Over at SB Nation today, Grant Brisbee has a good piece up about the Pirates' "perfectly whelming" offseason that addresses something I've wanted to talk about for a while: the perception that the Pirates have mostly been sitting on their hands over the winter. 

The Pirates haven't done a lot over the winter, of course, but as Brisbee points out, their roster has been in a constant state of flux pretty much throughout the entire Neal Huntington era. As things stand today, the Pirates' opening day starting rotation will be 40% different from last year's opening day rotation (60% different if you don't count AJ Burnett, who was on the disabled list), plus they're going to trot out a new starting catcher and an outfield that only has Andrew McCutchen as a constant from last April. That's quite a bit of turnover from one Opening Day to the next without even considering the bullpen. 

The question that gets asked about most teams at this point of the winter, when all of the wheeling and dealing is done, is whether or not the team in question has made themselves better over the winter than they were in the previous season. It's easy (and not entirely unfair) to look at the Pirate team that tanked in August and September of last year, see only a few cosmetic changes, and wonder why there's any reason to think that the Pirates could be better in 2013 than they were in 2012. The reality, though, is that for teams in the Pirates' situation, any significant improvement has to come from young players making themselves better and not from outside help. The reason the 2013 Pirates could be better than the 2012 Pirates isn't that Russell Martin or Francisco Liriano or Mark Melancon or Jerry Sands will put the PIrates over the top, it's that Starling Marte could turn into anything between Andrew McCutchen and Chris Duffy, that further evolution by Pedro Alvarez will turn him into a borderline elite power hitter, and that Travis Snider is still only 25 with a chance to a productive every day player. 

I feel like I say this every winter, but the Pirates can't ever really go into the off-season with the goal of adding elite talent that will transform the team. What they have to try to do each winter is to find the right players to build a supporting cast that's good enough to help support a contending team if the younger, more talented players have the breakthroughs that the team is hoping for. There are plenty of lessons to be learned from 2012, but some of the more obvious conclusions to draw from various points of last season are that the rotation was desperately lacking in the second half of the season, that Alex Presley and Jose Tabata are not every day Major Leaguers, and that Rod Barajas sucked. 

Instead of asking if the Pirates got better this winter, let's ask a different question. If Andrew McCutchen and Pedro Alvarez both hit 30 home runs and Neil Walker puts up a .768 OPS at second base, do the Pirates have a supporting cast that can turn help buoy those performances into a winning or contending team? Last year, the answer was no. This year? Well, we'll see. 

A couple of months ago, word leaked out that the Dodgers were close to a TV deal with FOX that would bring the Dodgers somewhere in the neighborhood of $6-7 billion over 25 years, bringing them something along the lines of a quarter billion dollars a year. Today, Bill Shaikin of the LA Times is reporting that that deal will not come to fruition, and instead that the Dodgers are going to work with Time Warner to create their own TV Network (Sports Net LA).

On its face, this might seem to be unrelated to the Pirates. The Pirates don't have a great TV deal (Frank Coonelly denied at Piratefest that the Pirates were only pulling $18 million a year from ROOT Sports, but the reality is that they really can't be making much more than $30 million a year based on what other similar-sized markets are making, whether they own their own sports network or not), but they're not alone on that front. There are several other teams that signed TV deals just before the explosion of TV money that seem to be in similarly bad situations: the Braves, Cardinals, Brewers, and Royals all appear to be in similar situations.

This does affect the Pirates, though, in a bit of an unseen way. The new CBA, ratified after the 2011 season, requires large market teams like the Dodgers to share about a third of their TV revenues with smaller market teams like the Pirates. All of that money goes into a pot that is then paid out according to need. If you recall the leaked financial documents that Deadspin got a hold of a couple of years ago, the Pirates were receiving close $30-40 million a year back in 2008 and 2009 -- well before the TV boom -- from revenue sharing.

