Former Pirate minority owner Jay Lustig gave an interview to the Tribune Review in a story that was published late last night in which he gave some perspective on Bob Nutting's reign as owner of the Pirates. I'd recommend reading the whole thing, but the key passage is this:

“If you are a small-market franchise, if you want to win, you have to be willing to lose ... money,” said Lustig, 58, a Rostraver money manager and businessman who also is board chairman of Adfitech Inc. “(Nutting's) problem is he is a rational owner in an irrational business.

“People say he is a cheap owner, but nothing is further from the truth. He allocates the money properly. He wants to make enough money to keep us from going into the red. He is running the business rationally, trying to make money. No small-market teams that win make money.”

Lustig goes on to say that, basically, he wishes the Pirates were owned by a real life equivalent of Jed Clampett; some crazy old man willing to throw away his substantial life savings on making the Pirates a winning baseball team. 

Let me be clear: obviously, what Lustig wants is what every Pirate fan wants. I would love (love love love love) to live in a universe where the Pirates could be on equal footing with the Yankees in the same way that the Steelers are on equal footing with the Cowboys and the Penguins are on equal footing with the Rangers. I would also love to never have to worry about grant money and for all of my experiments to always work on the first try. The problem is that (and here I'm going to pull out the biggest dork card in my arsenal) as Dumbledore once told Harry Potter, "It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live."

Who are these small market owners that operate with no regards to profit? Some of the best small market teams (Tampa Bay, Oakland) operate on much tighter budgets than the Pirates. The Reds and Brewers are similar teams to the Pirates and they both seem to have hit functional payroll caps in the ballpark of $90-100 million. This seems like a lot more money than the Pirates spend right now, but it won't when Andrew McCutchen's extension really kicks in and Neil Walker and Pedro Alvarez hit arbitration. 

Let's imagine that there is a billionaire that wants to call the Pirates. Let's give him a crazy name, like, say, "Mark Pork Ham And Swiss With Pickles And Yellow Mustard." Now, Mark PHASWPAYM has a ton of money and he even owns a successful NBA team, maybe the Mallas Davericks. How did he make that NBA team successful? It wasn't by pumping tons of money into the team at personal detriment to himself, it was by figuring out what other NBA teams were doing wrong and trying to do those things better than everyone else. Why on earth would we expect that Mr. Pork Ham And Swiss With Pickles And Yellow Mustard would run his baseball team differently? 

The Pirates' problem is this: in order to compete as a small market team, you have to be smarter and better than everyone else and I'm not sure that the Pirates are. They very honestly might have been if they'd been hired in 2001 instead of Dave Littlefield, but the way baseball teams are run has changed enormously in the last decade and the Pirates have been consistently behind the curve. Right now, the Pirates are followers in an arena where they need to be revolutionaries. The Yankees can afford to be behind the curve, but the Pirates just can't. 

It seems to me that our time as Pirate fans would be better spent wishing that the Pirates would find their own Andrew Friedman or Jeff Luhnow and less time hoping for The Perfect Owner to buy the team.

Like most baseball fans, I was glued to my computer tonight watching Yu Darvish dominate the Astros in his quest for a perfect game. The Astros are the Astros, sure, but Darvish's curveball was the proverbial wiffle curve tonight and it made the Astros look ridiculous all night. Darvish strung together strikeout after strikeout and out after out, putting down 26 hitters in a row, and then someone named Marwin Gonzalez singled though Darvish's legs, leaving him inches away from the perfect game. 

Like most baseball fans, I sighed a little bit. Who doesn't want to see a perfect game? Unlike most baseball fans, I immediately thought of Paul Wagner. 

You can be forgiven if you've forgotten Paul Wagner or never knew about him in the first place. Wagner was one in a long string of underwhelming starting pitchers for the Pirates, just one face in a sea of Josh Foggs. 1995 was particularly unkind to Paul Wagner. After 12 starts, he was 1-10 with a 5.94 ERA. He was removed from the rotation for a bit, then put back in for six more starts in July and early August. They went a little better, but not much. He was yanked from the rotation again in August, still searching for his second win. He made four relief appearances after that. The first two were OK: in one of them, he went five innings in relief of Esteban Loaiza and picked up his second win, in the second he was for some reason allowed to pitch the ninth inning of a two-run game and earned his third and final career save. The next two relief outings were pretty disastrous, though. Still, the Pirates put him back into the rotation for some reason to make a start against the Colorado Rockies in August 29th. 

