Honestly, it's pretty hard to keep my mind on baseball today. I'm considering watching Sudden Death this afternoon, which should tell you what kind of mindset I'm in right now. Accordingly, let's just drop some links and go back to worrying about hockey.

Actually first, let's do a WHYGAVS Night Afternoon announcement. WHYGAVS Night Afternoon will begin at 12:30 at Firewaters on Federal St. on Sunday. If you're not down for drinking in the mid-afternoon, that's cool (I'm not either, I have to drive home when the game is over and by home, I don't mean Hermitage), but it sees as good a place as any to gather up. I'll probably mention this a few more times.

Tim Williams at BuccoFans absolutely killed it during the draft. He's got writeups for every day and info on tons of players.

Keep an eye on Wilbur Miller's site for his take on the draft. I seem to recall he had writeups for every player posted pretty quickly last year.

I'm sharing the link for this week's Futilitywatch here because of how fascinated I was by the players who have hit two triples in one of the first five games of their career.

On the "Game 7" side of things today, PSAMP is rocking the Pens links, and don't forget to check The Pensblog. And if you're not psyched up enough for the game yet, watch this.

I will post a gamethread tonight, even though I don't really expect anyone to be using it.

Sometimes, when a game is on a moment feels like a defining moment. It's never actually easy to diagnose these sorts of moments while in the moment and maybe in the long run they don't mean much, but they feel huge when they happen. Today's ninth inning rally was certainly one of those things that seemed like a huge event for this team when it happened. Time will tell if it means anything more than a tally in the win column, but for now it's a sweet win to savor.

It started with Andrew McCutchen. I'm not sure if I remember a rookie with the Pirates ever looking more immediately in place than 'Cutch does. Even on the nights that he struggles, he just looks like he belongs in the big leagues. This afternoon, he lead off the ninth inning with an 0-for-3, two strikeout day weighing down on him with a lights-out right-handed reliever (Rafael Soriano) on the mound. After taking two strikes, he fouled a pitch off and then took a slider in to right field for a leadoff single. I couldn't see, but from listening on the radio it sounded like a great piece of hitting for anyone, not just a guy that's been in the big leagues for a week. As soon as he got on first, I thought to myself, "He's scoring." After a sac bunt by Nyjer Morgan moved him to second and a groundout by Freddy Sanchez moved him to third, the Braves chose to walk Adam LaRoche to get to Andy. Can you imagine a more motivating situation? Ninth inning, tie game, go-ahead run on third, and if that weren't enough, they intentionally walk your brother to put you in position to win the game.

The younger LaRoche fell behind 0-2 as well, but managed to work the count full before getting fooled on a 3-2 slider and somehow still getting his bat on the ball to flip the ball right up the middle and score both runners. Suddenly, the Bucs were in position to split the series and when Matt Capps closed things down in the ninth, they did. But the important thing was that the two biggest hits in the game for the Pirates were two great pieces of hitting by two young guys that are going to form the core of this team for the forseeable future.

It's also amazing what a ninth inning rally like that can do. It ensured that Paul Maholm's eight-strikeout start didn't come in vain. It erased the frustration created by watching guys in black and gold flail at Javier Vazquez all day. It got the split with the Braves, which feels like a big deal because of the McLouth situation.

The Pirates and Braves wrap their four-gamer at 1:00 this afternoon with Paul Maholm and Javier Vazquez on the mound while the draft wraps up the final 20 picks that will mostly be composed of guys none of us have ever heard of before. Meanwhile, I'm rockin' out in the Shenango Valley this afternoon, which means that I can't see the Pirates' game because it's on Sports South. Feel free to use this thread to post any info about the late draft picks, if you have it, or to talk about the game.

As I drove up the side of a mountain in Virginia, I managed to briefly catch Greg Brown's voice on some wayward AM radio station as Craig Monroe's heads up base running (whoa, there's a weird phrase) gave the Pirates a 3-1 lead in the seventh inning. I assumed that Charlie Morton had made a good debut with the Pirates. It wasn't until later that I found out that Morton left after the first inning with a balky hamstring and that the man he deposed from the rotation, Jeff Karstens, then made what amounted to his best start of the year by holding the Braves to one run over 4 2/3 innings. Funny how the world works out sometimes. No word on Morton's hammy (other than "day to day" that is) or who makes this start next time through the rotation.

