Tomorrow the Pirates will hold their "Black and Gold" intrasquad scrimmage game in anticipation of Saturday's Spring Training opener against the Rays. Nothing gets old quicker than spring training games (the first ones are exciting, then it's a month of blah before real baseball starts), but there's one pretty cool aspect to the Black and Gold Game this year: 

It will be Cole (Blacks) VS Taillon (Golds) in Friday's #Pirates intrasquad game at McKechnie Field. First pitch, Noon.

— Tom Singer (@Tom_Singer) February 21, 2013

Can you hear it? That's the future! It's bearing down on us! Instead of worrying about it (which I'm going to do plenty of in the next few weeks), let's just sit back and enjoy the fact that the #2 overall pick from 2010 is facing off against the #1 overall pick from 2011 in an intrasquad scrimmage in 2013 and that things have gone well enough since those drafts for this to be a pretty exciting event. 

*This post has been edited from its original form to reflect the fact that today is Thursday and not Friday. Which kind of sucks. I know.

It only takes about ten minutes of watching Starling Marte to understand why being a baseball scout is such a difficult job. Why even the best scouts pile up tons of misses for every diamond in the rough that they unearth. I am not a scout by any means, but since moving North Carolina 5 1/2 years ago I've watched plenty of minor league baseball. Most of that baseball has been Triple-A baseball and the reality of Triple-A baseball is that it's mostly a vast wasteland of Quadruple-A replacement-level talent, stowed away in case of big league emergency.

Still, watching the Durham Bulls regularly means that I've seen plenty of Tampa Bay's prospects come through, and when talented guys play in Triple-A, their talent tends to kind of pop off of the field. Maybe it's just confirmation bias (you know who the prospects are by the time they come to Triple-A), but in the vast Triple-A wasteland it's immediately apparent when Andrew McCutchen flicks his wrists through the zone and sends a fly ball screaming to the warning track or when David Price's slider keeps guys flailing, even if his control is a bit off. You can't help but notice Matt Wieters tower over everyone in the batter's box and understand that he's built differently than other catchers and that this is what the scouts rave about. 

And so by the same token, you can't miss Starling Marte on the baseball field when he's in front of you. When I watched him last spring, he was playing so shallow in center field that he might as well have been playing rover in slow pitch softball. On a couple of occasions I'd see a hitter rip a flyball towards deep center or left center, remember where Marte was playing, and think, "There's no way he's getting there." He'd be practically there waiting for the ball before I could even turn my head to watch the play. You notice it on TV, too. Remember the time Paul Goldschmidt thought he could stretch a single into a double with Marte in left field? Oops. At the plate, he can blister the ball. He homered on the first big league pitch that he saw and he tripled in three straight games. When he's on, he's magnetic. You can't not see him on the field or on your TV screen. 

And of course therein lies the caveat: he's not always on. He gets lost at the plate and can strike out a ton. When he's struggling at the plate, he presses in the field and weird things happen. He's already 24, which is not terribly young for a raw prospect. We can talk about his lack of time in the US or his relative inexperience due to not playing a full minor league season until the age of 22, but that doesn't change the fact that he's already 24 and that some of the stuff that needs to happen for him Marte to become star simply might not happen. Marte could literally be anything at this point in his career: he could turn into Michael Bourn or Carlos Gomez or Jacoby Ellsbury or Drew Stubbs or Alfonso Soriano or Andrew McCutchen. All I feel like I know for sure is that his speed and defense will make him a big league regular. After that? Who knows. 

This is frustrating, because there's nothing that could help the Pirates more in 2013 than Starling Marte having a breakout year as a hitter. The Pirates have Andrew McCutchen, who is a known superstar-level asset, they have Neil Wakler, who can be counted on to be a solid contributor at the plate if healthy, and they have Pedro Alvarez, who will probably fall somewhere in between with some danger of cratering. Marte will, at the very least, contribute real value to the team defensively, but the Pirates need more than that. They need another dynamic hitter that can help drive the Pirates' lineup to be something other than below average. They need Winter Ball Starling Marte, who drew 13 walks and only struck out 23 times in 120+ plate appearances to go with all of his extra base hits (four doubles, four triples, two homers). Starling Marte could be that hitter for the Pirates, but there's absolutely no way to be sure about it right now. 