For one night, Wagner found the zone. I'm not sure I'd say he was dominant because he put his share of runners on base (three walks and a HBP), but he racked up 11 strikeouts and kept the Rockies without a hit for eight innings. Wagner got the first two Rockies in the ninth, too, and then on a full count -- just one strike away from a no-hitter -- Andres Galarraga hit a little grounder into no-man's land between second and short for a hit.  Wagner got the next batter to finish up the one-hitter. 

It's funny what sticks with us. Every time I see a pitcher fall tantalizingly short of a no-hitter or a perfect game, I remember watching Paul Wagner just miss his improbable no-hitter. I suppose this is what being a Pirate fan will do to a person. 

Early this afternoon, Matt Bandi, James Santelli, and I had a Twitter conversation about when we expected to see Gerrit Cole, the merits of letting him dominate in the minors vs. struggle a bit in the Majors, and what the Pirates were hoping to see from him in Indianapolis in general. I'm sticking with my earlier prediction, that Cole will get just about as many starts with Indianapolis as he got in Altoona and Bradenton, and that we should probably expect him in the Pirates' rotation by early to mid June at the earliest. 

All of that being said, Will Carroll, baseball injury writer and Indianapolis native, Tweeted this out today: 

Opening Day in Indy won't be Cole vs Bauer. Cole's being matched up with 5 starter for Pittsburgh, which says he won't be around long.

— Will Carroll (@injuryexpert) April 2, 2013

Tim Williams, who knows as much about the Pirates' system as anyone, pointed out that that may be reading into things too much: 

@jamessantelli @injuryexpert I don't know if that means a lot. They're just continuing their normal five day rotations from Spring Training.

— Tim Williams (@timwilliamsP2) April 2, 2013

Now, on one hand it's true that the Pirates tend to hold prospects to individual schedules and that those schedules are completely independent of what's happening with the Major League team (see: Starling Marte). On the other hand, it's true that whether Cole is completely ready for Pittsburgh or not, there's an awfully good chance that he's going to be better than Jonathan Sanchez and Jeanmar Gomez right off the bat and that this Pirate team has a need for Gerrit Cole pretty much whenever. On a third seperate hand, the team should certainly take wasting a year of service time into account, especially when you consider that Cole threw less than 140 innings last year and that bringing him to Pittsburgh earlier will very likely cause his season to end earlier. Consider how badly the Nationals botched the Stephen Strasburg situation last year compared to how wonderfully the Braves handled Kris Medlen's innings in a similar bind and try to imagine Cole making a start in Pittsburgh on May 1, then Charlie Morton starting a one-game wild card playoff in October because Cole's been shelved for the season by hitting an inning coung.

What's the final takeaway? I don't know. I'm still not expecting Cole before June, but I'm willing to admit that there's room here for me to be wrong.

The easiest and probably most accurate way to describe the Pirates' 3-1 loss to the Cubs on Opening Day at PNC Park is probably this: it was cold out and when it's cold out, hard-throwing pitchers seem to do well, and as a result AJ Burnett and Jeff Samardzija combined for 19 strikeouts between them in just 13 2/3 innings combined work. 

Burnett was particularly awesome to watch today, setting ten Cubs down on strikes in his 5 2/3 innings. He gave up all three Cubs' runs, though; two of them came when Anthony Rizzo destroyed a mistake fastball in the first inning and one more came when Garrett Jones attempted poorly to play right field, letting a Wellington Castillo flyball drop for an RBI double on the warning track in right center. Other than that, Burnett was mostly unhittable. The bullpen behind him, which got called in for quite a bit of work due to Burnett needing 98 pitches to get through his 5 2/3 inning start in his quest to strike out All Of The Cubs, was also quite good. Justin Wilson whiffed two in 1 1/3 perfect innings, Jared Hughes recorded a strikeout in his perfect inning, and Mark Melancon struck out two in his hitless inning of work that was only prevented from being perfect by John McDonald's error. 