Since I didn't catch much of the game, I'll use the rest of this space here to wrap the second day of the draft. The Pirates made good on their promise to pull in some high upside guys, nabbing four interesting high school pitchers (Zackry Dodson, Zachary von Rosenburg, Trent Stephenson, and Billy Cain) with their first five picks today. All four have commitments to good baseball programs (Baylor, LSU, Arizona, and Texas, respectively, I believe) and all four will be difficult signs. In the 12th round they also grabbed John Inman of Stanford, initially expected to be one of the best pitchers in the country in 2009 before arm trouble zapped his year. Baseball America thinks he could go back to school to try and help his draft status, so he'll be a tough sign as well.

Elsewhere on the list, we got Aaron Baker from Oklahoma in the 11th, who Bryan Smith at BP thinks has great power for an 11th rounder, and Matthew den Dekker, Baseball America's 94th best prospect, in the 16th round. All told, it was a pretty huge day for the Pirates with one massive caveat; the Pirates have to sign a lot of these guys to make this a good draft. Specifically, the four high school pitchers (especially von Rosenburg) are important to sign. The Pirates had a lot of luck with guys like Robby Grossman, Quinton Miller, and Wes Freeman last year, but I'm not sure that that's necessarily a predictor for how things will go with these guys this year. Because the Pirates didn't get much value with their first round pick, they're really putting a lot of stock into these hard-to-sign guys.

In the end, there's not really going to be any way to value this draft class until August 17th (the 15th is a Saturday) and even after that, most of the value in this draft is tied up in pitchers (and high school pitchers at that), which means that it'll be years before we have any idea what comes out of this draft. Still, the Pirates did follow through on their promise to draft a slew of high upside guys today, with the plan to use the money not spent on a first round bonus to lure them away from college. We'll know soon enough whether it was a good strategy.

I'll wrap both this game and the draft later, but for now I gots to hit the road. Figures that I'll get to spend all of Charlie Morton's debut (one thing I was really looking forward to after the McLouth trade) in the car, away from any chance of seeing or hearing the game. I suppose I will survive. Anyways, Morton and Jair Jurrjens take the mound at 7:05 tonight.

Chance of Pittsburghers reacting to whatever happens in the first Morton vs. McLouth showdown? 100%

A few more thoughts on yesterday: Tim at BuccoFans makes the great point that the Pirates were hardly the only team picking in the top 10 that "reached' yesterday. And while it's been said before, I'll repeat it for emphasis; Sanchez is not a "Moskos pick," and that's for two reasons. One is that Moskos was a pitcher (always a bigger risk) that was a reliever (low upside) in college taken over someone almost universally agreed to be the best prospect in the draft. Sanchez is a catcher with a definite skill set (defense) and some potential with the bat taken over a bunch of guys that all had their own set of question marks. I'm still not a big fan of the pick, but I certainly don't want to come off like I think it's worse than it was. And if Huntington had taken someone more to my liking in the first round, I'd probably be fine with the next three picks. That's just how this sort of thing goes.

Anyways, Rounds 4-30 are being drafted today and this is where Huntington can make up ground. These are the rounds that the guys that could've been picked in yesterday's rounds will fall to and they're ultimately the picks that will define this draft. I don't know a lot about any of these guys and these picks are going to come fast and furious, so if anyone knows anything about the picks we make, please post it in the comments and I'll try to keep track of any interesting guys we grab today.

UPDATE (12:56)- Holy cow, these picks fly by. In rounds 4-8, the Pirates have taken high school pitchers with every pick and for the most part, they're all cut from the same mold; huge high school numbers with commitments to pretty good college programs. Big departure from yesterday, so far.

3:13- Names are still flying off the board, but they're getting pretty obscure at this point. I'll do a longer round-up of this round some time later today/tonight, but what I can tell you is this; I really like what Huntington is doing today and it makes his strategy from yesterday a bit clearer. Since the pick of Sanchez, we've taken 13(!) pitchers, including 10 high schoolers (through the 20th round). These guys aren't signed yet, but some of them are pretty highly touted recruits out of high school (von Rosenberg in the sixth and Cain in the eighth are two that immediately jump off the page). Any evaluation of this draft will have to be held until after the signing deadline, but the Pirates clearly thought it was more productive to try and pick up a bunch of high schoolers than one or two high-priced college or high school prospects. With that decision made, I'm guessing they took their favorite position player at #4. It doesn't necessarily make Sanchez a better pick or the right pick, but it is a pretty interesting strategy and I'm certainly not going to dismiss it right out of hand.

