In a surprising move this morning, the Los Angeles Dodgers have announced the most important signing of the off-season. They have acquired the single most prized free agent in the history of all space and time, and somehow, they inked him to a minor league deal. That's right. The Los Angeles Dodgers have signed ... Doug Mientkiewicz.

The Dodgers are still a terrible offensive team and will remain that way until Manny Ramirez is re-signed, but this move today clinches a World Series trophy for them earlier than any team in history has ever won the Commissioner's Trophy. Mientkiewicz provides the Dodgers with an intangible amount of hustle, an incredible field of illusion that allows normally right-thinking fans and observers to believe that he's effective as a third baseman and a great base runner, bountiful subject matter for Bill Plaschke, especially on the subject, "My mancrush, the genius Ned Colletti,"  and some disillusioned Pittsburgh Pirate fans/player personnel experts.

"You know, most fans think we should be working on a deal with Manny Ramirez," said Colletti, "But the truth of the matter is, Mientkiewicz has always been our top priority this offseason. I mean, how could he not br? Have you seen his stubble? When's the last time anyone has won a World Series without a player that has stubble like that? Huh? I'll tell you one thing, I don't know how a terrible franchise like the Pirates could pass up a player like this. I mean, we just clinched the World Series. Why wouldn't the Pirates want that? Do they hate their fans?"

Pirate general manager Neal Huntington couldn't be reached for comment, but reports out of Bradenton say that the nerd was muttering something about Eric Hinske's total value to the club being far greater than Mientkiewicz's because he can play several positions and actually hit for a little power. Whatever that means.

Just some quick-hit thoughts and links on the first game and other miscellenea:

-I liked the job Tim Neverett did in the booth. As a few people noted, his voice is vaguely reminiscent of Bob Uecker's. That's not a bad thing. I think he'll do just fine in the Pirates' booth.

-Remember, it's spring training. Pitchers approach their game plans differently, they throw differently, and hitters do the same thing. Everyone's just trying to work out the kinks for the season.

-So don't get too excited about Shelby Ford's home run or, you know, the 8-1 win.

-Or too down about Pedro Alvarez's strikeout.

This is a great read for any aspiring bloggers out there, or really for anyone interested in the evolution of the medium.

I'm getting slaughtered by Behind the Steel Curtain in the Elite Eight of Sean's Pittsburgh Sports Blog Tournament. They run a great Steeler blog over there, so vote for one of us and as always, check out the other blogs.

Honestly, I'm kind of looking forward to watching A-Rod this year.

Jim Bowden is close to heading to wherever it is that bad GMs go when they get fired. Jim Hendry's staff, I guess.

Baseball's back! Ah, what an awesome day.

Does the first game of the spring get a gamethread? I don't see why it shouldn't, though I'm posting it more as an "afternoon discussion while there happens to be a baseball game taking place" thread than anything. I obviously won't do this for every game since the spring training novelty wears off in about 48 hours, but the first game is always exciting, even if Chris Bootcheck is starting and there won't even be one starting pitcher involved.

For one point of discussion, though, I'm thinking about moving the gamethreads this year into the forum for a couple of reasons. One is admittedly that I'm trying to get people using the forum more regularly and the other is that I think that it's probably better suited for that kind of thing than these comments. If I do make the switch, I'll certainly make it as easy as possible; I'll probably just shut the comments for those particular posts off and post a link to the forum instead. My question is, how opposed is everyone to this? I'm mean, I'm sure everyone hates the idea, but how much do you hate it?

Baseball's here! Well, sort of. But it's been a long winter and I'll take what I can get.

UPDATE: If you're out of the range of 104.7 or any of the affiliates, the radio broadcast is available through Pirates.com today. I'm not sure who it's available to, but I had GameDay audio this year and haven't re-upped yet and I'm listening to it.

People ask me what I do in winter when there's no baseball. I'll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring.” - Rogers Hornsby

I suppose we can start this post with a bit of an announcement. The Road to 17 cannot end with a rundown of 2008, because the road itself leads through 2009. Accordingly, I've decided to keep what is already the longest running column in WHYGAVS history running on an approximately weekly basis throughout this season. It's easy to get into a slump writing any blog, but it's especially easy to do when writing a blog about a baseball team like the Pirates. Too many times in seasons past, I've fallen into a "Links/Gamethread/Recap" cycle during the dog days of the summer, so keeping the Road to 17 running is my way of trying to make myself write something real about the Pirates at least once a week. Obviously the focus is going to differ from the off-season posts, but I haven't run out of things to write about in nearly four years on this blog so I'm pretty confidant I'll have something to talk about.

