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.

This morning, DK posted on the possibility that the Pirates draft another Scott Boras client in the first round of the draft this year and says that Coonelly and Huntington and Greg Smith won't be deterred from drafting a Boras client, "even after what happened last summer."

But what did happen last summer? Didn't the Pirates play ball with Boras and prove that they were dedicated to signing a Boras client? I understand that the perception is that the Pirates buckled and gave Boras what he wanted, but the truth is that Boras operates as if the rules don't apply to him and if you try to hold him to those rules, he's going to mop the floor with you. The Pirates worked with him and they got Alvarez to sign for a fair price. That's what Boras is really concerned with and things might work out differently a second time around. I'm not saying they'll be easier, but the Royals have played ball with Boras in the past and in return, the focus of the suit that was filed last year wasn't Eric Hosmer.

Can we please get this out of the way right now? I sincerely doubt that there are many people that are regular readers here that really expect the Pirates to be this year's version of the Rays, so maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree here, but I've already seen a lot of, "The Rays did it last year, why can't we this year?" sort of talk in a lot of places and frigging Frank Coonelly apparently brought it up today when talking to the media after he talked to the team this morning.

With the way the Pirates have locked some of their key young players into contracts this year and the large amount of talent that they brought into the organization last year, it's certainly fair to say that the Pirates are trying to follow the same road map that got the Rays to the World Series last year. The problem is that the Pirates are still hundreds of miles away from that point. Last year, before the season even started, PECOTA was forecasting the Rays to win somewhere between 80 and 90 games while most people that had a real clue about baseball knew that they'd be much improved. Certainly, a large part of the media was writing the Rays off, but only because knowing that the Rays were primed for a breakout year would've required research beyond writing about the Yankees, Red Sox, and steroids for the better part of the winter.

This year's Pirates have been picked by PECOTA as the worst team in baseball, record-wise, and as the team with the worst chance of making the playoffs. The ZiPS projections for them are similarly bad. This doesn't mean that the Pirates are locks for the worst record in baseball or even for last place in the Central, but it does mean that the Pirates are a long way from shocking the world this year.

To be honest, I don't know why Coonelly and the ownership are putting such an emphasis on "improving the on-field product in 2009." I know we go through this again and again and I know that Frank Coonelly can't walk up to the reporters in Pirate City and say, "Look, we're going to suck in 2009 and the fans are going to have to deal with it." I understand that that's unfeasible, even though the roster they'll be fielding this year will scream it from the top of the USX Building. But what kills me is the way that these statements from Coonelly (like the ones from Nutting earlier this winter) raise the expectations of the casual fans. By saying right now that the Pirates will be improved in 2009 and the goal is to win and accountability and blah blah blah, they open themselves up to a ton of criticism from those same casual fans that they're catering to when none of that happens in 2009, even though they know right now that it's unlikely. So why bother?

ABC News recently  in with our favorite off-season minor league signings. To be honest, I still kind of thought this whole thing might be an elaborate hoax. That was until I saw them running the banana drill. You only run the banana drill if you're serious about baseball.

Via Walkoff Walk

Every once in a while, I find a blog that I really like and I completely forget about it or I forget to share the link here and when I remember that I've forgotten, I feel quite bad about it. Cardboard Gods is one of those blogs, where you can literally spend hours lost in posts. The reason I've suddenly remembered to share it is the current top post there is an awesome piece about Andy Van Slyke and the Pirates that links back here and showed up in my referrals. Josh says some very kind words about this blog and I thank him for that, but that isn't why I'm linking. Paragraphs like this are:

If you say Pittsburgh Pirates to me I think of a raucous party, Sister Sledge blaring, free-swinging sluggers Al-Olivering line-drive doubles into the gap and speedsters Omar-Morenoing around third and sliding into home safely in a cloud of glittering, vaguely illicit dust, the giddy treble of the disco in the Pirates’ fearsome game supported by the rock-solid morally upright thumping bass of slugging elder statesman Roberto Clemente on one end of the decade and slugging elder statesman Willie Stargell on the other.

Awesome stuff.

DK believes a salary cap is coming. I am bit skeptical. Prez at FanHouse is skeptical of John Henry's motives behind asking for a cap.

Sean's Ramblings has started a Pittsburgh Sports Blog tournament. There are some awesome blogs that he's put into the tournament that you might not know about and should check out. And Sean put a lot of work into making something fun to kick around during the down time before March Madness and the baseball season. And yes, I'm a #3 seed, so vote for me and feed my constant need for internet-based validation.

If you haven't read all the details yet, Frank Coonelly was apparently quite determined not to go to arbitration with Nate McLouth.

Not baseball related, but I've looked all over the place and I'm fairly certain that this isn't an Onion article.

I wrote a piece for FanHouse about Jose Canseco's role in the steroid era.

After having some formatting trouble, hearing some complaints, and getting deluged by spam comments, I've decided to switch to a new comment plug-in. A big thanks goes out to Derek with Bloguin, who's done a ton of work the last couple of days to get things changed over and make sure that all the comments that have been made so far were imported, and so now I'd just like some feedback from you guys on the new system since you are the ones that use the comments.

UPDATE (10:00 AM)- As Derek notes in the comments, if you register with the site and log in before you comment, you can leave a comment without the catchpa. You should probably do this for two reasons. One of them is that by registering, you'll have access to post in the forum. The second is because I will probably eventually get fed up with spammers or something and make it so that only registered users can leave comments. If you register now, you'll be ahead of the curve when that happens.