What makes the Dodgers forming their own TV network particularly noteworthy is that when the Dodgers were sold to Magic Johnson's Guggenheim Group last year, it appears that they struck a deal with the league to cap their sharable TV income at $84 million per year if they formed their own TV network. As noted in that article, that's twice what the Dodgers were making in TV rights at the team the terms were agreed to in bankruptcy court in 2011, but far, far less than the money the Angels received shortly after the cap was set in December of that year. In short, what the agreement means is that if the Dodgers pull in $170 million in TV rights from SportsNet LA in 2013 (which is on the low end of the estimates), their effective revenue sharing tax rate would be about half of the 34% specified in the CBA. This issue is apparently one of the things that's holding the TV deal up and it's something that likely could end up being settled in court. 

It's only been a couple of years since the huge TV money has started to trickle into baseball, but it's easy to see its effects already. The Angels signed a monstrous TV deal in December of 2011 and in the last two offseasons they've committed huge, huge sums of money to Albert Pujols, CJ Wilson, and Josh Hamilton. The Dodgers took on an immense amount of payroll at mid-season last year in their trade with the Red Sox, basically on the assumption that a ton of money was coming their way this winter from the TV negotiations. Imagine where things are headed if the court decides in the Dodgers' favor. If that happens, it stands to be reasoned that other large market teams with their own sports networks (the Yankees, Red Sox, and Mets, along with the Nationals and Orioles to an extent) will want similar exemptions.

It's not like the playing field in baseball is level now between the big markets and small markets, but the Dodgers' decision to make their own TV network is going to kick off a fight that could result in things being even more slanted away from small markets than they are now. The way that this revenue sharing situation with the Dodgers is decided is a huge deal and it's one that's going to decide what direction baseball is headed in for the forseeable future. 

With Francisco Liriano officially signing with the Pirates yesterday, details about his mysterious "non-pitching arm" injury were bound to emerge and today we have some thanks to Bill Brink at the PG, via El Caribe, a Dominican newspaper. The report is that Liriano broke his humerus by falling in his bathroom and that his arm was in a cast after the injury. Falling in the bathroom is one of those weird things that's hard to gauge. It definitely sounds like it could be a cover story for something else, but I could also see myself leaving, say, a beer fermenting bucket sitting out in the bathroom and tripping and falling over it in the middle of the night. 

In any case, let's talk about a broken humerus in the non-throwing arm. Unfortunately, arm bones are not discussed in "Dry Bones," so instead click on over to Wikipedia and look at a humerus. We are almost entire bereft of other details here (whether it's a displaced fracture or not, whether there was a dislocation of the shoulder, etc.) so it's pretty hard to speculate on how long this sort of thing might keep him out, but let's look at his throwing motion anyway, because it's late January and these are things fans do in late January.

That's just for a point of reference and not any comment on Liriano's actual mechanics. The upper arm/shoulder on the non-throwing arm is what helps create the whipping motion that generates torque through the zone. Imagine pitching with a fracture in that part of the arm. There might be enough separation between the injury (which we know happened around Christmas) and when the season starts for him to get some innings in spring training and to be ready for April, but it's impossible to say that without knowing all of the details here. The same can be said for the Pirates' caution: it's possible to read into it a bit and conclude that the Pirates know the injury is serious enough to make Liriano miss time and that's why they wanted to renegotiate, but it's also possible that they simply want their bases covered in the event that Liriano misses a lot of time, no matter what the initial diagnosis is. 

If you had to look at the whole of 2012 -- the excitment, the disappointment, all of the individual breakouts and meltdowns -- and wanted to take one thing away from it that would bear well for the future, I think that most Pirate fans would take Pedro Alvarez's breakout season. At this time last year, all of us were flat-out terrified of Pedro's future as a big league player: his trip through the minors was good but not quite as excellent as expected and his 2011 was so disastrous that it wasn't hard to imagine that he'd never be quite right as a big league player. When he got off to a terrible start in April, people were rightly discussing whether he was one of the biggest draft busts in recent memory. 

Starting on April 21st, though, Alvarez began to silence the doubters. He had two hits against the Cardinals on that day, then homered in both ends of a double header four days later, and by May 3rd he'd homered five times in 11 games and his seasonal OPS was up to .912. His season was a bit of a roller coaster from that point on, but he ended the season with 30 home runs, 25 doubles, a .467 slugging percentage, and a wOBA/wRC+ of .335/112 (that is: slightly above average). These numbers are encouraging for a hitter that was so very lost 12 months ago and you can even finesse them a bit to be even more so. If you eliminate Alvarez's terrible start (that is, if you start counting on April 21st), he hit .255/.330/.479 with 28 homers and 25 doubles in 139 games. If you start counting from after his second bad slump (from May 5 to June 15 he hit .143/.228/.223 across 33 games, then broke out of it by going straight-up Galactus on the Cleveland Indians), Alvarez hit .274/.352/.518 with 22 homers in 94 games. 