Editor's note: I'm keeping this pinned at the top of the page for now. Scroll for new content.

With the Penguins' win on Tuesday, Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals is now the same night that WHYGAVS Night was originally scheduled for. I would guess that a large number of the potential WHYGAVS Night attendees (myself included) would much rather watch hockey that night, so I'm moving WHYGAVS Night to WHYGAVS Afternoon on Sunday the 14th. I have prior plans on Saturday, so this is how it's going to have to go. For anyone that's still interested, we can meet up somewhere on Federal Street before the game (say, 12:30 or 1:00) and I'm open to suggestions for where in the comments (which I'll post when we decide). Sorry for the short notice. This is one thing you can blame on Marc-Andre Fleury and I won't have a problem with you doing so.

After last year's draft, several people wrote that it was a refreshing change to be able to recap the Pirates' draft by writing things like, "Signability issues" instead of "reach" or "overdraft" again and again. And they were right, it was a big departure from how things were done in the past and it brought a much-needed infusion of talent into the Pirates' system. That being said, guess which words I'd use to describe three of the four Pirate picks on Day 1 of the 2009 draft?

A lot of this hinges on the pick of Tony Sanchez. The first round is the best opportunity to get talent in the Major League draft and with Aaron Crow, Bobby Borchering, Grant Green, and a bevy of talented high school arms on the board, the Pirates went for a kid who wants to be (and probably projects to be) Yadier Molina. There's nothing actually wrong with Yady, he's a good, solid starting catcher that plays great defense and hits a little bit. Given nothing but his defense, I suppose Sanchez will probably be a starter for the Pirates somewhere down the road. But that's not good enough for that pick.

What really, really worries me is the way that Huntington describes Sanchez. To call him the third best player on their board frankly seems dishonest to me. The top fifty or so prospects are heavily scouted and I think the highest I saw Sanchez ranked by anyone was twentieth (if I'm wrong, please correct me). There was no speculation about Sanchez going higher than the back end of the first round until the Pirates became interested about a week ago. There's a lot more room for disagreement in this draft than most other drafts, but to call Sanchez the third best player suggests that they see something in him that no other scouts anywhere see. This certainly isn't a Moskos/Wieters repeat, but it's not a very good pick by the Pirates and there were probably ten other guys (several of them "signable") that I would've rather seen taken there.

Beyond that, the next three picks weren't bad, but that's about the best I can say about them. As soon as you move outside of first-round talent, the discrepancies in scouting get a lot bigger and so it's more believable that the Pirates see something in a guy like Brooks Pounders that, say, Baseball America doesn't. In fact, some of the more positive reports I've seen about Pounders say that he's a big guy with four pitches (very good for a high schooler), that doesn't have a lot of velocity. With his size (6'5", 240 lbs.) he certainly might develop that velocity and if the Pirates' scouts see a reason to believe he can do that, he's a fine pick for #53. Similarly, Victor Black can hit 95 and has a good slider, so if the Pirates think they can fix his control problems, he's a good pick at #49. Evan Chambers at #83 is another weird body type (5'9", 220) for a ball player, but they showed some video of his swing on MLB.com when the Pirates picked him and it looks like a good, quick, powerful stroke. He was at a community college in Florida, but he was a UF recruit out of high school and again, I'm more willing to believe the Pirates saw something different in him that made him that particular pick.

The problem is that one of the team's big rationales for picking Sanchez was that it'd give them more money to spend on picks later in the draft. Black, Pounders, and Chambers shouldn't take much more than slot money to sign, especially because Pounders and Chambers could be slight reaches where the Pirates picked them. They're not necessarily bad picks, but when coupled with Sanchez, the whole day brings what seems like a pretty pedestrian haul. The Pirates did spend a lot of money in later rounds (Grossman in 6, Miller in 20) last year, but off the bat this draft doesn't even remotely resemble last year's. They have plenty of picks to redeem themselves, but right now this draft is off to an awfully disappointing start.

Ross Ohlendorf and Derek Lowe at 7:05, if you can find time to watch the game with the Pens and the draft on. Please keep your Tony Sanchez-related rage to the thread below.