I think that this may be the longest posting hiatus in WHYGAVS history, so let's run over what's gone down in the last few days to get caught up. It's not a whole lot mind you, but definitely a few things at least worth mentioning.
The only thing the Pirates have really done in the last week or so is sign Anderson Hernandez. This really isn't worth mentioning because Hernandez isn't that good, except that he's another ex-Met that really doesn't seem to be very good that the Pirates have signed this winter and now this number is getting weirdly high.
Jen Langosch is leaving the Pirates' beat to cover the Cardinals. When she took the Pirates' job a few years ago, I wasn't expecting much because the writers who had the job before her amounted to little more than official Dave Littlefield mouthpieces, but I thought that she both did a good job and continuously got better at it. Congrats to her for the new gig. Hopefully her replacement will be able to walk the "official team website" tightrope that MLB.com writers have to walk as well as she did.
Speaking of the Cardinals, they signed Carlos Beltran to a two-year deal shortly before Christmas. Between him and Adam Wainwright's return, I think it's officially time for Pirate fans to stop saying that the loss of Pujols opens a door of opportunity for the Pirates, because the Cardinals are going to be very, very good next year.
Based on his conversation with Frank Coonelly at Piratefest, Charlie writes that the new draft rules probably won't hurt the Pirates quite as much as we think, especially in the immediate future when the club has two or three first round picks.
Not mine, not my blog's, but Josh Gibson's and Andy Van Slyke's. No, it's not creepy that I know when Andy Van Slyke's birthday is, thank you very much. People seem to insist on reminding me every year.
Over at The Hardball Times, Chris Jaffe has a writeup about the 100th anniversary of Gibson's birth. Read it.
I'm headed back to PA for Christmas and New Year's, so I'll be in the car tomorrow and posting may be light over the next week or so. I'll try to get some kind of year in review up next week, but there's never very much news during the holidays.
If you haven't yet, I'd strong recommend you check out the blogs that were able to attend PirateFest over the weekend (Bucs Dugout, Raise the Jolly Roger, Pirates Prospects, McEffect, and RumBunter, with too many posts to link individually at this point) and all of the content that they generated from their time talking to, among others, Neal Huntington, Frank Coonelly, and Chris Resop. The Pirates have really gone out of their way the last two seasons to accomodate the non-traditional media and I think that the Pirate blog community has responded by generating some really interesting content.
What I'm particularly interested in today, in more of an internal monologue fashion, is this post that Charlie just wrote about losing and how the fans perceive losses differently with Mike McKenry than they do with, say, Ronny Paulino. The opening passage, which is about a fan asking Clint Hurdle what he writes in his little notebook during the games and Charlie's approximation of Hurdle's answer, is really what caught my eye:
Charlie Morton was on the mound and in some sort of situation that required him to make a tough pitch in an important situation. Morton made his pitch in the right location, but the batter hit it anyway. But that wasn't what Hurdle wrote in his book. Instead, what he wrote was that Morton's catcher, Michael McKenry, noticed that Morton had made his pitch and made some demonstrative gesture that conveyed frustration while also letting Morton know, 'Hey, we'll get 'em next time.'
See, this kills me. Writing down that Morton made a good pitch that got blasted is a noble pursuit. It's not exactly sabermetric, per se, but trying to find the big picture behind a pitcher's performance that's unbiased by individual box scores. If Morton makes a great pitch to Ryan Braun and Braun hits it out of the park for a three-run homer, it's certainly reasonable to assume that the next time he makes that pitch to a lesser hitter, Morton may get an out. Similarly, if Morton makes a bad pitch to Braun and Braun hits it to the warning track, it's worth noting that he might not get away with that mistake again.
It's a slippery slope to note these kinds of things subjectively during games and it's dangerous to try and assume what a 'good' pitch is in isolation and without context it's all meaningless. If a guy makes ten 'good' pitches that all get whacked, you have to start noting that he's just a terrible pitcher and it doesn't matter if he makes 'his' pitch or not. But if you worked at it over the year and cross-referenced your notes with PitchFX data after the game and created a strict standard for what a 'good' pitch is and maybe computerized everything, you would eventually start to learn things that aren't apparent just from the box scores and you could probably draw some real conclusions about which pitchers got lucky during the season and which ones were just plain unlucky. You can do the same things with strikeout rates and walk rates and flyball rates and home run rates, of course, but tracking pitches like that may give you a deeper understanding of your pitching staff. This is probably the sort of thing I'd be interested in trying to do if I worked for a baseball team and it was my job to track these things obsessively, rather than just a hobby.