This is all well and good, but picking arbitrary end points and using them to prove things that you want to see happen is a great way to be disappointed. It's every bit as instructive to point out that Alvarez's strikeout rate for the entire season was 30.7%, that his strikeout rate from April 21st onwards was 29.7%, and that his strikeout rate from June 16th onwards was 29.6%. In short, that means that Pedro Alvarez is striking out a ton whether he's not or he's not hot, and when the only thing a hitter does consistently is strike out a ton there's plenty of reason for concern.

In the entire history of baseball, there have only been 33 individual seasons in which a player has struck out 180 times or more. As you might guess, the list is heavily populated by current players. Adam Dunn, Ryan Howard, and Mark Reynolds are all on it four times and Jim Thome is on it twice. Dunn, Howard, and Reynolds are pretty instructive for our conversation here, so let's talk about the three of them. 

Most people likely think of Howard as a more consistent hitter than Dunn and of Dunn as a more consistent hitter than Reynolds, but Howard and Dunn have been fairly streaky themselves across the seasons. Howard watched his OPS+ go from 167 to 144 to 125 from 2006-2008, which is a pretty significant drop that people tend to gloss over because of his huge homer and RBI totals. Smack in the middle of Dunn's run of four 40-homer seasons is 2006, when he had an OPS+ of 114. Reynolds is a known roller coaster, going from OPS+ of 127 to 97 to 116 to 107 over the last four years. It's easy to spot where these down years come from, too. If we consider Howard's prime to be from 2006 to 2009, his worst year was 2008 and that was the year he had the lowest batting average (.251). In Dunn's four straight 40-homer years, he only hit .234. In Reynolds' best season (2009) he hit .280. In his worst (2010), he hit .198. 

We don't need to go deep into all of this right now, but the generally accepted concept in sabermetrics right now is that hitters, to some extent, lose control over the outcome of any at-bat in which they put the ball in play. Since we're deriving norms from huge numbers of at-bats, any given season can be defined as a small sample size in which you can expect some amount of variability. In English, every once in a while a .300 hitter like Freddy Sanchez hits .344 and wins a batting title simply because the randomness of the universe allows for him to have a season where a ton of balls find gaps and holes that otherwise might not. Three true outcome hitters like Alvarez, Howard, Reynolds, and Dunn spend most of their time homering, striking out, or walking which means that the number of balls they put into the field every season is lower than most hitters, which in turns means that they should be even more prone to this variability (NB: I haven't actually researched whether high strikeout hitters have higher batting average variation than the average hitter and I'm sure that someone has, so if someone has and I'm wrong please let me know). 

As it relates to Alvarez, this is all important because his strikeout rate, walk rate, and line drive rate didn't change much from 2011 to 2012 and while we can infer that he definitely hit the ball more solidly because his pop-up rate dropped and his HR/FB took a jump as a result, the differences there probably don't explain the dramatic improvement we all perceived for him last year. There are more concern points, too. Alvarez's strikeout rate is above 30%, while the two hitters from this group that had long stretches as good hitters (Howard and Dunn) are below 30%, while Reynods is above 30%. Alvarez also has the lowest walk rate of the group and he's the only one that's below 10%. The reason that Dunn managed to sustain an OPS+ of 136 between 2004 and 2010 despite a .254 batting average and a aircraft carrier full of strikeouts is because he walked 16.2% of the time (750 bases on balls in 4634 plate appearances). Alvarez drew 57 walks in 586 plate appearances -- 9.7%. To be a really good hitter, Alvarez needs to walk more than that if he's going to strikeout as much as he does.

