With Jerry Sands' demotion earlier this week, it became pretty clear that Jose Tabata will start 2013 out in Pittsburgh, most likely as Travis Snider's primary backup/platoon partner in right field. Tabata's only 24, but this is almost certainly his last chance to play regularly for for the Pirates. If he can't hack it in the early part of this season, Sands will be at Triple-A waiting to relieve him and Tabata will probably be ignominiously non-tendered or appended as an inconsequential throw-in in a trade to some other poor Neal-Huntington-in-2008-type sap, loading up on ex-blue chip prospects to try and accelerate his club's rebuilding process. 

Tabata is on fire this spring, with four doubles and a home run in 26 at-bats. People are raving about his conditioning. He's still only 24. There are counterpoints to every single one of these points, of course: spring training stats don't matter, Jose Tabata is always in great shape during spring training, and despite no concrete evidence ever emerging there have always been persistent whispers that he's older than he says. My concern with Tabata is more straightforward than any of those things: Tabata's had 1197 MLB plate appearances and his OP+ is 97. He's declined every year in the big leagues. The question I have is pretty straightforward: can position players that start young, play fairly regularly, and struggle at the plate find success?

I set up a Play Index search for players 23 or younger with at least 1100 plate appearances and an OPS+  of 100 or less. That search turned up 166 players, and of that 166, plenty of them went on to find success in the big leagues. You don't have to do much more than find Tabata's name and look at the other players on the list with an OPS+ of 97; Hall of Famer George Kell is there along with Pudge Rodriguez and Carl Crawford. Adrian Beltre is on the list just ahead of Tabata, Troy Tulowitzki is just behind him. Carlos Beltran had a miserable age-23 season that dragged him way down on the list. Pirate fans, of course, know that Roberto Clemente's first three seasons were pretty miserable at the plate and that his first five weren't very good. 

It is important to note that the list is mostly populated by players that turned out much, much worse than those guys. Not every young superstar starts their career out like Mike Trout, but not every struggling young hitter turns into Roberto Clemente, or even Carl Crawford. Tabata's always been hard to get a read on because he was extremely young for every level he stopped at in the minor leagues. On top of that, he dealt with some injuries and questions about his behavior and mental makeup followed him all through the minors. Tabata's minor league numbers pretty much look like his big league ones; the idea has always been that once he settles in at the big league level, that he'll start to become more productive at the plate. It seemed like a strong theory in 2009, but I'm much less confident of it right now. 

So how long does Tabata get in 2013 before we see Jerry Sands start to take playing time from him? It's hard to say, but I would imagine that it's probably going to be tied pretty closely to whether we see a Jose Tabata that resembles the 2010/2011 Tabata or one that looks like the guy that floundered last year. In the first two years of his career, Tabata wasn't great by any stretch, but he seemed to be developing a very good eye for such a young international player; in 2011 he drew 40 walks in 382 plate appearances and had a .349 OBP despite a .266 batting average. Last year, he could barely do anything right at the plate and ended up with a .243/.315/.348 triple-slash line. 

In any case, I think the Pirates are right to give Tabata one more shot ahead of Sands this year. I probably wouldn't have said that two months ago, but seeing Tabata come to camp in shape (even though it happens every year) and hitting the ball (even though spring training stats are not very useful) is enough for me to think he deserves another shot. Whether or not he'll do something with that shot ... we'll see.

Buried in the boxscore from the Pirates' comeback walkoff win over the Orioles yesterday is this line: 

Irwin: 3 2/3 IP 3 H 1 R 1 ER 0 BB 7 K

In other words, Phil Irwin came into the game in relief of Jeff Locke, faced 14 hitters, and struck out half of them. Spring training games are full of meaningles stat lines (Jared Goedert's hot spring, for example), but every once in a while something happens that catches the eye. Irwin's dominating performance yesterday makes that list, I think. 

