You know, I wasn't going to talk about this, but it's just so ...
/tries to make excuse about beating the Reds in the real exhibition game today
/stops
/double checks box score
/tries again to mention the Reds game
/gives up
Well, uh, hey, at least we made the right choice by demoting Virgil Vasquez?
The Pirates announced today that Sean Burnett, Craig Hansen, and Donnie Veal will all make the opening day roster, which leaves the final spot for Evan Meek or Jesse Chavez. This isn't surprising at all and it's what everyone figured the final spot would come down to, but think about the composition of the bullpen for a moment. Craig Hansen, Tyler Yates, and Donnie Veal. All in the same bullpen. Possibly joined by Evan Meek. Holy freaking crap, the rotation must be terrified.
In what was pretty much a foregone conclusion at this point, the Pirates announced tonight that Craig Monroe has made the 25-man roster. To make room for him, ¡Romulo! Sanchez has been cut from the 40-man roster and will be put on waivers. I can't help but think this is the front office's way of ensuring that there's not a Romulo Sanchez bobblehead night this year.
OK, that's not true. But don't be fooled by Monroe's good spring; he hit pretty terribly with the Twins last year in a role very similar to the one he's going to play with the Pirates this year. If we're lucky, he might be this year's Jason Michaels. If we're unlucky? Hey, at least Jeff Salazar's in AAA.
I've got some big apologies to hand out here, as I asked for spring training pictures from you guys and I've been pretty bad at posting them lately. I've got a pretty good sized backlog of reader photos to post this morning, and we're going to get to them because I'm going to be honest, I've enjoyed seeing the pictures everyone's been sending me this spring and I don't think I'm alone.
First up, we've got pictures from David Walsh, who calls Greenville, PA home. David actually sent these to me about eight days ago, so I'm going to apologize profusely to my fellow Mercer County native for taking so long to post these. David had some nice seats at McKechnie and got some closeups of Jack Wilson, Adam LaRoche, and Brandon Moss.
Next up, we've got Ryan Alexander, who made a spur of the moment trip to Bradenton and Sarasota to watch some spring training. That's going to happen to me one of these years; it's going to be 2 AM before I realize I'm in my car going 95 on 95 halfway through South Carolina. He's got Andrew McCutchen, Paul Maholm, and he also partakes in that peculiar Pirate fan habit of taking a picture of the scoreboard, as if to say, "Holy crap! We're winning!"
And finally, we've got Steve Williams from State College who made his first pilgrimage to Spring Training this year and among other things, got a chance to see Brandon Moss in his first real action of the spring. 
All of these pics are clickable for higher quality, but if the loading time is too much, let me know and I'll crop them down a bit. A big thanks to Steve, David, Ryan, and everyone else who sent pics in this spring. I personally really enjoyed doing these little features as a change of pace and I think I'm going to try to do something similar during the season.
Nope, no jokes on my part. Instead, just a link to my favorite prank of all-time, George Plimpton's Sidd Finch story.
A second flap down by the pitcher's end was drawn open, and a tall, gawky player walked in and stepped up onto the pitcher's mound. He was wearing a small, black fielder's glove on his left hand and was holding a baseball in his right. Christensen had never seen him before. He had blue eyes, Christensen remembers, and a pale, youthful face, with facial muscles that were motionless, like a mask. "You notice it," Christensen explained later, "when a pitcher's jaw isn't working on a chaw or a piece of gum." Then to Christensen's astonishment he saw that the pitcher, pawing at the dirt of the mound to get it smoothed out properly and to his liking, was wearing a heavy hiking boot on his right foot.
Awesome.
The Pirates shipped eight players out today, leaving just one cut left to be made before the Opening Day roster is set. Virgil Vazquez, Jason Davis, Chris Bootcheck, Jeff Salazar, Andy Phillips, Garrett Jones, Denny Bautista, and Eric Kratz were all cut this morning, leaving one spot left in the bullpen to decide.
These moves mean a few things; Craig Monroe and Luis Cruz are all but assured of spots now and Jeff Karstens is locked in as the fifth starter. I was a bit surprised to see both Vazquez and Davis go, but my guess is that the front office wants to keep both of them starting for now, and thus the demotion. Similarly for guys like Phillips, Jones, and Salazar, another roster spot has to be opened for them to make the team over, say, Nyjer Morgan, and the Bucs don't risk losing them if they don't make the roster like they would if they cut Monroe. We can debate the merits of keeping Monroe aboard, but the fact is that if he's awful we can get rid of him and bring one of these guys up to fill the hole and it's unlikely that a ton of damage will be done.
That leaves four bullpen spots to be taken by Craig Hansen, Sean Burnett, Jesse Chavez, Don Veal, and Evan Meek. With those relatively limited options, I don't think the Bucs will risk losing Burnett or Hansen on waivers and if they were going to dump Veal back to the Cubs, they'd have done it already. That means the choice is between Meek and Chavez. I think Meek is probably a better reliever and since they're giving him a chance to pitch after both arm troubles and an ugly bout with the flu, my guess is that the team prefers him to take that spot. We should find out soon.
The other remaining question is whether or not an external move is coming. DK indicates that Huntington is working on a couple fronts, but nothing seems imminent. There are a few options out there (keep an eye on MLB Trade Rumors today, Jeff Keppinger, Robert Andino and Hayden Penn (same trade), Edward Mujica, and Ross Gload have already moved today) and Huntington could pull something off by the end of the day.