It's always important to remember that while Opening Day is infinitely more important than spring training of meaningless exhibition games agains the Altoona Curve, it's also just one day and it's very easy to overemphasize a bad result. That means that you'd really need the Jump To Conclusions Matt to decide that getting three-hit by Jeff Samardzija, Carlos Marmol, James Russell, and Kyuji Fujikawa is a sign that the Pirates' offense is back to the dismal state that it was in last April, no matter how terrible they looked against the floppy-haired Samardzija this afternoon. What I will say is that if you, like me, expect that good starts might be few and far between for the Pirates in the early part of 2013, then it's pretty disquieting to see them waste one right out of the gate. The Pirates really only even threatened twice in the entire game; once in the first inning when Starling Marte drew a leadoff walk and Garrett Jones reached on an error, then again in the ninth when Carlos Marmol was briefly allowed into the game and the Cubs seemed surprised to see him pitch like Carlos Marmol. 

The best part about baseball is that you never have to wait long for another chance after a rough performance, but then the worst part about Opening Day is that it's often followed by a built-in off day to protect against rainouts and so that second chance won't come until Wednesday night.

There is something amazing about the beginning of a baseball season. After a winter spent projecting and predicting and hypothesizing, guessing, and wondering, today is the day that we finally start building towards something. Today will give us 1/162th of what the final 2013 Pirates will be. That seems like a little impossible nothingth, but what is baseball if not a collection of impossible nothingths that build into something?

AJ Burnett takes the mound for the Pirates against the Cubs and Jeff Samardzija. The Pirates' lineup will be what you expect, only with Gaby Sanchez at first base and Garrett Jones in right field. I suspect that we'll see this lineup quite a bit, as opposed to the expected Tabata/Snider platoon in right, because it's the only way to keep a left-handed bat on the bench against right-handed pitching. I think that sacrificing production for pinch-hitting is dumb, but I am not a Major League manager. 

The first pitch today is at 1:35. It's cold, but it's still baseball. 

She looked at him, seeing him again, and the future be damned, since all possible futures ever envisaged are -- rusty sinks, two-week vacations and bombs or collective fraternity or harps and houris-- endlessly, sordidly dreary, all delight being in the present and its past, all truth, too, and all fidelity in the word, the flesh, the present moment: for the future, however you look at it, contains only one sure thing and that is death. But the moment is unpredictable. There is simply no telling what will happen. -- Ursula K. LeGuin, "A Week in the Country"

For much of Sunday, I sat in a chair staring at an empty editing box, unsure of how this season preview needed to begin. The Pirates are at a new crossroads in their eternal rebuilding process. The team itself is probably a year or so away from really being a contending team, but the Andrew McCutchen clock has been ticking and the front office has been in place for five years now. This is probably the most talented Pirate team to take the field on Opening Day since 1992 (the only other team that you could make a case for is the 1999 team that probably would've finished better than .500 if not for Jason Kendall's horrifying ankle injury), but this is also a flawed team that seems just not quite ready for the big stage yet. 

This is a pretty dangerous place for a baseball team to be. The Pirates really are closer to something good than they've been since the Bonds era, but they're also far enough away from it and deep enough into the Neal Huntington era that it doesn't seem like it's the wrong conclusion to think that someone else should be running the team if things go badly this year. Actually, that didn't seem like the wrong conclusion to make after things went badly last year. Huntington has mostly stuck to his guns by not trading prospects and keeping his eyes focused on the future, even last year in the heat of a playoff race. Still, Huntington faces the same question that all of us fans face: how do you know when it's time to stop looking to the future and start hoping for right now? 

I've said this before, but I think that the answer is in center field. Andrew McCutchen is like no one the Pirates have had since Bonds. I've never, ever seen anything like McCutchen's run from June 16th to July 17th last year. He went into the second game of the Pirates' series against Cleveland hitting .321/.382/.543, which put him firmly in the middle of a breakout season. Over the next 26 games, McCutchen hit 11 home runs, seven doubles, two triples, drove in 28 runs, and put up a .481/.521/.889 line. The Pirates went 18-8. The list of players that are capable of doing that for a full month can probably counted on one hand. McCutchen took an undermanned, 33-31 team and dragged it kicking and screaming into first place in that month. They couldn't stay there, but the fuse was lit. Even players like McCutchen only get so many seasons like last year; when you have a player like him in his prime, you have to stop looking off into the distance and start looking at what's right in front of you. If the Pirates can't win right now with McCutchen, when can they ever win?