Irwin was part of Neal Huntington and Greg Smith's infamous class of 2009, though he wasn't one of the more highly regarded pitchers in the group. He was picked in the 21st round out of Mississippi; the Pirates took his teammate Nate Baker in the fifth round. It's possible that he lasted that late because of his age; he's a year older than college juniors like Baker drafted that year and was 22 at the time of the draft. I don't think he was a senior in college in 2009 though Pirates Prospects does mention a Tommy John surgery in 2006, which likely set him back a year and is the reason for 

One way to tell how highly this front office in particularly values a player is how they move through the system, and so you can see that Irwin really wasn't really handled much like a prospect in his early time in the minors. He went to State College after being drafted, then spent all of 2010 in West Virginia. He put up good numbers in West Virginia (3.35 ERA, 8.8 K/9 1.6 BB/9, 0.7 HR/9), but didn't move beyond the level despite being old for the level (23) when the season started. He should've been dominating Single-A at that point in his career. The read on him at that point was that he was succeeding on control without great stuff, so you could be forgiven for expecting Irwin to to fall apart in the upper levels of the minors because it seems like the Pirates probably would've shared that opinion with you. 

It never happened, though. Irwin went to Bradenton for 2011 and put up a great ERA in 10 starts with slightly worse peripherals than he'd had in State College or West Virginia, which earned him a promotion to Altoona. He kept up the great control act in Altoona with a 6.9 K/BB ratio thanks to his very low walk rate (just 10 walks in 87 1/3 innings), though his home runs peaked a bit after the promotion. He went back to Altoona last year after missing the first part of the season with forearm trouble and did pretty much the same thing, though with a decreased walk rate. Then he got promoted to Indianapolis late in the season and went wild in four starts, striking out 28 hitters in 21 innings over four starts. 

When the season ended, Irwin got put on the 40-man roster to protect him from the Rule 5 draft -- a pretty good sign that the Pirates have a good opinion of him. His work this spring has done nothing to dissuade that opinion. Most of the talk surrounding the last one or two rotation spots has centered on Locke and McPherson, so should we be talking about Irwin, too? What sort of big league pitcher might Irwin make?

As a general rule of thumb, a right-handed pitcher that can't crack 90 mph like Irwin isn't likely to find much more success than Josh Fogg. There are exceptions, of course, and the Pirates do have one in their rotation right now in Jeff Karstens. Karstens doesn't throw hard, but between his good control, his ability to change speeds, and his ridiculous looping curveball, he's become a pretty solid mid-to-back-end MLB starter when healthy (which is its own story). Doug Fister's another example. His fastball has only averaged more than 90 mph once in his career, but because he's got four pitches and he keeps the ball on the ground, he's evolving into a very solid starter. 

If anything, Irwin's profile does remind me of Karstens quite a bit. Carson Cistulli at FanGraphs noticed his curveball earlier this spring (via Bucs Dugout) and while four .gifs do not a curveball make, those are also four pretty nasty curveballs. It's funny that piling up strikeouts in Indy and this spring is what is getting Irwin noticed, since he's probably never going to be a strikeout pitcher at the big league level. That being said, I do think that there's some room for him to turn into a Karstens-type pitcher at the big league level. It's hard to gauge his minor league numbers, since he's been old at every level he's pitched at, but the consistent way that he's succeeded is encouraging to me. If he is developing a sharp curveball to pair with a fastball that he can place anywhere any time he wants, he'll be on his way to having some level of big league success. It's certainly not a traditional route to the majors and so that makes it still not quite a sure thing, even for a 26-year old in Triple-A, but he's definitely worth paying attention to now.

All of that being said, it's probably too soon to start wondering if the Pirates should have Irwin in the rotation. He came through the minors slowly, he's been old at every level, and he's only made four Triple-A starts. There's definitely a chance we see Phil Irwin in a Pirate uniform, maybe even starting games in 2013. I just wouldn't count on it happening in April.

I wrote this last week, but screwed it up in the CMS editor and somehow didn't realize that it hadn't run until yesterday. Sorry about that.

