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.

Being a Pittsburgh Pirate has an unfortunate side-effect: what you've actually accomplished on the field never really matters, because all that's important is what you're going to do on the field whenever it is that the Pirates actually get around to being good. Andrew McCutchen's 2012 season was an amazing thing for Pirate fans to watch unfold: a player that we knew was good and thought was special accelerated beyond all of our expectations to become something else entirely. Franchises don't pull themselves up out of the doldrums without players like Andrew McCutchen doing things like he did in 2012. The problem is that the Pirates didn't pull themselves up out of the doldrums in 2012 and now the only thing that matters is whether or not he can do it again. 

This is a tricky question to answer. As I mentioned in February, there are 200 players that have had at least one season with 7.0 WAR or more in all of baseball history. Of those 200, 115 of them only had one 7+ win season (this includes maybe 10 or 15 active players, Andrew McCutchen included, that could join the list of players with multiple 7+ win seasons). This is a downer to mention, but the point is that past excellence does not ensure future excellence. 

Let's eliminate questions of injury and just focus on comparing what McCutchen did last year with what McCutchen did in the past. You probably know the base stats well enough; in 2011, 'Cutch hit .259/.364/.456 with 23 homers. His isolated power was .198, his BABIP was .291, his line drive rate was 20%, his walk rate was a career high 13.1%, and his strikeout rate was also a career high 18.6%. At this time a year ago, I thought that the next logical step for 'Cutch was for his strikeouts to come down some, which would result in his putting more balls in play, and then logically a higher batting average and OBP. I can't claim any sort of victory on that prediction, though, because while McCutchen did hit .327/.400/.553 last year, his strikeout rate jumped even higher to 19.6%. His walk rate dipped to 10.4%, his ISO jumped up to .226, his LD% rose to 21.9%, and his BABIP went way, way up to .375. 

What all of this means is that while McCutchen did hit for a higher batting average, which in turn drove his OBP up, which coupled with his power surge to make him an MVP candidate, it didn't happen because he put more balls in play. It's true that McCutchen's .291 BABIP in 2011 was on the low end of the spectrum for him, but it's also true that he wasn't as fast in 2012 as he was in prior years. His line drive rate went up, but it didn't go up a ton. In short, Andrew McCutchen is not terribly likely to be a .327 hitter in 2013 and we should probably consider ourselves lucky if he hits .300 in this coming season, particularly if his strikeouts hover around 20% again. 

And what about his power? McCutchen hit eight more homers in 2012 than he did in 2011, but his flyball rate bottomed out at 34.3%. That left him with a home run/flyball rate of 19.4%, 19th in all of baseball. That's not exceptionally high for a power hitter (the guys above him on the list are almost all sluggers), but the question is whether or not McCutchen is really a power hitter. This is tricky to figure out, but from what I can tell, the power surge from last year was real. If we go to the Hit Tracker, just four of McCutchen's 31 homers measured as "just enough." In 2011, that was true of eight of his 23. Basically, McCutchen didn't increase his home run total and HR/FB rate with a bunch of Jack Wilson foul pole shots and bloops into Houston's idiotic Crawford Boxes, he did it by inflicting grievous injuries upon multiple baseballs. I don't know if he'll hit 31 homers again, but I'm more than happy to guess that he'll hit somewhere between 25 and 30 if he doesn't get there, and that's just fine for a player like McCutchen. 

Of course, if the power surge is real it might also indicate that he hit the ball harder than his small increase in LD% might indicate, which in turn means that it's possible that some of those gains in BABIP that I dismissed above might be more legitimate. He almost certainly won't hit .375 on balls in play again, but it might be possible for him to get to where he was in 2009 (.327) again, despite losing a step or two in terms of overall speed (please note that he's still quite fast, but he's not quite blazing fast the way he used to be -- you can see this in the way that his awful jumps on base stealing attempts don't get covered up in quite the same way that they used to). 

So what does all this leave us with? Steamer and Oliver both see McCutchen as about a six-win player in 2012. ZiPS sees him as a five-win player. Steamer and Oliver both call for him to hit approximately .290/.375/.500 with 25 homers, which feels right to me, though I might even argue for a smidge more power. In short, there's every reason to believe that McCutchen is going to be a great player in 2013, even if it's probably unreasonable to think he'll be quite as good as he was in 2012. This Pirate team has plenty of things to worry about, but it's hard to think that #22 will be one of them. 

With a few announcements today, the Pirates have all but set their Opening Day roster for 2013. As expected, Jeff Locke will take the last unannounced rotation spot (I'm hesitant to call him the "fifth" starter whether the team does or not because he's not really the fifth best starter) while Kyle McPherson and Vin Mazzaro go back to Triple-A. The last bullpen spot goes to Jeanmar Gomez, which is hugely unfortunate but was unavoidable news since Bryan Morris was demoted to minor league camp in the middle of last week and Jeff Karstens was put on the disabed list. 

Charlie has been writing at Bucs Dugout most of the week about how players like Gomez and Sanchez are making the team because that's the only way for the Pirates to hold on to them as badly needed depth pieces while Karstens and Liriano and Morton rehab from their injuries. That's true, to an extent, but having a 25-man roster that includes John McDonald, Jonathan Sanchez, Jeanmar Gomez, and maybe even Brandon Inge is absolutely exasperating for what is supposed to be a young team about to come out of its shell. 

The real decision point on keeping Gomez is that he's on the team for now instead of Bryan Morris. This is a tough call to make; Morris was not particularly good this spring, nor did he finish 2013 strong for Indianapolis. He pitched last Monday against the Red Sox in a game that I was at; he didn't have great command, and the Red Sox scrub crew squared up on several of his pitches. You can't really make a judgment on one inning, of course, but you also can't really argue that Morris should've made the squad on merit based on his spring. Of course, that's also true of Gomez, who was mostly terrible except in his start against the Rays last Friday when he was only a little terrible.