But Hurdle is instead writing down when someone notices that a teammate got crappy luck and tries to pick him up. I have so many questions. What if McKenry is just a legitimately nice guy trying to pick up a teammate after he makes a bad pitch? What if Morton makes a fantastic pitch and strikes out McKenry's best friend and McKenry doesn't compliment him? Does that go in the book?
This is ultimately unimportant in the grand scheme of things, of course, and I'm guessing that Hurdle going out of his way to notice guys doing little things for their teammates is exactly why the players seem to really legitimately like the guy in a way that they never did with the prior two managers. Which confirms your suspicions: that I'm a bored stats nerd that's killing time in lab before I head home to PA and it's a slow time of year for baseball news so I'm nit-picking.
Instead, let's all watch this weird holiday e-card the Pirates sent out and laugh about it!
Andrew McCutchen, talking to the Post-Gazette about an extension with the Pirates:
"We definitely want to work something out but that's nothing that I can control right now," he said. "All I can do is get ready for the season and get things right. I'll let everything else take care of itself."
Of course, it's not really true that he can't control signing an extension with the Pirates, unless he means that he doesn't worry about these things at all and his agent does it all for him. I read it differently, though, as him saying that the Pirates have asked him to do something he has no interest in doing -- sign a contract that locks him down for one or two of his first free agency years -- and neither side is has any intention on budging at the moment, so there's nothing no one can do.
McCutchen's free agency is still a ways away, of course, and so there's plenty of time for the Pirates to take advantage of McCutchen's talents before even worrying about him leaving. Who knows maybe an 85-win season in 2012 makes 'Cutch more amenable to a deal that keeps him in Pittsburgh in 2016 or 2017. It's always worth remembering, though, that nothing in the world can make a player play for a team longer than he absolutely has to, and that a contract negotiation always has two sides.
Kevin Goldstein's Top 11 Pirate prospects is posted today over at Baseball Prospectus, so as always it's interesting to check it out and see what outside minds have to say about the Pirates' system. Much of the article is under the paywall, though the rankings themselves are free. Goldstein gives the Pirates four five-star prospects this year, plus Starling Marte and Robbie Grossman as four-star prospects. You can check back through Goldstein's past rankings of the Pirates' system to see that the Pirates haven't had a collection of good talent like this in a long time, though Goldstein still expresses some reservations about depth.
It's also interesting to see how he penalized Tony Sancehz and Stetson Allie for their difficult seasons. I personally have a harder time figuring out how to rank highly-regarded guys after a bad season, so seeing how others do is something I try to keep an eye on. In any case, make sure to check out the whole thing, especially if you have a BP subscription.
And this seems like as good a time as any to mention that Pirates Prospects is taking pre-orders for their 2012 prospect guide, which should be shipping soon. Last year's guide was pretty much indespensible and I'm sure this year's will be, too.
At the Winter Meetings, David Laurila at FanGraphs spoke to Clint Hurdle and Hurdle's got some interesting things to say about Andrew McCutchen, Pedro Alvarez, Neil Walker, Jose Tabata, and how the hitters and coaches prepare for opponents. It's worth reading enough that I'll only snark on his comment about Neil Walker being an RBI hunter this one time.
But seriously, read it all. For as much crap as Hurdle gets from guys like me, it's apparent from this article that he knows quite a bit about hitting and has put a lot of thought into how his young players approach their at-bats, even if the club's young offense didn't bear much fruit in 2011.
Patrick Newbman of NPB Tracker (via MLB Trade Rumors) says that the Pirates have signed Ryota Igarashi to a "split contract," which I think means a minor league deal that would pay him differently if he makes the big league club (think Jose Veras last year). Igarashi's worked 69 innings out of the Mets' bullpen over the last two seasons and before that was a reliever with Yakult in NPB's Pacific League.
He doesn't have much to show for his time with the Mets, but he throws pretty hard (his fastball averages around 92-94) and his strikeout numbers with the Mets were (67 in 69 innings). He struggled with his control in New York quite a bit, which really hurt his overall numbers, but that seems like something maybe the Pirates can help him with. Certainly it won't hurt to have another potential bullpen arm in camp.
And of course, you can probably guess that I like the signing because I think the Pirates need to be branching out into the Far East market more and while Igarashi isn't a star by any means, he is another Japanese player they can put on the roster to help towards making the Pirates a more viable destination for Japanese players. Hopefully, this will work out better than the Akinori Iwamura experience.
It's a bit of a slow news day, but Jon Heyman tweeted last night that the Pirates are still interested in Derrek Lee, with the implication being that the acquisition of Casey McGehee and tender of Garrett Jones would not keep the Pirates from re-signing Lee, should he be interested.