I'm not mentioning this to be depressing, just to point out that Alvarez is still very much a work in progress despite all of the home runs last year. The reality is that he's still two weeks away from his 26th birthday, that he's only got the equivalent of two seasons worth of Major League experience, and he's only played one full big league season from beginning to end. I'm saying that there's room for improvement, but he's still at a point where it's not unreasonable to expect improvement from him. The reality, though, is that I'm still incredibly unsure of what he's going to do in 2013.

After a long, weird negotiation, Ken Rosenthal reported this afternoon that the Pirates and Francisco Liriano have finally finalized a version of the two-year/$12.75 million contract that we'd all thought the two sides agreed to back before Christmas. The main difference in the deal is that if Liriano misses any time this year due to his injury (which Rosenthal characterizes as a broken non-pitching arm), his 2013 salary will be rolled back accordingly. 

Assuming that there are no more weird plot twists in this story, that leaves the Pirates with a rotation of Burnett, Rodriguez, McDonald, Karstens, and Liriano for 2013, with Jeff Locke, Kyle McPherson, Vin Mazzaro, and Jeanmar Gomez to provide immediate depth while Gerrit Cole gets himself ready in Indianapolis. I spent most of the winter warning about rotation depth and how the Pirates could really be in for disaster this year, so bringing Karstens back and signing Liriano are both welcome moves. This pitching staff still raises plenty of questions (Rapid fire: How much do Burnett and Wandy have left? How many innings can you count on from the old guys? James McDonald in general. How many innings is Karstens good for and is he due for some regression? Was betting on Francisco Liriano a really dumb idea? What happened to his arm anyway? Can Locke or McPherson be a solid big league pitcher if they have to be? How quickly will Cole be ready? Seriously, why even waste time with Gomez or Mazzaro? Should I have mentioned Justin Wilson or is he just going to be a reliever?) but it's fair to say that the Pirates have five Major League pitchers that are all capable of pitching well in their rotation for now and that Locke and McPherson aren't really bad options as fringey sixth starters (I'm not opposed to giving either of them innings in 2013; it was just the thought of having to give them innings for lack of other options that worried me). 

Like many of the things that we're going to talk about as the 2013 season approaches (I'm going to be blogging more regularly, honest!), there are two different Pirate rotations to consider right now. There's a Theoretical Ideal Pirate rotation, which is actually pretty good. There's a lot of talent in this group -- more so than in any season in recent memory, I think -- that could make that group of five a productive group if everything goes right for the Pirates. There are also plenty of things that could go wrong, which means that the other Pirate rotation -- the Actual Pirate Rotation -- isn't going to be nearly as good as the ideal one. The problem is that 40% of this fivesome is getting up there in age and 40% is maddeningly inconsistent and 20% is Jeff Karstens. That makes it  hard to figure out where this group will fall on the "ideal outcome/abject disaster" continuum, which is kind of maddening with spring training so near. 

When the news came out a couple of days ago that Andrew McCutchen wouldn't be taking part in the World Baseball Classic because he wanted to dedicate himself to getting ready for his 2013 season with the Pirates, I had two thoughts: 

1.) Well, at least he won't get hurt or burn himself out early this year.

2.) I still kind of wish Andrew McCutchen had a chance to show off for a larger audience.

As it turns out, there are still eight Pirate players that will take place in the World Baseball Classic this spring, even with 'Cutch staying on the sidelines to prep for the part of the baseball season that actually counts. You would probably expect Russell Martin (born in Ontario, once put 'J. Martin' on his jersey to honor his French Canadian mother) and Chris Leroux (born in Quebec) to play for Team Canada, but you might not expect that they'd be joined by Jameson Taillon. For whatever reason (Wikipedia says his parents are Canadians, but Wikipedia also says [citation needed]), though, Taillon is pitching for the Canadian team this spring, and so all Pirate fans -- Bradenton bound or not -- should have a chance to watch the Pirates' second best prospect pitch this spring. In addition to the Canadian contingent, Wandy Rodriguez will pitch for the Dominican Republic, Ali Solis (a recently-signed Triple-A depth catcher) is on the Mexican roster, the recently-acquired Ivan DeJesus will play for Puerto Rico, minor league infielder Stefan Welch will play for Australia, and Jason Grilli will pitch for Italy. 

Jason Grilli was born in Michigan and grew up in New Jersey and went to Seton Hall. But he'll pitch for Italy, because, hey! World Baseball Classic! 