It doesn't take a long look at the Pirates' pitching staff to find room for Jeff Locke and Kyle McPherson in 2012. Francisco Liriano is still nursing his goofy non-throwing arm injury, Jeff Karstens has a bum shoulder that we have almost no information on beyond the fact that this is his third shoulder problem in three years, Charlie Morton is out until mid-season recovering from his Tommy John surgery, and Gerrit Cole needs time in Triple-A. That leaves one or two Opening Day rotation spots available without asking questions about the rotation's top three or taking any sort of performance questions into account. Both Locke and McPherson will get a few starts apiece this year; if either of them is able to step up and perform at a big league level, there's a good chance that they'll be given a chance to start more than that. So is either of them up to the task?

I have a hard time putting my finger on exactly what the Pirates have in Locke. When he came to the Pirates from the Braves' system in the Nate McLouth trade, he was a promising young lefty with control problems. The Pirates have straightened him out on that front and as a result, his Triple-A numbers (between 2011 and 2012 he's spent roughly the equivalent of a full season at the level) are better than his numbers at any level other than rookie ball. He keeps the ball on the ground and in the park, he throws strikes, and he misses enough bats to be effective. He doesn't look like a burgeoning star or anything, but he does have a distinctly Paul Maholm look about him, and I suspect the Pirates would be pretty happy with Paul Maholm still in the rotation eating up some innings right now. 

His big league starts have been something else entirely. In 2011 and 2012, he's made ten total big league starts. In four of them, he's allowed five or more runs. I watched Locke's first start last year -- against the Astros on Labor Day -- and he was really unimpressive. He mowed through the back end of the Astros' pathetic post-trade deadline lineup without breaking a sweat, but he allowed seven hits to Jose Altuve, veteran Tyler Greene, and Brett Wallace. Those three guys used those seven hits to score five times. You could look at his line and think it was decent enough (he struck out six and walked just one in his five innings), but the reality was that he struggled badly against most of the hitters in the Astros lineup that could be considered big league players and padded his stats against the rest. 

Parsing through Locke's 2012 numbers are similar difficult. There's the bad ERA (5.50) and there's the astronomical home run rate (six in 34 1/3 innings, basically three times his rate in Indy), but there's also a good strikeout rate (34 in those 34 1/3 innings), decent control, and a 49% groundball rate. As a result, Locke's xFIP (3.70) is downright solid and you could easily look at his numbers and conclude that he'd gotten unlucky with the home runs and that he'll be generally fine this year in the back of the rotation.

That might be the right conclusion to draw with him, honestly. I can tell you that none of his starts last September impressed me and that my own personal opinion of him took a hit as a result, but it's still only 51 innings and ten starts and 12 appearances over two seasons. If we use the Paul Maholm comparison, Maholm was a terrible starter as a 24-year old and a pretty bad one as a 25-year old and he was pretty uneven after that until putting together back-to-back strong seasons in 2011 and 2012 as a 29 and then 30 year old. Obviously we'd all like to hope that it won't take Locke that long to put things together, but it doesn't seem fair to damn him for some rough starts as a 23-24 year old. 

McPherson's just nine days older than Locke, but his career looks much different. He was drafted by Dave Littlefield in the 14th round of the 2007 draft. Because he spent a year at a community college, he was drafted after his freshman year at Alabama and as a result, sent to the GCL instead of the NY/Penn League, where he was promoted after a few starts. He was mostly unimpressive in 2008 with State College and 2009 with West Virginia, but when he repeated the Sally League in 2010 his strikeout rate exploded and he got onto the radar as a fringe prospect. He went to Bradenton in 2011 and made 12 starts where he put up a silly 10.0 K/BB ratio (7.5 K/9, 0.8 BB/9) before being promoted to Altoona, where he made 16 generally strong starts. He stayed in Altoona to start the year last year because of an early season injury, made nine starts, went to Indianapolis and dominated in three starts, and found himself in Pittsburgh. He made seven relief appearances and three starts for the Pirates. His relief work was good and his first two starts weren't, but his last start of the year saw him throw six shutout innings against the Reds, striking out five, walking one, and scattering four hits. 

If you asked me to pick between a lefty with a decent fastball, a curve, and a change that can keep the ball on the ground vs. a righty with flyball tendencies with decent fastball command and not much else, I'd think it was a no-brainer and I'd go with the lefty. If you asked me to pick between Jeff Locke and Kyle McPherson, I'd say that I want to give McPherson a shot because Locke's big league work thus far hasn't impressed me all that much. 

