Part three in the intermittently-timed season preview-type posts as the 2012 season approaches.

I've started and abandoned at least three different Pedro Alvarez posts this winter. The problem with all of them was that every single time I get the basic Pedro Alvarez facts laid out, I have no idea where to go with them next. Here are the things about Alvarez that I am sure of on March 27, 2012:

• When the Pirates called Pedro Alvarez up in 2010, there sure didn't seem like there was any reason to keep him in the minors any longer.
• The number of times Pedro Alvarez struck out after his call-up in 2010 was concerning to me, but in general his rookie performance wasn't all that far out of line from what I had expected from him.
• Alvarez was abjectly terrible last year, and he was terrible in a way that genuinely worried me. 
• Alvarez is absolutely too young to be considered a bust based on what we've seen from his Pirate career.
• Spring training stats are useless.
• When people say that spring training stats are useless, they mean that spring training stats are useless in a vacuum, which is usually how people try to use them. If a guy has an awful year in which he can barely hit the ball and he strikes out a lot, then shows up at spring training the next year and can barely hit the ball and he strikes out a ton, being concerned is warranted.

Here's the thing, though: I have no idea what the Pirates should do about this. I think Keith Law's take, that Alvarez was rushed through the minors, that the Pirates mishandled him, and that the only way to fix his problems now is to send him down to Triple-A to fix what ails him, is interesting. I also think that the Pirates would've been hard-pressed to keep Alvarez in Triple-A a day longer than they did in 2010. Through 66 games and 278 plate appearances, he'd hit 16 homers and he had a .277/.363/.533 line and his strikeouts weren't substantially different than they'd been in 2009. He seemed pretty fine with the Pirates, too. He was streaky, but he managed to adjust and finish strongly after a terrible stretch in August. That seemed like a good sign, even considering the strikeouts. 

Obviously, it wasn't since Alvarez was such a disaster last year. The terrifying thing of it all is that his strikeout rate actually decreased a bit (30.8% to 30.5%) last year; he just got crossed up and confused way more often, which lead to less solid contact, which lead to an absolute void of power. The same thing was basically true when he went back down to Triple-A; he only hit 5 homers in 148 PAs with a .432 slugging percentage. 

So how do you fix a power hitter that's lost all of his power? Some people wanted to Alvarez to go to winter ball and as I said at the time, I thought you could make an argument both for him going south for the winter and working on his swing and for him taking a mental break. He clearly did some work this winter with his swing, because he came to camp with a more pronounced toe-tap and early in the spring there was some talk about getting him comfortable with his new swing. Early on, it looked like it was working. He hit a couple of opposite field home runs (one after working a 1-2 count full!) and seemed to be generally improved over last year's mess. Since then, he's been much more hit or miss and he's got 15 strikeouts in 34 PAs and only two hits besides those two home runs. He's occasionally had better at-bats, but there's plenty of reason for concern here.  

That leaves us with the Pirates' decision. What do you do with this guy? The club has decided to more or less unconditionally support him. He's the starting third baseman. It's true that he's working on a new swing, that the potential he brings to the lineup every day is greater than what Matt Hague and Josh Harrison bring, that spring training stats alone aren't much to get worked up about. It's true that the presence of Casey McGehee ensures that he won't have to play against the toughest lefties early in the year while he works on getting ironed out. It's true that for spring training the club has probably set benchmarks for Pedro that have little to do with the in-game results that we all see. It's true that the strong support from the front office might be good for him.

None of that makes me feel much better, though. If the Pirates are breaking camp with Pedro Alvarez as their starting third baseman, they're more or less committing to him starting at third base against right-handed pitching through the season's first 60-80 games. They absolutely cannot break camp with him on the roster, then bench him or demote him after an ugly 20 game stretch. It would be pointless and counterproductive to yank his chain like that. That means that when the Pirates start out 7-13 against their tough schedule and the casual fan with impossibly high expectations gets frustrated, it's going to be Alvarez that those frustrations get taken out on, assuming that his struggles continue.