I don't have much else to add, other than that I'm going to spend the next two months terrified about Jameson Taillon pitching for someone other than the Pirates so early in the year, but that I'm also kind of excited to watch him and intrigued to see how he does. And I'm armed and ready with plenty of Alpha Flight jokes for the Pirates' Canadian contingent this spring because for some reason, I've always had a soft spot for Alpha Flight and I may or may not have all of Alpha Flight volume 2 in a comic book box in a closet in my parents house. 

Almost immediately after I pushed "publish" on that last post, news came across the interwebs that the Pirates had agreed to a one-year deal with Jeff Karstens. Bill Brink at the PG is reporting that it's a one-year deal worth $2.5 million, which you may note is actually $600,000 less than he made with the Pirates last year. A big reason the Pirates non-tendered him earlier this off-season was that they didn't think he'd be worth the raise he was due through the arbitration process (~$4 million), so this is a pretty nice deal for a Pirate team that badly needs pitching depth. 

In fact, at $2.5 million I'd be mad if the Pirates didn't bring Karstens back. Over the last two seasons, Karstens has evolved from a fringe big leaguer into a pretty useful arm. In both 2011 and 2012, he increased his strikeout percentage and decreased his walk percentage to the point that his K/BB ratio last year was an excellent 4.40. The two problems are that his stuff isn't overwhelming, which means that there are plenty of doubts about his ability to repeat his two-year mini-breakout, and that he's not durable at all*.

While you could argue that the Pirates' non-tendering of Karstens was justified, that still didn't mean that it made a whole ton of sense. As I've been saying ad nauseum, the Pirates have depth problems in their rotation and 90 or 110 or 130 innings of Jeff Karstens is 90 or 110 or 140 innings that don't need to be thrown by someone that's not a Major League pitcher. When the Pirates signed Russell Martin, I wrote that while Martin might be worth $17 million to two years to some teams, that I wasn't sure the Pirates were one of those teams. You could make the opposite case about Karstens: that he wasn't necessarily going to be worth $4 million, but that he would've been worth $4 million to the Pirates. Now, we don't have to worry about that.

All of that being said, I think the Pirates could really still use Francisco Liriano or Shaun Marcum in the rotation. Karstens helps things out a bit, but he still only contributes maybe half of a rotation spot to a team that has, at the absolute most, three Major League capable starters right now. Bringing Karstens back is a start and it's a win for Neal Huntington at this price, but I still think there's more work to be done.

In general, the arc of winter for a Pirate fan goes like this: 

1. Depression bought about by the end of the season.
2. Talking yourself into the coming season's team as the front office makes trades and signings.
3. Release of the ZiPS projections, followed by the crushing realization that upcoming Year Y will be no better than the prior Year X. 

Today: FanGraphs has the 2013 Pirates ZiPS projections!

Actually, as Carson Cistulli notes in his post about the projections at FanGraphs, the projections take a bit of a different path for the Pirates on the offensive side. Pedro Alvarez and Neil Walker can be expected to give Andrew McCutchen some help at the plate and Starling Marte and Russell Martin should at least be solid contributors due to their defense and at least some offensive help.

I'm not here to talk about the offense, though, because once you scroll past the encouraging offensive numbers there's a much grimmer sight waiting for you. Out of the Pirates' entire pitching staff, only Wandy Rodriguez is pegged for more than 1.5 WAR and Phil Irwin is projected to be the team's fifth best starter, if you throw out Jeff Karstens (who's still associated with the Pirates, presumably because he hasn't signed elsewhere yet). This is terrifying. You can say that maybe James McDonald finds some consistency and that some of these guys (Irwin, Kyle McPherson, Gerrit Cole, even Jeff Locke, whose ZiPS are probably hurt by his bad numbers in a small big league sample the last two seasons) are young and talented or have had non-traditional minor league careers, which means they could be better than a projection system thinks that they might be, but sheeeeesh, basically 60% of the Pirates' rotation is staked to that assumption right now.