In any case, this sort of decision sets the Pirates up for the same fall they took with the bullpen last August. They kept Juan Cruz up well past his sell-by date and they kept giving big innings to guys like Chris Resop instead of bringing Morris up earlier in the year. They didn't really need Morris (or any other young reliever) until August, but because they hadn't used them in the big leagues to that point they decided they had no confidence in them. And then they got stuck with Chad Qualls. Using a bullpen spot on Gomez now instead of Bryan Morris or Vic Black or Duke Welker just starts the cycle over again. 

It would appear to me that Gomez is around to be a long-man and an insurance policy in case Sanchez or Locke are terrible. As insurance policies go, though, Gomez is about as useful as volcano insurance for someone that lives in the eastern United States. The Pirates clearly see something in him because they keep making ridiculously glowing statements about him, but I'm just not convinced that there's anything there to be seen. I'd like to say he won't be around long and the Pirates won't need to use him much, but I know better. 

When word leaked out yesterday that the Brewers had come to a three-year/$33 million agreement with Kyle Lohse, a lot of Pirate fans immediately started wondering why the Pirates didn't make more of a push for Lohse given their current rotation woes. There are a lot of fairly straightforward answers to this question: Lohse is due for some regression and is much more likely to be a ~3.50 ERA/2 WAR guy in 2013 than the <3.00 ERA/4 WAR guy he was in 2012, $11 million a year is a lot of money for the Pirates to give to any player that's not a slam dunk, and due to their not being completely terrible last year, the Pirates' first round pick at #14 in this coming draft is not protected. Since Lohse is a Type A free agent or whatever they're called now, the Pirates would have to sacrifice their pick to the Cardinals in order to sign Lohse.

There's room for some debate on this topic over whether Lohse is really worth $11 million (he might be) over three years (he's not), whether or not the Pirates can afford to spend their money that way (they can't), and when the Pirates can start sacrificing draft picks for the present (probably never) . The reality as I see it is that there's no cognitive dissonance between saying that the front office did a pretty poor job building a rotation that's likely to be bad for 2013 and saying that we simply do not live in a universe in which the a team like the Pittsburgh Pirates can spend $33 million + a draft pick on the likes of Kyle Lohse at any point, especially not at this one.

One question that I thought was interesting, though, was this: why can the Pirates trade a draft pick for Gaby Sanchez (under the new CBA the picks from the bullshit competitive balance lottery are tradeable and the Pirates swapped the 35th overall pick in next year's draft along with Gorkys Hernandez for Gaby Sanchez) but not Kyle Lohse? The answer is complicated, but it's also interesting and worth diving into. 

The first step is to note that the gap between Sanchez and Lohse might not be as big as you think. If you go to their Fangraphs pages and look at projections (Lohse, Sanchez), you'll see Sanchez pegged as ~1 win player and Lohse pegged as ~2-3 win player. If you like Sanchez's defense (UZR does, DRS does not; I tend to default to DRS), Sanchez was a 2-3 win player in both 2010 and 2011, though, and it's not impossible to see him getting back there in 2013, especially if his hot spring training is an indication that he's fixed whatever was wrong with his swing last year and, say, Garrett Jones gets traded or plays right field a lot because Jose Tabata and Travis Snider both suck. You could say the same of Lohse, of course, but Miller Park is a pretty bad fit for a flyball pitcher. I'll freely admit that it's wishcasting on my part to hope that Sanchez is anything more than a competent platoon player and pinch-hitter, and so let's peg the difference between Sanchez and Lohse at one win. That's a real difference, but it's not as big as the 3-4 win gap between them in 2012. 

The second step is to look at 14th overall picks vs. 35th overall picks. It's a pretty striking gap. There have been 48 MLB drafts, which means that 48 players have been taken 14th overall and 48 players have been taken 35th overall. 32 of the #14 picks have made the big leagues, and quite a few of them have turned into decent players. The list includes Jason Heyward, Aaron Hicks (a Top 100 prospect in the Twins' system who got as high as #14 in the BA rankings before losing some luster in recent years), Billy Butler, and the Pirates' own Travis Snider in recent years. Historically there's also Derrek Lee, Jason Varitek, Cliff Floyd, and Tino Martinez, all of whom had careers of at least 20 WAR. At #35, only 26 of 48 have made the big leagues. There are no recent standouts picked at #35, and only Matt Davidson of the Diamondbacks is currently on Top 100 lists. Historically, both Johnny Damon and Mark Langston were picked 35th and they're better than any of the players listed as 14th picks, but after them only Aaron Rowand (18.9 WAR) even tops 10 career wins above replacement. In other words, if you pick 35th and get Gaby Sanchez out of that pick, you're probably lucky. 

All of this doesn't even take into account the effect that having two first round picks has on financial flexibility in the new draft. Last year, the Pirates sort of took a blind shot into the dark when Mark Appel fell into their laps with the eighth pick. They pretty seriously had now way of knowing how the process would pan out or how much money needed to be saved to sign Appel. I still think it was a good risk to take, but it obviously didn't work out in their favor. If something similar happens this year and a top five talent falls to #9, the 14th pick gives them some financial wiggle room. If it doesn't, well, the Pirates still have two first round picks. 

The final argument is even more straightforward: as it stands right now it seems like the Pirates were kind of dumb to trade even the 35th pick in the draft for Gaby Sanchez. I'm happy they didn't compound their mistake by giving away the 14th pick, too.