I wrote about Travis Snider and whether or not I thought he was a breakout candidate last week. About halfway through that post I thought to myself, "This is silly. Starling Marte is way more important to the Pirates." His approach at the plate is one of the few things to keep an eye on in spring training that might be important for the coming season. Really, I think it's this simple: it's hard to imagine the Pirates being a good team in 2013 or 2014 without Marte becoming a legitimate top or middle of the order hitter and it's not a slam dunk that he will be. 

Remember when I said that this season was making me awfully nervous? This kind of thing is exactly why. 

Rob Biertempfel tweeted from Bradenton today that Jeff Karstens isn't throwing for a couple of days because he's being cautious with a sore shoulder. The whole thing is made to sound like it's not a big deal and that Karstens will be fine in a couple of days. That doesn't mean I'm not concerned, though. 

Let's play detective here. The Pirates were unwilling to even tender Jeff Karstens a contract this winter, despite being due a relatively modest raise to the ballpark of $4 million. They were unable to trade him as the deadline to tender him approached. Karstens became a free agent, and no one wanted to touch him even though Kevin Correia got a two-year/$10 million deal from Minnesota. The market for him was so poor that Pirates re-signed him for $2.5 million, a $600k pay decrease from last year. 

Presumably, part of the reason that there was such little interest in Karstens was his health. Karstens missed time in August of 2011 with a shoulder injury, then spent more than two months of the early part of last year on the disabled list with shoulder problems. Today, we get news about another sore shoulder. Literally just yesterday, Russell Carleton published a piece at Baseball Prospectus (no subscription required) about predicting pitcher injuries. You should read the whole thing, but the conclusion is that nothing predicts injuries better than previous injuries. Elbow injuries beget more elbow injuries and shoulder injuries beget more shoulder injuries. 

Jeff Karstens has had shoulder issues two seasons in a row. Jeff Karstens already has shoulder issues a week into camp. This is pretty concerning, no matter how much it's being downplayed right now. 

Rob Biertempfel says this morning that the Pirates have extended Clint Hurdle through the 2014 season with an option for 2015. We're at a slow point for spring training news (everyone's in Bradenton but nothing's going to happen) so I suppose this will probably get some play in the news for the next 18 hours or thereabouts, but I think that it's pretty uninteresting as far as news goes. 

Hurdle's contract was due up at the end of 2013 and "lame duck" status for managers is something the media loves to drum up into controversy, so this takes care of it. The reality is that 2013 is probably Neal Huntington's last shot at putting a winning team on the field at PNC Park. If the Pirates are disappointing in any way this year, Huntington will be out the door and if he goes, Hurdle will almost certainly follow him. The actual status of his contract probably doesn't matter much.

Over at Baseball Prospectus, Colin Wyers rolled out this year's first Playoff Odds Report last night. He goes into quite a bit of depth explaining what the Playoff Odds Report is here ($), but the long and short of it is that they take the preliminary depth charts and run a bunch of simulations using PECOTA as a baseline to project what's going to happen over the course of the season. There are, of course, a million caveats (spring training battles and injuries and PECOTA's strengths and weaknesses and so on and so forth), but it's usually a pretty instructive way to understand exactly how thigns stand at this point in the pre-pre-season. This is how the first run of the odds sees the NL Central: 

A 17% chance of making the playoffs! A better-than-one-in-ten chance of making the division round! Almost a full percentage point of a chance of winning the World Series! 

Look, I know that celebrating this seems sarcastic or cynical or worse, but I'm posting this to be legitimately hopeful. It's been a long time since any pre-season projection program has seen the Pirates as a near-.500 team that could make the playoffs more than a handful of times in 100 simulations. As I've been saying all winter, the Pirates aren't quite there yet and you still have to do some dreaming to imagine this group of players as a playoff team, but at least there's less dreaming to be done than in previous years. 

While reading Baseball Prospectus's list of nine potential breakout candidates yesterday, I was legitimately surprised to find Travis Snider at number six on the list. Then, I thought about it some and decided that I was surprised to find myself surprised to find Travis Snider at number six on the list. I was excited when the Pirates traded for him in July and he actually played pretty well until the hamstring injury messed up the end of his season. I puzzled some more and I realized that I really don't have much of a handle on my expectations for Travis Snider for the 2013 season. Snider, or at least the concept of finding a second dynamic outfield bat to help Andrew McCutchen carry the load o in the lineup, is pretty important to the Pirates in 2013, so it's probably a time to try and figure out what to expect. 

