Draft kicks off in two hours in Seacaucus. We're chatting at FanHouse at 6 PM through the draft, so stop by there for live analysis that's free. I'll update here with any rumors I hear before the draft and our picks as we make them. I'll post a wrap-up of the picks tonight.

Right now (4 PM), both Jim Callis and Keith Law seem to think we're leaning towards Tony Sanchez, the catcher from Boston College. Callis seems pretty certain, Law seems less confident and says it could be any of Sanchez, Grant Green, Aaron Crow, Zack Wheeler, and Matt Hobgood.

Immediate Update: Keith Law's blog, which is Insider only (which annoys me to no freaking end), has a post currently titled, "Pirates to take Sanchez." So, there goes all your first round speculation.

UPDATE (4:30)- I'm not a huge fan of this pick, but I'd caution everyone against freaking out just yet. What's clear is that the Pirates really liked Sanchez and that he wasn't going to be available with the 49th or 53rd pick. There are some big upside arms that could free-fall that far with their contract demands and the Pirates' front office may see this as the best way to get both Sanchez and a big arm. I'm not saying we will, and I'm not saying we'll take them when we get there, but we should at least wait until the team makes their first three picks before hitting the panic button on this draft.

UPDATE (6:30)- Tony Sanchez it is.

6:41- Both Hobgood and Wheeler are off the board over guys like Matzek, Turner, Purke, etc. who had big bonus demands.

7:00- Crow, Matzek, Scheppers, and Purke all last through the top 10.

7:12- Crow goes to KC at #12.

7:19- Purke's gone to Texas at 14.

7:39- I guess it's fair to talk about Sanchez a bit since he's our pick. He's certainly a big reach at #4 and I don't like the pick at all, really, but it's not fair to say that he would've been available at #49 for the Pirates to take. He was generally projected to go to a team late in the first round and because of his willingness to sign easily and his great defensive reputation, I don't think he would've fallen further than that.

The issue, at least for me, comes in that there were better options for the Pirates here. There were quite a few interesting pitchers, as well as a couple position players like Borchering and Green that the Pirates could certainly use in their system. It's possible that Sanchez will keep developing the power that he flashed (14 homers) this year, but he absolutely has to do that for this pick to be worth the slot we made it in. Otherwise, well, we picked up two catchers with great defensive reputations and some mildly intriguing bat skills for what amounts to spare parts in the past year. It's clear that Huntington and Smith love that guy, but they're just about the only people on the planet that have him rated this high, which makes me incredibly nervous. He'll likely play for the Pirates if his defense is anywhere near as good as people say it is, but this just isn't a great pick for a team in the Pirates' situation.

Anyways, here's a link to his MLB.com scouting page with some video and scouting reports and the like.

7:56- Gibson falls to the Twins at #22. Just about all of the arms the Pirates might've been interested in with the fourth pick are gone, save Tanner Scheppers. I don't think the odds of them going that route again are very good.

8:05- Sanchez Q&A with David Laurila at BP is here. He compares himself to Yadier Molina. Really, it sounds to me like we drafted a Molina brother with the fourth pick in the draft.

9:16- Scheppers gone at #44 to Texas.

9:21- With their comp pick for Scheppers from last year (49 overall), the Pirates take Victor Black, RHP from Dallas Baptist University.

9:27- And with the 53rd pick (fourth in the second round), the Pirates take Brooks Pounders, a high school RHP from California. Give me a few minutes to dig up some stuff on Pounders and Black and I'll get it posted.

9:34- Black is a tall, hard-throwing righty with control problems. John Manuel thinks he might end up in the bullpen, but he seems pretty appropriately slotted at #49. Remember, we have to sign that pick or we don't get it back since it's compensatory. Pounders, besides having an awesome name, is committed to USC as both a power-hitting first baseman and a pitcher, though the Pirates announced him as a pitcher. USC's coach has this to say about him (link via Bucs Dugout):

"Brooks is another one of our commits who has accelerated his play in the past year. He has shown the ability to hit top-level pitching and become a force on the mound himself. He pitches with a loose arm and has great command of all his pitches while maintaining a low to mid 90's fastball. He will make an immediate impact for us in the lineup and our pitching rotation."

Like Black, he seems like a pretty appropriate pick for the spot but with the commitment to USC, he'll probably be a little harder to sign.

9:48- John Manuel calls Pounders "another reach" and notes that he doesn't really throw very hard (87-90) for such a big guy (did I mention he's a big guy, or did you just assume it from the name?). I'm guessing the Pirates hope his fastball grows into his frame.