So maybe tomorrow will be a nine-pitcher carousel and the score will be so meaningless that they might as well not even keep it. So maybe the biggest reason I'll put the radio broadcast on my computer is to hear Tim Neverett call a game. For about a week now my mind has been churning with ideas for pre-season preview posts, ideas for video previews for FanHouse, and a million other things that go with baseball season starting. Football and the Super Bowl and everything was a blast, but it might as well have been a million years ago because spring training's here.

Every spring at least one person asks me how I can possibly be excited for baseball when I know what's coming with the Pirates. I never know how to answer that question, except to say that I really do love baseball. Every year has its own special moments, whether it's catching the last two innings of the ridiculous comeback against the Cardinals last year, staying up until an ungodly hour to watch the end of the 18 inning marathon against the Astros with my brother, or being at the Mackowiak double header with my dad. If I give up the Pirates, I give up the little things that make baseball awesome. I don't have to tell you that there's no way that's happening.

And so here we are on February 25th, and I'm checking Durham's schedule to see when Indy will be in town, I'm checking Lynchburg's schedule to see when they come to Winston-Salem in hopes that I can catch a glimpse of Pedro Alvarez, I'm upset that the Pirates only trip to DC this year is during the week so that I can't take a weekend to see them. It's baseball season. So maybe the Pirates will set the most ignominious of all sports records this year. That doesn't mean this season won't have its moments. And besides, who's getting off the train after coming this far?

From today's PG comes what I think is my favorite photo caption ever. For some reason, you have to see the picture and the caption together for the full effect.

So Jason Davis is a taxidermist and Brian Slocum is a barber. What can't these guys do?

It's OK. You can say "pitch." I won't hold it against you.

So the earlier entries have hit Maholm, Snell, Duke, Gorzelanny, and Ohlendorf in this series, which means that I've probably already covered the starting rotation. I've written in a few places that I thought that Jeff Karstens would get the final starting spot over Zach Duke, but the team has indicated that they're going keep Duke in the rotation, so I'm guessing Karstens is the odd man out. Is that a good decision? Let's find out.

The first thing that jumps out at me in Karsten's numbers from last year is that he got a decision in his first eight starts. That doesn't actually mean anything at all, it's just really weird. It's probably more important that those last six decisions were all losses and even in his two wins, including his near perfect game against Arizona in his second start with the Pirates, he didn't pitch as well as his 0.00 ERA showed.  (I'm looking at his 6/5 K/BB ratio 15 innings).

Since we don't have a lot to go on with Karstens, let's take a look at his awesome start against the D'Backs and then a look at one of his uglier starts down the road to see if there's anything he did differently in the two starts. If you'd like to follow along at home, I'll be looking at data and stats from the August 6th start against the D'Backs and the August 17th start against the Mets (chosen because it was one of his longer poor outings, it's hard to learn anything from a 60 pitch shelling). As always, a hat-tip goes to Brooks Baseball for compiling this data.

The initial glance at the pitch charts (which, as the usual caveat goes, can be unreliable but work for the purpose of this exercise, etc. etc.) don't show much amiss. Pitch selection and pitch speed seem to be pretty similar in the two games, so there's not much to talk about there. And Karstens actually threw more strikes in his second start. I noticed, though, that the horizontal break numbers seemed weirdly different. Check out the overhead view of his pitches from the two starts (the first start against the D'Backs is on top):

Both his fastball and his changeup have a lot more horizontal break in the first start than they do in the second. There are a number of reasons for this. The algorithim that determines pitch type often gets confused between fastballs, sinkers, and two-seamers and has a hard time telling them apart and the same goes for the changeup, depending on the difference in speed. Karstens doesn't normally throw a sinker, though, and his changeup is at about 10 mph slower than his . Maybe the pitch had more movement on it, but it also looks like he was either throwing it from a slightly different arm slot or he moved to another spot on the rubber to throw it.

This certainly makes some sort of intuitive sense. If Karstens' fastball had more movement against Arizona, he probably had a harder time throwing it for strikes, but it would more effective, especially against righties, who the pitch was tailing away from on the day of his near perfect game. Then again, his slider seems to have much more break on it (look at where it starts and where it finishes on both graphs) in the second start.

Then again, Karstens only threw nine sliders in the 95 pitches he threw against the Mets, compared to 23 out of 115 against the D'Backs. Lower sample size means more variation in the pitches, so I don't think we can draw a conclusion from that. Instead, we'll stick with the fastballs. I went back in and looked at a few more Karstens starts. His fastball looked straight again on August 25 against the Cubs where he got shelled and again on September 7 where the offensively challenged Giants teed off on him for three innings.