The good news is that by Valentine's Day, most of the projection systems have churned out their numbers for the Pirates. Let's look at what the various projections see for Snider: 

PECOTA ($): .249/.308/.419 with 11 homers in 336 plate appearances. That's a TAv of .264, which is just about average for Random Hitter X, but probably a little on the low side for a corner outfielder.

ZiPS: .253/.310/.403 with 13 homers in 497 plate appearances. That's a wOBA of .309, which by rule of thumb is below average in general. 

Steamer (link goes to FanGraphs page, where Bill James and Oliver projections can be found, as well): .267/.334/.459 in with 19 homers in 530 plate appearances. wOBA is .341.

Bill James: .278/.345/.468 with 11 homers in 312 plate appearances. wOBA: .352

Oliver: .262/.324/.437 with 16 homers in 482 plate appearances. wOBA: .328

In short, we've got two systems (Steamer and James) that see a breakout year for Snider. Two systems (PECOTA and ZiPS) that see disappointment in his future and one (Oliver) that basically splits the difference. Of course, no projection system is perfect. James's projections, for example, are almost always hitter-friendly. Oliver uses a unique MLE calculator for minor league numbers which tends to make it useful for young players. ZiPS and PECOTA both use historical comparisons and adjust for aging with various levels of complexity.

The important question with regards to Snider at this point is probably this: just how much do his minor league numbers still matter? His ZiPS and PECOTA projections are below-average because he's been a mostly below-average Major League hitter since 2009. The question we should really be asking at this point is if there's any good reason to believe that this is a poor conclusion to draw. 

Snider's first month as a Pirate was fairly promising. He hit .301/.385/.422 in 28 games. His power was noteably below expectation (he had only five doubles, a triple, and a homer among his 25 hits), but he also only struck out 17 times in 96 plate appearances. That's noteably lower than his 26.7% career big league rate and lower than even his 22.8% minor league rate, so it seemed like maybe the Pirates had him working on his swing. It was hard to tell, though, because he was already struggling with the hamstring by late August and it got pretty bad in September. He finished the season terribly (.156/.204/.156 post August 31). 

Here's what we have heading into 2013 with Snider: a 25-year old that's now four years removed from being one of baseball's best prospects, 1,062 big league plate appearances with an OPS+ of 94, and a few flashes of his talent peppered here and there throughout the five years that he's spent part of in the big leagues. What does that mean? Given the other options (Clint Robinson and Gaby Sanchez getting more time at first base, Jose Tabata, Alex Presley), I think that the right field job should be Snider's to lose and that he should get some substantial at-bats at least in the early part of the season. From February, he's young enough that he deserves one more chance and he's almost certainly the Pirates best option. It's just that I can't really find anything to convince me that he's going to make any more with this chance than he already has. I hope I'm wrong. 

Spring training is hurtling towards us at a rapid pace, but the Pirates are apparently still filling out the fringes of their spring roster. While everyone was watching burning cabins and presidential speeches last night, the Pirates were signing Brandon Inge to a minor league deal.

Inge, of course, spent most of his career in Detroit before being released by the Tigers in April of last year. He subsequently picked up with Oakland and started for them at third base before separating his shoulder twice in August and early September and missing the rest of the season and playoffs. Inge is basically a third base version of Clint Barmes. He can't hit even a little bit (since 2006 his OPS is .698 and his OPS+ is 84), but he's a spectacular defender at third base: Baseball-Reference has him pegged as 13.5 wins above replacement defensively for his career. He's a utility guy that's played all over, but if you look at his DRS it looks like around 80% of that value has come from his time at third. That held true last year, too; despite a .675 OPS he was above-replacement as an Athletic because he contributed nearly a full win defensively in his 74 games. 

Which is to say that I don't really mind giving Inge an invite to camp on a minor league deal. His glove likely makes him a better bench player than Josh Harrison, though he's a little less versatile in the field. The usual caveat applies: if Inge spends any significant time on the field this year, something went terribly wrong. He's not a high upside player that's going to suddenly have a resurgence at the plate; he's a defensive specialist that can take up some late-game slack from Pedro Alvarez and maybe play second in a pinch, but he's nothing more than that. If he makes the team (which I would assume is not quite a given, especially because of that shoulder), he shouldn't go much north of 250 plate appearances. If he does, chances are pretty good it'll have been a long year for Pirate fans. 