10:15 PM- Third round pick is Evan Chambers, an outfielder from a community college in Florida.

After I finished up my first piece on the draft on Sunday night, suddenly a lot of the consensus (based on Goldstein's work at BP and Keith Law's Twitter feed, since I don't pay for ESPN Insider), has suddenly seemed to shift towards Aaron Crow dropping in the draft, potentially out of the top ten. That would, of course, indicate that the Pirates would pass on Crow for someone else. With the caveat that no one really has any idea what's going to happen beyond Strasburg and Ackely going first and second, what might the Pirates be thinking if they pass on Crow?

One thing to consider is that they have two second round picks, at #49 and #53. That #49 pick is compensation for not signing Scheppers last year, so they have to pick someone they know they can sign there, because that pick's not coming back. What's interesting to consider though, is that a bunch of pitchers are all falling down the draft boards at the moment because of signability issues. On top of Crow dropping, high schoolers Jacob Turner, Tyler Matzek, and Matt Purke are all rumored to want "Porcello money." It's a stretch to think that any of those guys will be available at 49, but since we're handicapped a bit with that pick we'd have to wait until 53 to even consider it and it's even more of a long shot that they'll be around then.

A more interesting thing to consider? Kyle Gibson. It seemed like the Pirates had locked in on him before his elbow injury and it's hard to say how that injury is really going to affect his draft status. Could he fall to the 49th pick? It seems unlikely, but I guess it's possible. It's not really out of the realm of possibility that someone that was seen as a middle-first round talent falls down that far with signability issues, but predicting this draft is not easy to do.

This is where we (and the Pirates) are left with a difficult question. Let's say they like Aaron Crow, but they don't love him. I've heard criticisms of Crow that seem pretty valid; there's always an injury risk, he might not develop a third good pitch, and he might not have a ton of room to grow from where he is right now. It's certainly fair and not really unreasonable if the Pirates evaluate Crow as worth less than the $4-$4.5 million he's demanding right now. So what if the Pirates decide, as today's Chuck Finder piece indicates, that they've decided that they like Sanchez as much as Crow and that they want to use the difference in bonus money to sign more draft picks?

The Pirates signed, users a manual count of WTM's rundown of last year's draft, 32 of 50 picks last year. That's a pretty good haul, but they were pretty clearly bumping their heads against the ceiling by the end of things. When they signed Quinton Miller, they only signed him because they failed to sign Drew Gagnon and Tanner Scheppers.  Presumably, with the money not spent on a first round pick, it would allow the Pirates to be both more aggressive in signing the guys they draft and more aggressive in drafting guys like Miller, Robby Grossman, Wesley Freeman, and the like.

This strategy (if it is indeed the one the Pirates embark on) makes me a little uneasy for a couple of reasons. The first reason is that I'm not sure this is a great strategy. First and second round picks are generally fairly safe, in terms of the baseball draft. They're not slam dunks like football and basketball, but a pretty high percentage of them (about half, in total) end up in the Major Leagues. Passing on a guy that's an upper-first round talent to sign more guys that aren't seems risky to me. The second question I have is why we can't spend the money on both Crow and our late draft picks. I understand that there has to be some kind of budget on the draft and Latin American signings, but if they're "not being limited" as John Perrotto reports today, what's another $2 million on a draft pick? It's one thing if they think that Sanchez and Crow are equal as prospects, but I don't think they are and I don't think many people do.

One thing that's for sure is that the success of this draft shouldn't be measured solely by their first round pick, as it has been the first two years. Crow or Grant Green, or probably even Sanchez would all make be nice additions to the organization, but the Pirates need to have a draft that's at least as deep as last year's where they signed eight of their top nine picks and were getting value from picks as late as the 20th round.

A lot of stuff happened in this game tonight, but when games go 15 innings, I tend to focus on things that go wrong in the extra innings that I feel like I harp on the things that could've been done differently that alter the outcome of the game. There's other stuff from this one to get to, but before we I have to get the following stuff off my chest.

• Craig Monroe is slower than a glacier. I know that Nyjer Morgan was on-deck and Tony Beasley wanted to force a throw after McCutchen's double in the eleventh, but did anyone expect that to play out differently?
  
• I wasn't really a fan of bringing Ian Snell in to pinch-bunt in the fifteenth. I know our options were limited there, but hear me out. Jason Jaramillo was up next, and he was clearly gassed after catching 14 innings. He was almost an automatic second out up there. Basically, by having Snell bunt Andy LaRoche over, JR was saying, "I hope Jack Wilson knocks him in." This is why I sometimes feel like baseball managers don't think more than a move ahead.
  