Yesterday afternoon, there was a pretty interesting subplot for Pirate fans in the USA/Canada World Baseball Classic game: Jameson Taillon, dual US/Canadian citizen, was on the mound for Team Canada with a spot in the WBC's second round on the line. When I wrote about Taillon last Monday, I noted that Taillon's numbers in the minors haven't been great, but that all of the scout and prospect type guys that watch him pitch rave about him after they see him in person. I was pretty curious to get a look at Taillon with my own two eyes in a game that meant something, just to have an idea of what to expect from the kid in what I think is going to be a pretty important season for him. 

It didn't take very long to understand why scouts rave about Taillon. For most of his start (4 innings, 4 hits, 2 runs, 1 earned run, 3 strikeouts, 1 walk) he kept the USA lineup off balance with a 94-96 mph fastball mixed in with a sharp, diving curveball. After giving up a leadoff double to David Wright in the second, he induced a passel of groundballs off of the bats of Ben Zobrist and Eric Hosmer and Shane Victorino and escaped the inning without giving up a run even with Taylor Green's error (thanks in part to Joe Torre's insistence on bunting with Adam Jones seemingly every time he bats, but still).

The highlight of Taillon's outing (at least for Pirate fans) definitely came in the third with Ryan Braun at the plate. Braun singled off of a first pitch fastball against Taillon in the first, but Taillon kept trying to get Braun to chase high fastballs and fell behind 3-0 in the count. He got a strike on the 3-1 pitch, then went with a 3-1 curve that Braun couldn't do anything but look at. After a foul ball, Taillon came back with another 3-2 curve that froze Braun so solidly in his place the pitch might as well have been Medusa. Braun didn't even wait for the umpire's call, he just walked off the field. 

This is not to place too much meaning on one result. The MLB hitters likely had almost no book on Taillon since he's barely even pitched at the Double-A level, let alone above it. Taillon used his fastball and his curveball almost exclusively, which is something he won't get away with for long at the big league level as a starter once hitters see him a few times. On top of it all, behind Taillon in the field was cautionary tale Adam Loewen, who shut down the USA in the 2006 WBC as a top prospect at the age of 21 despite having almost no upper-minor league experience. By mid-season 2008, injuries had ended Loewen's career as a pitcher and he was transitioning to the outfield. 

All of that sort of goes beyond the real point though. Jameson Taillon took the mound on Sunday and faced a lineup full of big league hitters in a game that was more meaningful than a run of the mill spring training game. He had a few advantages, yes, but I don't think there was one person that watched him in his four innings yesterday that didn't come away impressed. This is pretty much all that we as Pirate fans could've asked for from Taillon's stint in the WBC. As you could probably tell in my post about him last week, his numbers at Bradenton last year had me a little worried. Seeing him pitch yesterday, though, I'm much less worried. There's no question that Taillon's got the stuff to be a good Major League pitcher. Getting him there from Double-A, that's the task now. 

This is seriously how Tom Singer's story about Brandon Inge at Pirates.com starts: 

Clint Hurdle may finally have his Jose Oquendo.

This, if you'd forgotten or never knew or never cared, is Jose Oquendo. It's not so much that the comparison to Oquendo is out of line, it's that I can't figure out why anyone would go looking for a modern Jose Oquendo.

A good spring training rule of thumb is this: if it finds its way onto a prominent spot on the team's website, it's important. This is probably bad news for Josh Harrison, and entirely inconsequential to everyone else in the universe, since neither Josh Harrison nor Brandon Inge are very good at baseball. 

Even moreso than Gerrit Cole, Jameson Taillon's minor league career has kind of vexed prospect guys. Everybody that watches Taillon throw in person reports back that he's got borderline-elite stuff. You can check out the piece Kiley McDaniel did for FanGraphs last summer, when he slotted Taillon just behind Dylan Bundy as a prospect, said he has a "non-zero" chance of becoming an ace and that even if he doesn't (noting that there are never more than 15 or so pitchers in baseball that really qualify as "aces") he'll be a very strong #2 starter. McDaniel saw Taillon again over the winter at instructs and reported back that he looked basically the same. 