I've had a sense of dread about the 2013 season for the Pirates since the 2012 season ended. This is not because the Pirates are a hopeless mess, because they're not. Of all of the teams that the Pirates have fielded since 2005 when I started this blog, the 2013 edition of the Pirates is probably the least-Calvinistically-predestined for Baseball Doom. It's true that it's possible in February of pretty much any year to screw your eyes up and convince yourself that your favorite baseball team is a winner. It's true that this Pirate team is still flawed. It's true they won't (or at least they shouldn't) be anyone's pick to win the NL Central or one of the NL Lottery Ticket Wild Cards. All I'm saying is that this year, you don't have to hold the picture quite as far away from your face to convince yourself that something good could happen in PNC Park. 

For five years under Neal Huntington, the Pirates have been wheeling and dealing and spending tons money on the draft and internationally. They've spent every spring with Francisco Lirianos (if he can just do this ...) and Jonathan Sanchezes (there's a snowball's chance in hell but what's the harm ...)  in camp in hopes that throwing something at the wall will eventually make something stick. The implicit goal from Day 1 has always been this: the short term future of the Pirates is unimportant because we are working towards opening a window of contention in the future. 

Talking about windows in baseball is misleading though, and the reason for that is that front offices can't really control when windows open. In the long and mostly great history of the Pittsburgh Pirates, a player has hit the 7.0 WAR mark exactly 27 times. Honus Wagner did it eight times from 1903-1912. Arky Vaughan and Ralph Kiner did it three times apiece. Roberto Clemente did it five times in the 1960s. Willie Stargell did it twice in the 1970s and Dave Parker did it once. Barry Bonds did it four years in a row from 1989 to 1992. Andrew McCutchen did it in 2012. That's it: those are the greatest individual seasons by position players in Pittsburgh Pirate history. It's easy to go from there and map the Pirates' World Series Champion teams to great players: the 1909 Pirates had Wagner, the 1960 Pirates had Clemente, the 1971 Pirates had Clemente and Stargell, the 1979 Pirates had Stargell and Parker. Only the 1925 Pirates won a World Series without a player that achieved the 7.0 WAR mark at some point in his career (on that team, Kiki Cuyler had the highest single-season WAR of anyone with his 6.6 in 1925). 

I don't want to get bogged down in correlation/causation here. Honus Wagner didn't win the 1909 World Series by himself. Clemente didn't win the 1971 World Series by himself. Besides Wagner, the two best seasons in Pirate history came from Barry Bonds in 1990 and Arky Vaughan in 1935. Neither of those guys ever even played in the World Series as Pirates. The point is simply this: great teams often have great players, and Andrew McCutchen had a great season in 2012. Pittsburgh Pirate fans have been wandering around in the dark for two decades waiting for a team to lead them into the light and if Andrew McCutchen isn't one of the players on the team that does it, I have no idea when it's ever going to happen. 

That means that so long as McCutchen is on the team and producing, the window is open. In the entire history of baseball, only 50 position players have had three or more seven-win seasons and only 35 more players have had two seven-win seasons. That means that of the 200 MLB players that have recorded at least one season of 7+ WAR, 115 of them didn't repeat it. I want nothing more than Andrew McCutchen's 2012 season to be a harbinger of doom for National League pitchers over the next half-decade, but the reality is that 2012 might have been a career year. That means that the Pirates wasted 2012 and it means that they're at risk of wasting 2013, too, because this club is certainly not a slam dunk for contention. It's not unreasonable to think that Starling Marte and Gerrit Cole could need another year of seasoning after 2013. Guess what that means? After years of waiting and preparing for "The Window," McCutchen yanked the window open last year and the Pirates weren't ready for it. They still aren't, and I'm not sure when they will be beyond a vague, "pretty soon." 

Perhaps it's not quite a sense of dread that I have about the 2013. Perhaps it's much more a case of nerves. As a Pirate fan, I've been waiting for some sort of vague concept of the future for a very long time. It's here now, and it's not as comforting as I wanted it to be. 

Liriano passed physical. Deal with #Pirates finally official.

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) February 8, 2013