• Bringing in Jeff Karstens over Matt Capps in the fifteenth was a huge mistake.  Why end a game with your best reliever, who's available to pitch, on the shelf while your fifth starter struggles? At least Karstens' relief outing should ensure that Charlie Morton finds his way to Pittsburgh this week.
  

So the Pirates lost a 15-inning heartbreaker. That outcome obscures a lot of stuff from the actual game. Stuff like Andrew McCutchen going 4-for-7 with a single, a double, and two triples and one of his three outs being a flyball that he put a charge into that went to the warning track in dead center where it was tracked down by Nate McLouth in the 14th. Both of his triples were crucial in the Pirates' comeback from a 5-1 deficit and the second tied the game at six in the top of the seventh.

His first triple was probably the most impressive though. With the Pirates' down 5-1 in the sixth inning, he lead off by showing some really nice power to the opposite field gap in right center. "Alright," I thought to myself, "There's that first double." But it wasn't a double. He was on third base easily. There was nothing remarkable about this hit; it was just a line drive into the right center gap that got to the fence. It wasn't misplayed at all, Jeff Francouer and Nate McLouth didn't collide on the warning track, no one slipped en route to the ball, nothing. It was just a normal double into the gap fielded by an outfielder with a very good arm that McCutchen turned into an easy triple. The term "game changing speed" is thrown around a lot and sometimes, I'm not sure what it means. Watching McCutchen play, I get it. The best way that I can describe it is that he's faster than I can anticipate. After watching enough baseball, my brain expects certain physical reactions; players to be in certain places after balls are hit based on where and how hard the ball is hit, the situation, etc. McCutchen is consistently two or three steps ahead of where my anticipation places him every single time. It's something that you truly have to see to fully understand.

Of course, the counter to that is that McLouth had three hits and a homer for the Braves tonight while creating another run with a single and a steal of second base, which I'm sure will get plenty of play in Pittsburgh tomorrow. Of course, Tony Beasley also sent Jack Wilson home on his arm during the seventh inning rally and won the gamble in a big way that allowed the Pirates to tie the game, but I suppose that won't be talked about as much.

Finally, there was also Zach Duke. The defense has gotten a lot of credit for his turnaround this year, but tonight he gave up three home runs. Not much the defense can do there. It's OK, though. Duke is certainly due for a bit of regression, but there's no real reason to panic after just one bad start. The Braves seem to have his number this year, as they were responsible for his other worst start of the year back in April.

I don't think I have much more to say about this one other then, wow, what a game.

I'll be on First Inning/Minor League Notebook Radio with Tyler Hissey and Doug Gray at about 8:20 tonight to talk about the McLouth trade and what the Pirates are looking at for the draft tonight. You can check it out live at the link or an archive tonight/tomorrow when I put it in a links post.

The Nate McLouth circus takes another ridiculous turn today as the Pirate roll into Atlanta to face McLouth's new team. In fact, both McLouth and his successor in Pittsburgh, Andrew McCutchen, are batting leadoff tonight against Zach Duke and Kenshin Kawakami, respectively. It's a weird situation for a guy to face his old teammates so quickly after the trade, but it's just the way life goes sometimes.

Jack Wilson's back in a Pirate lineup that hasn't hit a home run since before McLouth was traded, while Duke faces the team that pounded him into his worst start of 2009. We've got tons of subplots tonight; way more than we normally see from a Monday night game in early June. Enjoy it all while it lasts.

With just a day to go before the 2009 draft, it's time to start looking at what the Pirates will do. I'm not going to preview specific players; I never really pay much attention to these guys until draft season and what I know about them is limited to what I read. If you're looking for that, Tim Williams at BuccoFans.com has done a great job previewing potential picks for the Pirates and if you've got time, I'd strongly suggest checking his stuff out.

Instead, I'm going to focus more closely on strategy. What are the Pirates likely to try and do? How does this draft fit into the long-term plan? What are the Pirates building towards?

First Round

All indications so far are that the Pirates are looking to take pitching in the first round. The reasoning here is simple; behind Dustin Ackely there doesn't figure to be much high-end hitting talent in this draft and Ackley's almost certain to be off the board by the time the Pirates pick at number four. If Ackley's there, I'd expect the Pirates to pick him. I don't expect him to be there and neither does anyone else, so there's some more analysis that needs to be done.