This is mixed news. All of us Pirate fans have spent a lot of time in recent weeks dwelling on the wave of crap that this spring training season has heaped up on the North Shore of the Allegheny. It's true that it seems like a team that's supposed to be peaking in Year Five of its rebuild shouldn't be taking the field that with Jonathan Sanchez and John McDonald and Brandon Inge and it's hard to swallow that after years of trades and big draft spending that this is what the Pirates have to deal with. It's also true that those guys only make up the back end of a roster that, as mentioned, is probably the strongest roster the Pirates have opened a season with in 20 years. It's easy to moan and gnash teeth when you see McDonald and Sanchez and Inge on the roster and to wonder what the Pirates did all winter and how it came to this, but the honest reality is that the Pirates' best hope to improve this winter was set in stone the second the final pitch was thrown in 2012, before one free agent was signed or one non-roster invitation was sent out. 

The Pirates' best hope this season and next season and the season after that is that the young talent base built up by Neal Huntington drives the team forward in the same way that McCutchen did last year. This year, those hopes fall most squarely on Starling Marte, Pedro Alvarez, James McDonald, and probably Gerrit Cole. Alvarez had a breakout year last year in that even the most optimistic among us was starting to wonder if the ship had sailed by late April, before he picked himself up by his bootstraps and became a 30 homer guy. The Pirates need Alvarez to be a 30 homer guy again, but they need him to be a 35 homer guy with a .340 OBP and a .520 slugging percentage. They need the strikeouts to go down and the walks to go up. Alvarez's season last year was a breakout, but it was the bare minimum of what's really expected of Pedro as a rock in the middle of the lineup. If he can be better, the Pirates will be better. The same holds true of McDonald. For at least a month and quite possibly longer, the Pirates' rotation is going to give 40% of its starts to Jeff Locke and Jonathan Sanchez. It's possible that those starts will go better than the worst case scenario I've got in my head, but in the event that they don't, McDonald is the rotation's tipping point. We know that he can be dominant, mixing a fastball, curveball, slider, and sometimes a changeup to look a lot like a younger version of AJ Burnett. We know that he can lose the strike zone and wear down and be the most frustrating pitcher on the staff. The Pirates need good James McDonald this year; good James McDonald makes a huge difference while the Pirates wait on Francisco Liriano and Jeff Karstens and Gerrit Cole and he can continue to make a huge difference even after the Pirates have those guys, because I'm not sure that any of that trio will be better than First Half 2012 James McDonald in 2013. 

Starling Marte is his own category. I really have no idea what to expect from Marte, really, but I'm hugely excited to watch him play every day. He's unlike anything the Pirates have or have had in a while with his blinding speed, gap power, great arm, and great instincts in the field. If Marte can hit for the Pirates the way he's hit in the minors or the way he hit in winter ball, the Pirates have another dynamic middle-of-the-lineup hitter and MVP candidate to go with McCutchen. His talent means he's just capable of bringing more to the plate than a one-dimensional masher like Alvarez or a solid-but-unspectacular hitter like Neil Walker. The problem is that he's just so raw, it's impossible to know what to expect out of him this early in his career and it's really hard to count on anything more than spectacular defense and flashes of brilliance at the plate peppered by stretches of frustration.