That's a relatively innocuous tweet, but from it I think we can make a couple of decent conclusions. One is that the Pirates are not terribly confident in Garrett Jones as an every day first baseman. That makes sense, both because of his glove and his limited bat there. I don't know that Lee would add a whole lot at this point (see: this post) and now that they have Casey McGehee and Yamaico Navarro and even Nick Evans I really don't see why the club would still be interested in Lee, since I think that he really adds depth more than anything and the Pirates have quite a bit more first base depth than they did when the off-season began.
The other thing that this means is that the Pirates are still planning on spending a bit more money. Which means that I hope they spend it on a starting pitcher, and not Derrek Lee. It's good to know that Neal Huntington may have more on his shopping list before spring training starts, though.
Casey McGehee is a Brewer. We have always hated Casey McGehee. Casey McGehee is a Pirate. We have always loved Casey McGehee.
When the Pirates picked up Casey McGehee last night, my initial instinct was to remember that how awful he was in 2011 and how overrated I thought he was in 2010. Being overrated doesn't mean that a player isn't useful, of course (see: Neil Walker), which is something that I have to remind myself pretty regularly. The second that I remembered that, I stopped asking why the Pirates would want McGehee -- it's obvious why they'd want a guy that was a 3-win player in 2010 in exchange for a reliever they were otherwise going to non-tender -- and shifted to what the Pirates might be seeing in a guy that was just as bad as Pedro Alvarez at the plate last year.
Most Twitter conversation (mostly between James and Ed) last night centered on his very low BABIP in 2011 (.249 vs. .330 and .306 in 2009 and 2010, respectively) and his low HR/FB rate (8.6% vs. 13.6% and 12.5%), two things that could suggest that a hitter is getting unlucky. That's a start, but it seemed to me at that point that it wasn't a huge amount to go on given that McGehee does strike out quite a bit (almost a quarter of his plate appearances are either strikeouts or walks [career 16.6% K rate and 7.6% BB rate], which means fewer balls in play, which means a low BABIP would have less of an effect) and that he's moving to PNC Park, which tends to swallow right-handed hitters homers. Which is to say that yes, McGehee did get a bit unlucky in 2011, but based on those numbers alone I'm not sure that a better BABIP would help him out a whole ton, especially because PNC Park won't do his power any favors.
So I woke up this morning still pondering the question until I saw this tweet from ESPN's Christina Kahrl about McGehee's bad year against lefties in 2011. I figured I'd follow up on that a bit and there's definitely something there. In McGehee's breakout 2009 season, he hit .303/.404/.461 against lefties, though he mostly played against righties (290 PAs vs. 104). In 2010, his first full year, he hit .316/.358/.589 against lefties. Eight of his 23 homers came against left-handed hitters, despite only a quarter of his PAs being against lefties. In 2011, McGehee hit .169/.228/.185 against lefties. So, all indications before 2011 were that he was a fairly typical right-handed hitter and then suddenly, he completely bottomed out against lefties.
Was it because he hurt his thumb early in the year? Or because some mystical cosmic force feasted on his ability to hit lefties to fuel its undying hunger? Was he just weirdly unlucky early in the year and let that fester into something worse? If you dig a little deeper, you can see that almost all of his BABIP and HR/FB problems stem from left-handed pitchers, even though his line drive rates and strikeout rates and flyball and groundball rates all seem to be in line with what he did against righties. That's not as good as he was in the past, but it still suggests he was hugely unlucky against left-handed pitching in 2011. I don't know if McGehee will get back to his 2009/2010 rates against lefties, but I do know I'd be incredibly surprised if he put up a .413 OPS against southpaws again 2012. If he improves there, he'll be a much better player for the Pirates than he was for the Brewers last year.
With the midnight non-tender deadline fast approaching, I'll update this post through the night as we figure out who the Pirates do and don't offer contracts to. We already know that Jose Veras has been traded to the Brewers for Casey McGehee, who will presumably be tendered.
We also know that the Pirates signed Jason Grilli to a one-year/$1.1 million deal. Grilli, you'll recall, was pretty excellent for the Pirates after the Phillies were forced to release him in July when they didn't promote him to the Majors. He was recovering from a knee injury that forced him to miss all of 2010. Assuming Grilli stays healthy (he's 35 now, so this is a bit of a concern), getting a reliever that can strike out more than a hitter an inning for $1.1 million is a pretty solid deal for the Pirates.
MIDNIGHT UPDATE: Everyone got a contract offer, with everyone being Joel Hanrahan, Garrett Jones, Chris Resop, Charlie Morton, Evan Meek, and Jeff Karstens. This is what I was hoping for, of course, though Neal Huntington's comments early in the off-season put some doubt on a Jones tender. The Pirates are better off with all of these guys on the roster, though, especially with Veras headed to Milwaukee.