Last week, my dad sent me an e-mail telling me that he'd picked up three old issues of Sports Illustrated with the Pirates on the cover, as well as some old programs and scorebooks from Pirates games. He said that while they weren't in great shape, he assumed I'd be interested in them anyways and was sending them along in the mail so that I could look at them.
Of the three SIs he sent, one of them was the famous Willie Stargell/Terry Bradshaw cover, which has its own special place in Pittsburgh sports lore. The second was from early July in 1972 with Steve Blass on the cover, just as he was hitting his stride the year after his post-season performance propelled him to stardom. Neither he nor anyone reading had any idea his career would be over in two years. Despite the compelling stories, neither of these two covers pulled me in. The cover that instead grabbed my eye was this one, a shot of a young and powerful looking Willie Stargell in August of 1971, just months before the Pirates defeated the Orioles in the World Series.
I was born two and a half years after Pops retired, and so the Stargell that occupies my mind's eye has always been the one on the cover with Bradshaw; the aging, rounding, jovial superstar that laughed and bashed his team to a World Series in 1979. This Stargell was someone different. I went to Baseball Reference and looked up his stat line: .295/.398/.628 with 48 homers, 26 doubles, and 125 RBIs in 1971. The man was an unstoppable force.
Compelled by the cover, I carefully opened the aging magazine up to find Roy Blount's story. A melting pot of cheerful rapscallions, Pittsburgh is escaping from the National League East reads the intro paragraph. No one writes like this any more. Set across from the first page of text is a gripping picture of Roberto Clemente taken by Walter Iooss Jr., staring apprehensively through a chainlink fence. Pirate power is new, but Roberto Clemente's singles will soon stretch to Cooperstown. Reading those words, I felt a pang. No one knew just how terribly soon those singles would stretch. He hit .341 at the age of 36 that season. I read on. The article goes details the Pirates' run to the top of the NL East that year. It's got Manny Sanguillen's exuberance, Doc Ellis's irreverence, a quote from Steve Blass about how he's just out there throwing that he had no idea would sound incredibly expository in 38 years, and an example of how Clemente could quiet the clubhouse in a second if he chose to do it.
It was a strange feeling reading a story like that about the Pirates, but it got the wheels turning in my head. If there were one Pirate team in history that I could go back in time and watch play, I think it would be that '71 team. The '79 team always gets a lot of attention because of the way Stargell and Parker and Tanner carried the Fam-a-lee to an improbable victory in the World Series and the '60 team was immortalized by Maz's home run, but the '71 often gets glossed over as one small part of the greater Clemente story.
Reading the SI story reminded me of an anecdote in David Maraniss's Clemente biography that was published a few years back. After the Pirates lost Game 6 of that World Series to the Orioles, Clemente told his teammates that they would win Game 7 like it was simply a matter of fact. The team, having just lost a ten inning heartbreaker on the road and facing another road game with the Series on the line, was uncertain. The next night, in a scoreless game in the fourth inning, Clemente came to the plate against Mike Cuellar, a player he had no lost love for, and homered over the left field fence. Everyone in the Pirates dugout sat up. He told them they were going to win and they believed him. They went on to win the game 2-1.
For me, that's kind of the ultimate baseball moment, the one that I'd go back in a time machine to watch live over and over again. I can actually see myself sitting on the edge of my seat, watching that home run live and feeling my heart catch in my throat while my brain registers what happened.
Someday.
I've said this time and time again this off-season, and I'll say it again: until the Pirates show that they're turning things around, no free agents are going to be interested in coming to Pittsburgh. This is painfully clear today, after Will Ohman signed a minor league deal with the Dodgers after being offered a big league deal by the Pirates.
I don't really think this is a big problem (we don't really have an overwhelming need for free agents like Ohman in the next few years), but fans need to keep in mind that for now, the Pirates being involved in any sort of negotiations more likely means they're being used as a bargaining tool.
You know what's really great about the new front office? Despite Andrew McCutchen's very solid spring, capped by his five-hit game over the weekend, I was never for one second worried that Neal Huntington would buckle to public pressure and keep McCutchen up with the big club. And sure enough, he didn't.
There were a lot of things to like about McCutchen's performance this spring. After a kind of slow start, he rounded his line out to .318/.423/.561, showing both the on base skills and the power that he hasn't really put together in a full minor league season yet, and his five hits on Saturday came against Jamie Moyer and Brad Lidge. He's come a long way in the two years since he really struggled in starting his first first full go-round at AA in 2007 and the player that's topped prospect lists for the past few years is starting to take form. Still, there's a lot he can work on (namely hitting right-handed pitching and building that power stroke up a bit more) and given that he's only had an OPS of above .800 in one full minor-league season, there's just no reason to start his arbitration clock right now.
Brian Bixler was also demoted this morning and he's just a little less interesting to talk about. He did hit nicely this spring, but a lot of his line was tied up in that .345 batting average and there's just no reason to think that he can regularly replicate that at a AAA level, let alone a big league one. It's true that he's better than his dismal big league showing last year, but I don't think that necessarily makes him any more than a career utility guy. If he keeps hitting at Indianapolis to start the year, he'll earn a chance to to play full-time with the Bucs when the inevitable Freddy Sanchez/Jack Wilson injury comes along, but long-term I don't think he's going to be good for much more than that.