This is why it's no surprise to learn that the Pirates are still negotiating with Francisco Liriano, despite his arm injury that came after the two sides agreed to terms and why they're interested in Shaun Marcum, who's injury problems have kept him on the market late into the winter, and even why they'd be looking into Joe Saunders, who's basically a left-handed Kevin Correia. It was fine that the Pirates let Kevin Correia wander off into free agency and not-as-completely-indefensible-as-people-think that they non-tendered Jeff Karstens (who, you'll note, hasn't generated much interest to this point in the off-season), but they haven't added any real options to the starting rotation at this point (Jeanmar Gomez and Vin Mazzaro are depth guys, not people you want to lean on) and you end up where the Pirates are right now. 

Pitchers and catchers report in 28 days. The clock is ticking ... 

It would be fairly easy to write the trade the Pirates made today with the Indians that sent Quincy Latimore into Cleveland's system in return for Jeanmar Gomez as a minor move of little consequence, but it's early January and nothing else is happening. Plus, I need to get back into blogging shape for spring training in a few weeks, so let's use this as a springboard to talk a bit about what trading for Jeanmar Gomez might tell us about the bigger picture as the Pirates prepare for 2013. 

Gomez was designated for assignment by the Indians last week after throwing 90 2/3 mostly bad innings for them in 2012. From 2010-2012, he made 42 appearances (38 starts) for Cleveland, putting up a 5.18 ERA and a 4.58 xFIP. In his 206 2/3 innings over those three seasons, he only struck out 112 batters (12.2%) and he served up 28 homers. These are all a bunch of ways of saying, "his ERA was bad and there's not much good buried underneath it." If you want to look for an encouraging sign, his career groundball rate is 49.2%, which is probably what gives us that lower xFIP. He put up good strikeout numbers as a 21-year old in Double-A back in 2009, but that's mostly tailed off since then. He doesn't throw all that hard (his average fastball is right around 90 mph, which is not very good for a righty), so what we've got is a pitcher that's not much more than big league depth. 

Latimore was the fourth round pick in Dave Littlefield's last draft (2007) and in the low minors he was an occasionally interesting fringe prospect due to his power, but he's moved slowly and in two seasons with Altoona (age 22 and 23) he only has a .308 OBP. He's depth, basically. Still, Gomez will need a 40-man roster spot and so it's worth asking why, exactly, the Pirates would want to waste even a non-prospect and a 40-man spot on a guy with little big league success and as little upside as Gomez has. 

The answer, I think, is that in the absence of Francisco Liriano (and we still don't know how this mysterious 'non-throwing arm injury' is going to pan out), the Pirates plan to address their rotation depth by just flinging a bunch of stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks. There's still time to get the Liriano situation sorted out and the Pirates aren't completely out of rotation options even if they decide to go in another direction, but I'm starting to get pretty seriously worried about the 2013 rotation. So far, we can be pretty sure that AJ Burnett, Wandy Rodriguez, and James McDonald will all have spots on Opening Day. There's a lot of talent in that trio, but Burnett is 36 and he tailed off last year and besides a dominant stretch in July and early August, he was really just a solid mid-rotation guy. McDonald is all over the map and unreliable. Rodriguez is 34 and given his dipping strikeout rate is probably headed for the "solid but unspectacular" portion of his career. 

That's not so bad, except that those are the top three spots in the Pirates' rotation and after them is a whole mess of uncertainty. Charlie Morton will probably miss the start of the season recovering from Tommy John surgery and when he returns, he'll be even more of a cipher than he was before. Jeff Locke has nice Triple-A numbers and hasn't had a long stint in the big leagues yet, but whenever he does start he gets hit hard. Kyle McPherson is interesting but has less than 50 innings above Double-A. Justin Wilson still seems like a reliever to me in the long term. Gerrit Cole likely needs more seasoning before a mid-season call-up. Guys like Vin Mazzaro and Jeanmar Gomez strike me as extra arms with some kind of upside in them to have around in camp in case Locke and McPherson and Morton and Phil Irwin and Cole aren't able to fill out the rotation on Opening Day. 

Of course, my concern here is that it's not at all crazy to think that Morton + the young guys won't add up to two starting pitchers on Day One, that there are plenty of concerns about the top three pitchers to boot, and that Jeanmar Gomez and Vin Mazzaro and Vin Mazzaro and Jeanmar Gomez. The clock is ticking faster every day.