After Steven Strasburg (all but certain to be the Washington Nationals' pick at #1, in case you've been living under a rock) and Ackely are off the board, things really open up. The Padres have the third pick, and I've seen them projected to take any one of about five players, so there's no point in concerning ourselves with what they might do. If the Pirates are looking for pitching, the college pitchers available at the fourth spot might be Aaron Crow, last year's #9 pick that failed to sign with the Nationals (and a potential target for the Padres), Alex White, a righty from UNC, Tanner Scheppers, the Pirates second round pick last year that they failed to sign due to a shoulder problem, and Mike Leake, a flamethrower from Arizona State. The high school pitchers potentially available are Jacob Turner, the guy who I think goes in the #3 slot to San Diego more than anyone, Shelby Miller, Tyler Matzek, Matt Purke, and Zach Wheeler. Kyle Gibson of Missouri, who was previously thought to be the Pirates' first round target, was recently diagnosed with a fractured elbow and won't go in the four slot unless Neal Huntington wants a riot on Federal Street.

The best way to do this may be to take what the Pirates have said about the pick; that they're looking for someone that will sign quickly and go right into the system, and work backwards. I think we can rule all the high school kids out. High school pitchers drafted high are seeing more success of late, but they're still exceedingly hard to project and I'm guessing that the Pirates will likely target high school pitchers that aren't quite as highly rated as Miller, Matzek, Purke, etc. in later rounds if they fall due to signability concerns. This is the strategy they used last year to pick Quinton Miller (who signed) and Drew Gagon (who didn't). Given the amount of growing that most high school pitchers have to do, I don't really see a problem with that approach.

Most people have used the "sign quickly" statements by the Pirates to rule out Crow as a pick. I've always thought this was a bit of a mistake, because Crow doesn't have a ton of leverage this year. He can't sit a second year out. It would be insane. Crow's set his value at $4 million. If the Pirates take him, I think that's an indication that they think he's worth close to that and I wouldn't be surprised to see a deal worked out very quickly. John Perrotto has indicated that with the money that was slated for Nate McLouth this year suddenly freed, the Pirates may well do that. That's a fine move for the Pirates, I think. Crow dominated the Big 12 last year and he's rounded himself into shape very quickly with independent Fort Worth this year. There are some that rate his as the second best arm in this draft behind Strasburg and if he did sign quickly, he could probably end the season in Altoona and be with the Pirates next year unless he gets hurt.

The other two college pitching options at this point seem to be White and Scheppers. The Pirates won't draft Scheppers again. They didn't meet his bonus demands last year because of his injury history and while he seems fine now, I doubt the Pirates will mess with his shoulder injury with a first round pick this year. I watched White pitch on Saturday against ECU in the NCAA Super Regionals and I've got to say that despite his fine final line (8 1/3 innings, 12 strikeouts, 9 hits, 3 walks, 1 run/earned run), I wasn't all that impressed. White is supposedly the most projectible of the college pitchers, which means that he's put together a good run at UNC with good stuff despite not so great mechanics and scouts see that and say that if he fixes his mechanics, he could be great. The guy I saw threw mostly with his arm and had trouble locating his pitches early on in the game. My gut feeling (and remember, I'm not a scout and this was the first time I really watched him pitch this year) is that he's someone that's going to end up in the bullpen in the long-run. Messing with mechanics is always a difficult thing to predict. Maybe it'll unleash White's potential, and maybe it's something that will never quite "take."

But what if the Pirates don't go with a pitcher? That's not something that's talked about all that often and if Ackley's gone it's not all that likely, but what if the first three picks go Strasburg, Ackley, Crow, and the Pirates don't like any of the remaining arms? Or what if they're understandably slow to grab a pitcher early in the first? The first name that jumps out at me is USC shortstop Grant Green. Before the college season started this year, a lot of people had Green as the #2 prospect behind Strasburg after he hit .390/.438/.644 in his sophomore year. Since then, his stock has fallen quite a bit after a "disappointing" junior year in which he hit .374/.435/.579. The concern is that his power dropped off pretty considerably (9 homers his sophomore year just 4 this year) and that as a big guy (6'3") he might not be able to stay at short, which means the lack of power could hurt him. He's hit a lot of doubles and triples in his college career though, and as such a big guy, that power could be coming down the road. The USC team he played for this year wasn't great either, and lack of support could help explain some of the drop in his numbers.

Behind him as hitters are Boston College catcher Tony Sanchez, who the Pirates seem interested but would be a huge overdraft, and high school third baseman Bobby Borchering, who was originally slotted as a low first-rounder with signability problems but has recently started moving way up the charts as a switch hitter with power.