It's hard to say anything conclusive from just looking at a few games' worth of data, but like I said above, this makes a lot of sense to me. Karstens doesn't really have any special qualities beyond the ability to throw strikes with a few different pitches and he can't really throw much past people. That makes him either (a) Josh Fogg redux or (b) the right-handed Zach Duke, whichever you prefer. A little bit of extra bend on his curveball and fastball could really throw a team off at the plate. Of course, the real questions are whether or not he knows how he did what he did against Arizona and how hitters would adjust to it if they saw it more often. I'm guessing Karstens will start the year out in the pen, so he'll have some time to play around with this sort of thing.

Attention Craig Hansen, Danny Moskos, and Andy LaRoche. Especially you, Andy LaRoche. If you perform well at baseball, people will forget all of the bad things they had been saying about you.

"Pedro Alvarez has Willie Stargell's swing," the patriarch of Pirates catchers [Manny Sanguillen] was saying Thursday. "I played with him a lot of years. I know that swing."

So you watch. Then you discover everybody else seems to be watching, too. On Friday, Sanguillen sidled over to a batting practice on Pirate City's Field 4, away from his usual bullpen haunts, to catch a glimpse. No more is this the second-overall selection of June's draft. No more is this the Vanderbilt third baseman with whose agent Pirates management performed a contract dance for 2 1/2 months. No more is this the kid whose diagnosed tendinitis in his knees left him out of shape in January's minicamp.

I am a big proponent of letting players be themselves. Pedro Alvarez will have enough trouble living up to his own hype to become the first Pedro Alvarez, let alone the second Willie Stargell. Still, it's awesome to read some positive things about this kid after the ugly beginning of his Pirate career. And while I don't know that his swing looks like Pop's swing, well, it sure is pretty.

So I've spent much of today in a "thesis proposal bubble," sitting in lab trying to write up my preliminary results and make a research plan for the next three to four years of my life. Since this is due tomorrow for class, I haven't spent a whole lot of time thinking about the Pirates. I have, however, noticed the furor over Andy LaRoche's back problem and this quote:

A couple of years ago, LaRoche was hobbled by a protruding disc. He did not need surgery and the problem went away when LaRoche began a dedicated exercise program.

"My back felt great and this offseason I didn't really stick with (the exercises) like I should," LaRoche admitted. "I guess the doctors were right when they said I'll have to stick with them for the rest of my career."

Charlie is a little perturbed by the statement, but Matt at the Pittsburgh Lumber Company thinks everyone is over-reacting.

My initial reaction was to shrug this off. By most reports, LaRoche has been swinging the bat all winter and doing his best to try and figure out/fix what was wrong with him in his stint with the Pirates at the end of last season. Not doing his back exercises seems stupid, but hey, LaRoche is a pretty young guy and young people do stupid things all the time. For example, I'm about 16 months younger than LaRoche and very allergic to cats. I have a friend that has a cat and every time I go to his apartment without taking some sort of allergy medicine before I go over, I'm a sneezing, sniffling, watery-eyed mess within about 20 minutes. I KNOW this happens, but three out of four times, I don't take allergy medicine before I go over anyways. This is because I'm too stubborn/lazy/distracted by other things to remember. So if Andy LaRoche doesn't do his back stretches, I sort of get it.

But that's not really the point here, is it? The point is, we've got a player coming off of one of the more embarrassing performances I can remember by a top-level prospect. LaRoche was so bad in 2008 with the Pirates that he went from being, "He's like his brother only he hits all year," to "Gee whiz, if he'd turn in a season like Jason Kendall did after his debilitating thumb injury, I'd be pretty damn excited." We were supposed to believe that LaRoche took his slump personally and that he was working all winter to find his swing again and figure out what he needed to do to get back on track. And now we find out that he wasn't doing back exercises that his doctor specifically told him he'd have to do for the rest of his life and unsurprisingly, he's injured his back again.

Now granted, this doesn't seem to be a serious back problem and I'm sure LaRoche has "learned his lesson" and all that, but it is really pretty discomforting to hear that he stopped exercises he knew were important, just because his back felt OK. I guess my point is that until Andy LaRoche plays well enough, he just hasn't earned enough trust from the fans for us to just shrug this kind of news off.

John Russell gets his contract extended through 2010. Don't read too much into it, though, it's mostly to keep him from being a lame duck tis year, I think.

It's that time of year; I answered some questions about the Pirates for the Cardinals' blog C70 At the Bat.

Looks like Andy LaRoche is coming along OK with his back spasms. With the PECOTA and Hardball Times projections being recently released, I'll be updating the Andy LaRoche projection extravaganza pretty soon.

Danny Moskos has a blog now.

EDIT: Forgot to post a link to We Should Be GMs' Pirate Preview. Always interesting to see how fans of other teams look at the Buccos.