribing things to curses or throwing my hands up and saying, "God hates Pirate fans." It's just that sometimes, the Pirates make it really, really hard not to do those kinds of things.  

*People are quick to do this right now, but I think that this is way more complicated than people are making it seem. Go back to the day of the Wandy Rodriguez trade and imagine that by the end of September Kyle McPherson and Jeff Locke and Kevin Correia would all be mainstays in the rotation. Would you have known then that not only would James McDonald not find himself in the second half, but that Erik Bedard would be so bad the team would jettison him entirely and Jeff Karstens would get stuck in a weird injury limbo and AJ Burnett would regress back towards where you'd expect 35-year old AJ Burnett to be? And if you could have anticipated all of those things back in July, what else could you have done besides trading for Wandy Rodriguez and hoping that it was enough? That's not to let anyone off of the hook here, but to re-iterate that I think that this collapse is a complicated issue and when you try to assess jobs for managers and GMs as this season winds down that you have to look at a full picture of two years or five years and not assign undue weight to 50 games, even if those 50 games are awful, even if those 50 games are the freshest things on our minds. And again, this isn't me sugar-coating things for anyone or trying to duck handing out blame; I'm slow to base anything in baseball on the outcomes of 50 games, no matter how great or awful

Once upon a time, the New York Mets were 46-39 and in the thick of the NL wild card race. No one really expected them to be there, but with a combination of good starting pitching, some unlikely help on offense, and some good luck it seemed like maybe they were starting to turn things around. Since then, the Mets have gone 23-44. Their pitching has imploded, they've dealt with injuries, the good luck has gone away and for most of the second half they've been a depressing shell of a baseball team just playing out its string of games. 

Once upon a time, the Pittsburgh Pirates were 63-47 and leading the NL wild card race. No one really expected them to be there, but with a combination of good starting pitching, some unlikely help on offense, and some good luck it seemed like maybe they were starting to turn things around. Since then, the Pirates have gone 12-30. Their pitching has imploded, they've dealt with injuries, the good luck has gone away and for most of the second half they've been a depressing shell of a baseball team just playing out its string of games. 

This isn't the last season of the year for the Pirates or Mets, but it's pretty fitting that these two teams will be actively attempting to lose baseball games to each other this week. It'll probably be pretty hilarious to watch (Ronny Cedeno is involved!), but only if you can stomach watching the end of the Pirates' historic collapse. Kyle McPherson makes his first big league start tonight against Jenrry Mejia. First pitch is at 7:05.

Since Dejan Kovacevic first broke the story about the Kyle Stark-lead Navy SEAL training last week, I've been thinking about the whole situation and trying to figure out how much I really care about it. Last night, DK put up a second column that goes into more detail, and I was able to corral my thoughts a little bit better. They go something like this: 

I don't care at all if Stark wants to put his players through crazy Navy SEAL training. It's three days, and we're mostly talking about young guys and trying to instill some work ethic. It seems a little intense and maybe a little extreme, but I don't really think it's out of bounds for the Pirates to do something like this at their fall instructionals. 

I don't really care about Stark's slightly crazy e-mail, either. The Hells Angels stuff was a bad comparison to draw, but I think that invoking the name of any organized crime group is something that's done colloquially quite a bit by people too young to remember when those sorts of organizations were a bigger deal in the country (I'm talking about people my age, of course; Stark is seven years older than I am). I'm not necessarily condoning that kind of speaking/writing without thinking and I'm not denying that he comes off like a little bit of a crazy person, I'm just saying that neither of those things prevent him from being good at his job and I'm not really willing to judge him based on those things. 

I'm honestly not sure that I care that an American League scout thinks that the Pirates' development program is a joke, either. The reality is that there are a lot of things we don't know about player development and I think that the biggest sin is not doing things differently. I'm not sure that the way the Pirates do things is the right way, mind you, just that I'm not sure that I care what other teams think about the Pirates.

I think that the development/scouting question is definitely a chicken/egg question and for all of the draft busts that the Pirates have had in the Huntington era, you can definitely point to the Rudy Owenses and Alex Presleys as players that no one thought had a chance that blossomed into Major Leaguers (well, I'm extrapolating for Owens here) under the Huntington/Stark regime. Who gets credit for Alen Hanson and Gregory Polanco exploding this year? The scouting staff that found them, or the development staff that brought them into a new country and helped them adapt and use their raw talent? I definitely agree with the idea that the Pirates don't have as much talent in their system as they should given the money that they spent from 2008-2011 in the draft, but I'm not at all sure where to point that finger, other than to point it at the guy at the top. Neal Huntington is his own post, though; we'll talk more about him and Clint Hurdle and Frank Coonelly next week. 

All of which is to say that a lot of the things that have been discussed about Kyle Stark in the last week are weird and off-putting, but I don't think they're necessarily damning to his ability to do his job. There's a big exception, though. It's really concerning to me that DK wrote his story calling Stark's methods into question last week and that that apparently lead to an avalanche of unsolicited criticism of Stark from within the team. It's one thing if players are complaining about unconventional training or other teams are skeptical of what the Pirates are doing, but it's worrisome to me that team employees are forwarding internal e-mails to the media to basically say, "You think this guy's crazy? Check this out!" Being unconventional is one thing, but creating an environment that leads to your employees just chomping at the bit to sell you out, well, now in that light, all that other stuff starts to look really bad. And of course, if people are just waiting to sell Stark out because he's a megalomaniac, that's on the people that have continually employed him every bit as much as it's on Stark himself.

I sincerely doubt that the Pirates will stand pat after a second straight collapse this winter, in terms of the people running the club. The biggest question I have after reading things like this is exactly how much change is necessary.

You were surprised by this? I wasn't. 

The Pirates are 74-74. They haven't been under .500 since they were 24-25 on May 29th. Given the way things have gone of late, this may be the very last moment that the 2012 Pirates were an above-average baseball team. That ... is pretty sad. 

The first pitch today is at 4:05, with Wandy Rodriguez and Mike Fiers on the mound. Also, you may have noticed WHYGAVS is a bit different today; this is part of Bloguin's site-wide re-design. It'll probably take me a few days to get everything worked out, but for the most part things should be the same. The one thing that is important to point out is that the comments sections still exist, you just have to click on the title of the post to get to the page with comments on them.