Right now, the consensus seems to be moving towards us taking Crow, and I think that's a fine pick. There's nothing inherently wrong with taking a college pitcher if it's done right (look at Brad Lincoln this year and consider that he would've likely been at this point two years ago without his injury), and Crow is about as good as it gets outside of Strasburg, especially considering Scheppers' injury problems.

There is one situation in which I can see us taking someone other than Crow, but that has a lot to do with our two second round picks. I'll take a closer look at that scenario and thsose two picks tomorrow.

September 25, 2007, to be specific. Why am I pointing this out? Well, it's because of things like this:

2. A finish line must be drawn.

It is not enough to say, as Huntington reiterated this week, that no one is untouchable. At some point, though maybe not now, the players -- as well as the manager and his staff -- will need to know that the carpet will not keep getting yanked out on an annual basis.

DK, who wrote that quoted link above, has said several times this week (and even in the same article that I've quoted!) that the players "saw" the Bay and Nady deals coming because of their contracts. That means that this McLouth trade makes it exactly one time that Huntington has pulled the carpet out from underneath anybody. Sure, there's been a ton of carpet-pulling going on, but most of it was done by Huntington's awful predecessor, Dave Littlefield. I've already spent far more words than necessary establishing that Huntington is not Littlefield and two years is not nearly enough time to clean up the mess that Littlefield left.

As for a finish line, well, I've got a rhetorical question for everyone that's in favor of Huntington drawing a "finish line." How did you feel about Cam Bonifay and Kevin McClatchy's "Five Year Plan"? I'm willing to bet that you feel the same way I do, which is to say that upon hearing the phrase "Five Year Plan," you grimace and chuckle sadly to yourself.

If you don't recall the plan, it was laid out by McClatchy and Bonifay in 1996 to get a competitive club into PNC Park when it opened in 2001. You know, the 2001 season where the Pirates went 62-100. What people always forget is that the plan actually got off to a fairly good start. Then, after the Pirates' unexpectedly contended for the 1997 NL Central title and sat at .500 on the 4th of July in 1999 when Jason Kendall destroyed his ankle, things took a turn for the worst. Buoyed by that .500 record and the near .500 finish in '97, Bonifay made a disastrous decision; he decided to build around a core of players that wasn't good enough to build around. As 2001 (or in this case, the finish line) approached, he panicked, overspent on bad free agents, handed out bad contracts, bungled the handling of Aramis Ramirez and ruined his Pirate career, built the worst Pirate team in recent memory, and was fired before the Five Year Plan ended.

Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.

There are two things that immediately stand out to me from today's disappointing loss in Houston. One is that the bullpen was well overdue for a bad outing. We expected the 'pen to be the worst part of a bad team when 2009 began, but they're really been pretty good, especially since Matt Capps has gotten himself together. Jesse Chavez and Steven Jackson gave up three runs (well, Jackson gave up all of them, but Chavez let all the inheriteds score) and that was the main difference in the Pirates' loss today. But I can't blame them for it, because once again (this is the second thing), we were shut down by Russ Ortiz.

When Russ Ortiz pitches 4 1/3 innings in relief, you should score runs off of him. The Pirates didn't and lost as a result. Besides the problems with Ortiz, Andrew McCutchen looked good with three singles, including an infield hit that came on what was basically a slow roller to second base. He hasn't really gotten a hold of a ball and sent it screaming into a gap yet, but through four games he certainly doesn't looked overwhelmed and that's a very good thing.

Ian Snell also turned in a pretty decent effort, holding Houston to three runs over six innings. He gave up eight hits, but his control seemed pretty good and he had some more life on his fastball. I definitely noticed the FSN gun popping at 94-96 several times and the Pitch FX has him down for an average of 93, which is better than the 91-92 he was averaging early this year. Hopefully the acquisition of Morton will scare some life into him, because the rotation has the potential to be much better if Karstens is the one being replaced and not Snell.

Regardless of Snell's good effort and McCutchen's three hits, the Pirates still lost two of three to a bad Houston team. Next up: a reunion with Nate McLouth and the Braves in Atlanta. And the draft! I've got a nice, long, two-part draft piece that's going to run Monday and Tuesday.

Ian Snell and Felipe Paulino take the mound at 2:05 today in what should be the opposite of a pitcher's duel. Of course, it's terrible pitchers that have given the Pirates the most trouble this year and Paulino certainly qualifies. It should be interesting to see how Ian Snell responds to the challenge that Charlie Morton presents to him now that he's in AAA. I'd guess that Morton will be in Pittsburgh sooner rather than later, and if Snell can't get his act together, it could be in his place.

How do I think Snell will respond? By walking hitters, giving up home runs, and blaming someone else for his struggles, of course.