The vexing part is that despite having a great fastball and a great curve and a pretty good changeup for a pitcher of his age (he turned 21 in November), his minor league numbers haven't been great. In his minor league debut with West Virginia in 2010, he gave up nearly a hit an inning and allowed nine homers in 92 2/3 innings. Last year with Bradenton, his home runs and hits allowed came down a bit but so did his strikeouts. His K/9 rate in the Florida State League was 7.1/9 innings, which is right around the big league average. That's not quite what you want to see from a pitcher like Taillon at any level in the minors. 

The explanation that's mostly been used to explain this is that the Pirates keep their young pitchers on pretty tight leashes in the low minors, limiting how many breaking pitches they throw, stressing fastball command, etc. As a result they can occasionally get hit hard or have lagging strikeout rates, but that those things aren't necessarily reflective of the pitcher's talent so much as the Pirates' method of development. You can see the way that Taillon's being brought along and compare it to, say, Nick Kingham, and understand that he's more talented and that the team is higher on him and that his results are better, even if that's not technically born out in the numbers. Certainly, everyone that watches Taillon throw says that his stuff is still great and that he's still projectible and still on pace to be a good big league starter and all of those things. 

All of that being said, questions started cropping up last summer. I distinctly recall Kevin Goldstein, before he left Baseball Prospectus for the Astros, asking when it would be OK to start wondering about Taillon's mediocre results. That it's great that he's talented and it's fine that the Pirates have their own system for developing pitchers, but at what point do mediocre results outstrip immense talent? Taillon quieted some of that with his late promotion to Altoona when he absolutely blew the doors off of the Eastern League to close out the 2012 season. He only made three starts, but in them he struck out 18 and walked one hitter in 17 innings. He gave up 11 hits, no homers, and just three runs. Still, he went from being Baseball America's #15 prospect to #19. At MLB.com he went from #8 to #15. There's nothing wrong with being one of the 15-20 best prospects in the game, but it shouldn't go unnoticed when a prospect's stock drops like that. 

I think that the answer to Goldstein's question is that this is the year to really watch Taillon. He's been in the Pirates' system for two years now, he's no longer in the low minors, and he's the same age Gerrit Cole was last year. The leash has to start coming off this year. The first two years in the system, it's understandable that the Pirates wanted to build up stamina and work on command in a high school pitcher. At this point, it's time to transition towards building up an arsenal to pitch in the big leagues. If Taillon's results are still middling with Altoona this year, his prospect stock is going to drop quickly and there will be plenty of reason to worry about his future. 

The bigger question, of course, is this: will that happen? I don't really have any more evidence in either direction than what I've already offered. His stuff is still good enough that any scout watching him pitch drools over him, but his results up until now haven't been great. You can read the tea leaves a bit and say that the Pirates letting him pitch for Canada in the WBC is a sign that they're not terribly worried about him and you can put a lot of emphasis on his little run with Altoona at the end of last year, but I'd advise against reading too much into either of those things. I'm going to lean towards breakout, because I find it hard to believe someone with Taillon's talent won't break through and because being negative about Pirate prospects before they've collapsed is the final step towards Total Pirate Apathy and I'm not there yet. My point, though, is that I think that Taillon will start 2014 as either one of the two or three best right-handed pitching prospects in baseball or he'll be out of the Top 50 prospects entirely (or, I suppose, he'll dominate in the minors and get called up early enough to exhaust his prospect status, but that seems unlikely).

From a more zoomed out perspective, what Taillon does in 2013 won't be just about Jameson Taillon. It's also going to be a referendum on the Kyle Stark/Jim Benedict pitcher development program. To this point the Pirates' strategy of taking young pitchers and focusing on fastball control in the low minors has mostly fizzled. There have been a few success storys, but all of the guys that took middling low-minors numbers and translated them into upper-minors success (Rudy Owens, Kyle McPherson, and Jeff Locke come immediately to mind) were all generally relatively low-ceiling guys either drafted by Dave Littlefield or acquired in a trade. It's hard to say whether the system failed guys like Zack Von Rosenberg and Zack Dodson and Quentin Miller, or if the scouting team simply failed to identify high school pitchers that truly had a high ceiling. Taillon, though, has all the talent in the world and even after two years of middling results in the low minors, no real reason to not reach his ceiling. If things don't work out, there are going to be plenty of questions to ask about what went wrong. 