Cole represents the future. Since early on in the Huntington era, the Pirates have cast their lot with pitching. As a result, the Pirates have a collection of minor league arms that rivals anything in baseball. Just about none of those arms have been able to help the Pirates, though, and the club is starting the season with Jonathan Sanchez in the rotation and Jeanmar Gomez in the bullpen. Cole can change that. He needs the work he'll get in the early season with Indianapolis, but if he breaks through, he'll get his shot with the Pirates this year. His talent level is unlike anything else the Pirates have in their rotation; at his ceiling, he's capable of dominating every night the way that Burnett and McDonald do on their best nights. He probably won't hit that ceiling this year, but he's the wild card in a rotation that's lacking right now. AJ Burnett, Wandy Rodriguez, James McDonald, Jonathan Sanchez, and Jeff Locke are decent and uninspiring at best, as rotations go. Gerrit Cole, AJ Burnett, Wandy Rodriguez, James McDonald and Francisco Liriano is a different animal entirely; one that could shut down opposing lineups for a week straight if all five guys are clicking at once. It's a rotation that could be very good, even if McDonald and Liriano are only performing inconsistently. 

Therein lies the difficulty in predicting what this Pirate team will do. On this Opening Day, it's easier than it's been in a long time to close your eyes and dream of PNC Park laced with bunting on a cold October night, to see your breath in front of your face and the Pirates in the playoffs behind it. This could happen in 2013. Most of the projection systems peg the Pirates as just about a .500 team right now. I've always said in the past that it's not all that hard for a team with 75-win talent to win 82 games. It's not impossible for a team with 80-win talent to win 87 games, either.

If that's what I want for this Pirate team in my heart, that's not what I see in my head or I feel in the pit of my stomach, though. There are still too many what-ifs. It'd be one thing for Alvarez to continue his progression forward or McDonald to finally put together a full season or Marte to just blow the doors off of the National League or Cole to come up in June and go straight into Verlander mode. It's not really unreasonable to expect any of those things to happen in isolation. It feels like a stretch, though, to hope for all of them to happen at once without anyone else going backwards. It could happen, but since when has everything going right for the Pirates all at once? And if everything doesn't go right, well, that's where the depth issues become a concern. What bugs me about John McDonald and Inge and Sanchez and Gomez isn't so much that they're on the roster, but that the Pirates have fallen apart two years in a row because they had no depth to cover for a long season. They had no contingency plans for when things stopped going perfectly in August and September. They still don't, and that's worrisome. Baseball seasons are inherently unpredictable, despite all of the work that goes into figuring out what will happen. I just don't think this Pirate team has a Plan B for when things go wrong, and it's foolish to think that something won't go wrong over the course of a baseball season. 

Could this be the year that things are different for the Pirates? It could be. Will it? I don't see it yet. I see another 75 win season, and I see a re-evaluation of the direction the club is headed when the season ends. We don't live in the future, though. We live in the moment and inside of the moment everything is possible.

Prove me wrong, Pirates. Please, prove me wrong. 

Really nice story by Brady McCollough in the Post Gazette today about Andrew McCutchen. I'm not just saying that because it quotes a certain handsome, beer-brewing, science-oriented blogger from North Carolina. I'm saying that because it's a really nice story. It is a rare occasion that we, as Pirate fans, have the ability to say that we're lucky. We're lucky to have Andrew McCutchen in black and gold. 

Not my words. 

If #Pirates fans were REMOTELY as demanding of their team as those of other two in town, they’d be cheering a winner, too.

— Dejan Kovacevic (@Dejan_Kovacevic) March 30, 2013

It feels like a lifetime ago, but last April was a brutal month for the Pirates' position players. The Pirates scored 58 runs in 22 games (2.6 runs per game). Andrew McCutchen didn't hit a home run, Pedro Alvarez went 0-for-the-first-two-weeks-or-so, Neil Walker continued a power outage that had started in the middle of 2011, and most of the rest of the lineup was absolutely terrible, too. Things picked up in May, but only a little bit -- the Bucs scored 89 runs in 28 games (3.1 per game). In June and July, Andrew McCutchen exploded and the Pirate offense shot into orbit with him. They scored 276 runs in 54 games in those two months (5.1 per game). Even as the Pirates collapsed in August and September, the offense didn't really revert back to it's ugly early season form, with 228 runs scored over the club's final 61 games (3.7 per game).

The final result was that even though they didn't even average three runs per game over the season's first two months, the Pirates scored 651 runs and finished 10th in the National League in terms of runs. The run scoring environment is quite a bit different in 2012 than it has been in the past (in 2006, for example, the Pirates scored 691 runs and finished last in the NL) but that tenth place finish is somewhat noteworthy; it was only the third time since PNC Park opened that the Pirates finished in the NL's top ten in terms of runs scored. In a 16 team league this is a sad thing to be excited about, but we Pirate fans take what we can get. 