I spent most of the winter bemoaning the Pirates' lack of pitching depth, but the whole time that I was doing so there was a significant elephant in the room: Gerrit Cole.  Cole is in camp with the Pirates, pitching big league innings, ranked in the top ten of most prospect lists and he rose to Triple-A in his first minor league season and people like Baseball Prospectus's Jason Parks write things like this about his ceiling: 

Fantasy Future: Could develop into premier starter; 20-game winner; perennial Cy Young award candidate.

As a result, I think that there's the perception among some Pirate fans that the fact that Cole won't start 2013 because the Pirates are trying to keep his arbitration clock from ticking. Whether or not that's a justifiable reason to keep a pitcher in the minors is its own debate (short answer: I think that it definitely is), but I'm not sure it's applicable to Cole here. The reality is that Cole is a good prospect and he's got a high ceiling, but I'm not sure he's such a phenom that he only needs one Triple-A start before showing up in Pittsburgh. He'll start the year out with Indianapolis because he's got things to work on, not because the Pirates are holding him down. So what does he have to work on? And when can we expect to see him?

There are a few things to watch with Cole both in spring training and in his future time with Indianapolis. The first is his changeup: his fastball and slider are already big league pitches, but there are varying reports on how much work his changeup needs. To be clear: everyone thinks that his changeup can be a plus pitch, just that he needs a bit more work on it. Kiley McDaniel watched Cole in instructs in January and wrote pretty much that: 

Cole threw one curveball at 81 that he should scrap, just a slower version of the slider and only threw two changeups in the low 80’s. The changeups showed plus potential, turning over with fade and bottom but the changeup is a pitch that comes with feel, something Cole can’t have throwing it twice a game. His command was fine for the level, but would waver more than you’d like, usually missing up in the zone.

If you go back to the first link, Parks' scouting report of Cole, you'll read that while Cole's fastball meets the hype in terms of velocity, it tends to flatten out when he leaves it up in the zone. And when you read McDaniel's report, you see that Cole's remaining command issues have to do with him leaving the ball up in the zone. Whenever you read a report on Cole, even going back to his days at UCLA, that says that he has all of the disparate parts needed to make an ace (explosive fastball, plus slider, the beginnings of a plus changeup) but that for some reason his results don't quite match the talent, I'm pretty sure that this issue with the elevating fastball is why. 

Do you remember the 2012 Futures Game? Cole came out throwing gas, striking out Xander Boegarts on four pitches with a fastball that touched 99 mph. Then he got a ground out, walked a hitter, and fell behind Jae-Hoon Ha (who's not a Top 100 prospect and is presumably more well known for his defense than his offense given his minor league numbers) 2-0. Cole came back with two fastballs up in the zone. Ha fouled one off, then homered to right field. I suspect that the same thing happened when Cole got lit up in his Triple-A playoff start with Indy last year. My hypothesis is this: when Cole gets excited, his command dips, when his command dips, he elevates his fastball, when he elevates his fastball, he gets pounded. 

This is not a huge problem for someone with the raw stuff of Gerrit Cole. When he works out his changeup and can throw it more consistently, hitters won't be able to sit on fastballs and hope he leaves a straight one up in the zone for them. Really, it's more like fine-tuning that needs to be taken care of before he's completely ready for the big leagues. 

So when will he be completely ready? Even Stephen Strasburg made six Triple-A starts, and while Cole is a good prospect  that Strasburg was. Still, six Triple-A starts is a nice baseline as an ideal number. I think that we have to assume that he gets that many, because even if he just blows the doors off from the beginning it'll probably take that many starts to be sure that he's made the progress that needs to be made. If we do want to take financials into account, the Super-Two deadline (which slides from year to year) is generally somewhere around the beginning of June. PLUS, every minor league start will be a tightly controlled situation, in terms of pitches and innings. That means that the longer he stays in Triple-A, the more potential flexibility the Pirates have with him down the stretch should they need him to pitch in a pennant race without having to shelf him, Strasburg style. You're laughing now, I know, but this is stuff that someone should at least be thinking about at this point in the spring. 

If we add all that together, I'd say that there's practically no chance that Cole comes to Pittsburgh before June 1st, even if he flat-out dominates at Indianapolis (given the precarious health of the Pirates' staff and the chance that Cole certainly could go to Indy and flat-out dominate, I won't say that there's no chance at all, but I do feel like it's pretty small). Indy has 59 games in April and May and their season opener is also their home opener, so that means 12 starts for Cole if he pitches every fifth game and eight starts for him if they hold him to once a week to keep a leash on innings. Instinctively that number of starts feels about right. He made 13 starts with Bradenton and 12 starts with Altoona last year. I suspect that the Pirates won't let him pitch every fifth day, though, and that when June 1 rolls around he's somewhere around 8-10 starts instead of 12. As a result it could be closer to July when we see him. 

I feel pretty good about that ballpark, though that's partially because I'm pretty optimistic that things will come together quickly for Cole in Triple-A (and that I'm optimistic more out of a need for sanity at this point in the season that anything else). It's certainly possible that he struggles a bit at the beginning of the year and needs more time to work things out. Still, between his talent and the Pirates' lack of pitching depth this year, I'd say that while I wouldn't expect Cole much earlier than June 1st, I also wouldn't expect him much later than the All-Star break. 

After Gerrit Cole's Grapefruit League debut yesterday, Jameson Taillon will start against the Red Sox today at 1:05 PM. Taillon probably won't get many spring training appearances with the Bucs this year since he'll be joining Team Canada for the World Baseball Classic shortly, which is an even better reason to pay attention to him today. 

You can read about Cole's outing against the Rays yesterday here. Clint Hurdle's quote about his appearance has a pretty fantastically loaded elipsis. That quote could literally mean anything with that thing in there. 

As Charlie notes, Gerrit Cole and pretty much every other interesting Pirate pitcher of consequence is taking the mound against the Rays today. I'm not much interested in spring training results but I am curious to see how Cole fares against big league hitters. He's high on my list of things to talk about during spring training and I'm particularly interested just to see how he fares in situations where he's out of his comfort zone. 

Speaking of things to talk about this spring, I've been thinking about how I want to do spring training and season previews and here's how it's going to go down: every day I'm going to try and answer a question about the Pirates in the coming season (stuff like "When will we see Gerrit Cole?" ). I have a long list of questions to tackle, but if you have anything on your mind leave it in the questions or holler at me on Twitter. If it's not on the list and I think it's interesting, I'll try to get to it. 

I did the Pirates' portion of the season preview for Big League Magazine this spring. You can check out an excerpt of it here. Their preview issue is a heck of a thing: bloggers and writers familiar with all 30 teams wrote a couple thousand word previews for each club in addition to other season preview articles. Which is to say that it's not free, but there's lots of stuff for the $4.95 that the preview issue costs. (Full disclosure: my payment is based on how many copies of the issue get sold.)

Jason Parks put out his Top 101 prospects at Baseball Prospectus yesterday. Parks loves high upside guys and that's reflected in his rankings of Pirates: Gerrit Cole is at #3, Jameson Taillon is at #11, Gregory Polanco is at #44, Luis Heredia is at #53, and Alen Hanson is at #66. That's about where Polanco and Hanson come in on other lists, but those are particularly high slots to find Cole and Taillon and Heredia in, I think. Not that I'm complaining, of course, just noting that most lists have those guys a bit lower. 

I'm doing World Baseball Classic previews over at The Outside Corner this week. On Monday I ran down the qualifying round, I did Pool A yesterday, Pool B will be today, and so forth. I'm shooting to have them run at 2:30 every day, if you're interested in checking back in. I'm also trying to pass them around on Twitter.