The Pirates need to be better than that at the plate in 2013, though. Really, they're going to need the offense to carry the pitching for at least the season's first two months and quite probably for even longer than that if the team is going to be worth watching at all in 2013. The good news is that this doesn't seem like an impossible proposition. The Pirates managed their mid-season offensive explosion and their almost-average offense in 2012 despite quite a few hurdles. An incomplete list: 

- Clint Barmes sucking the life out of 493 plate appearances with an insane OPS+ of 66. 

- Rod Barajas being very nearly as bad as Barmes. 

- Many of the club's corner outfield at-bats going to Alex Presley (370 PAs, 89 OPS+), Jose Tabata (374 PAs, 86 OPS+), and Travis Snider (145 PAs, 84 OPS+). 

- Not that he got a ton of plate appearances or anything but I'd like to remind you that Nate McLouth had an OPS+ of 10 with the Pirates last year. Like, it was so low that you almost have to spell it out in a sentence instead of using digits. 

- Clint Hurdle.

- That's an easy joke, but seriously: 73 stolen bases (last in the NL), with 52 caught stealings (most in the NL), along with (by my count) 30 sacrifice bunts and who knows how many sacrifice bunt attempts by position players alone. 

There is good news here. Barajas is long gone, replaced by Russell Martin. Martin is not Buster Posey, but he should still have some pop in his bat and he should take a few walks. An OPS+ of 90 isn't great, but it's not awful for a catcher and it's much better than Barajas was last year. It's also true that it seems like Barmes should be better at the plate this year simply by virtue of being a human being with a pulse and a baseball bat. Again, I'm not expecting Barmes to suddenly morph into Cal Ripken, but if he just draws a few more walks and gets his wOBA up into the .280 range and fields like he did last year, he'll be just fine at short. 

The outfield should be better, too. Starling Marte is not a sure thing to match his minor league numbers right off the bat, but I think if he's allowed to play he can at least match his triple-slash line from last year, which was .257/.300/.437. That's not great, but it's definitely better than what the Pirates had in the corners for most of last year. His ceiling is much different than Presley and Tabata's too, and it's possible that he could be quite a bit better than that. Snider and Tabata might not reach the potential that was once forecast for them, but it's not hard to think that they could make an acceptable platoon in right field. Neither was very good last year, but Snider battled hamstring injuries for much of his time in Pittsburgh and Tabata dealt with who-knows-what-but-it-seemed-like-something in a more intangible form. Again, it's possible for those two to be an improvement on last year without being All-Stars. 

There are, on the flip side, reasons to be pessimistic. It seems pretty crazy to think that Mike McKenry will hit a home run once ever 23 or 24 plate appearances, although there's just not enough information about The Fort to really know either way at this point. There is plenty of information on Garrett Jones, though, and it's enough to know that we probably shouldn't expect 27 more home runs out of him. Pedro Alvarez could really go in any direction. I've got serious concerns about Neil Walker's ability to play 162 games, and the club still doesn't really have a solid replacement for him in the event he gets hurt again. Once you run past the platoons (Tabata/Snider, Jones/Gaby Sanchez), the bench is flat-out awful, which means that there's not a whole lot of room to spare with injuries. 

If we take all of this together, I think it's probably fair to say that the Pirates offense will be better this year than it was last year. Even if you assume a small drop off for McCutchen, as we discussed on Wednesday, I think that a full season of Marte (even if he doesn't go nuts), plus a Snider/Tabata platoon, plus the potential that Pedro Alvarez draws some more walks and becomes a legitimate middle-of-the-order threat, which is something that he really only threatened at last year. Really, I think it's possible that the Pirates could finish with an NL-average offense this year or maybe even a little better, dependent mainly on Marte and Alvarez. 

The larger question, of course, is whether the offense being a little better is enough to offset the worries about depth and the pitching staff. That's not an easy question to tackle, but I'll try in the forthcoming season preview, which will be posted either Sunday afternoon or Monday morning.