Of course, by the same token, if the Pirates send Alvarez to start the year in Triple-A, they can't call him up for probably half of the season, no matter what the results are, because the ostensible reason he'd be sent down is to prove that he's at least where he was in 2010 and preferrably ahead of that benchmark. You can't prove that in 20 or 40 games. Maybe the Pirates think he's closer than that and would prefer not to have him in Triple-A for half of the season. The point is that I don't know what the right course of action is here and I don't know how many people really do. Maybe Alvarez just needs more time with his new swing and the best way to get it is in Pittsburgh. Maybe he needs a bigger overhaul of his swing and his whole approach and the best way to get it is in Indianapolis. We're only going to know by seeing how things play out in 2012.

One thing that I'm sure of is that how Alvarez hits is as important to the Pirates immediate and longer-term future as everyone else says he is. They need a 30-40 homer bat in the middle of the lineup, a real power threat. Alvarez is the best internal option for that. I don't know what the right approach is, but I hope that the one the Pirates are taking with him is it. 

kip wells. who hasnt pitched since 2009, is attempting comeback. the rhp threw for mets a few wks ago & hit 93 mph

— Jon Heyman (@JonHeymanCBS) March 26, 2012

Now, Charlie Morton is the Pirate pitcher that gets the most virtual ink on this blog. Before Electric Charlie, there was Ian Snell. Before Ian Snell, there was Kip Wells. 

Here's to Kip Wells, the first mediocre Pirate pitcher that WHYGAVS ever obsessed over! May he find success in his comeback, except against the Pirates, when I hope he keeps on pitching like Kip Wells. 

Nice story by Jonathan Mayo at Pirates.com today about Josh Bell, though I can't help but look at the pictures of Bell and thinking about how incredibly young he looks. And that when I was his age, I was just about to start a blog about the Pirates. 

Rumbunter thinks about Pedro Alvarez's swing and ruminates on what to do with him. I'll be writing more about Alvarez very soon as he's the obvious choice to hit with my next season preview piece.  

The Pirates/Orioles' game should be on ROOT tonight, if you're interested. 

Finally, we're just ten days away from real baseball. It can't get here soon enough.

Neal Huntington told Rob Biertempfel today that if Pedro Alvarez's knee soreness clears itself up, Alvarez will open the season with the Pirates and there's no chance that he'll be demoted to Triple-A to open 2012. He goes on to say that there's nothing left for Alvarez to learn in Triple-A and that he needs big league at-bats to improve. 

That's obviously one way of looking at Alvarez's struggles and it's a theory that I more or less prescribed to myself when Alvarez was struggling last year, but the longer this goes on the less sure I am that this is the right course. It's not a good idea to base any conclusions off of spring training stats, obviously, but Alvarez is struggling quite a bit this spring and he struggled last year and he wasn't really all that great in Indianapolis when he was there last year, either. It's not cut-and-dried, of course, and the team is better positioned to intrepret his spring training results than I am, but at this point it's hard not to be concerned by any sort of struggles that Alvarez has, spring training or not. Hopefully I'm wrong here.  

Charlie Morton said after putting up four zeroes today he expects to be ready for first turn in #Pirates rotation: "I want the ball."

— Dejan Kovacevic (@Dejan_Kovacevic) March 23, 2012

Awful hard not to be a Charlie Morton fan, I say.

Part two in the loosely affiliated series of posts that anticipate what I think are the most important issues in the 2012 Pittsburgh Pirates' season.

There is no baseball player in Pittsburgh that's as consistently mis-evaluated as Neil Walker. Walker is The Pittsburgh Kid, of course, and as a result there's a huge portion of the Pirate fanbase that see his RBI numbers and lap up his photo opportunities with Bill Mazeroski every spring and put Walker on a pedestal equal to Andrew McCutchen in the hierarchy of the current Pirates. As a result, there's a backlash against Walker by some very smart, very vocal Pirate fans that point out all of Walker's flaws: his low minor league OBPs, his bad second half last year, the way advanced metrics don't like his defense. It's hard to even talk about Walker because people often read what they want to read and hear what they want to hear. 

Walker's neither a great nor a bad second baseman. He's a pretty good, but definitely not great, hitter for the position. His defense was bad in 2010, but it noticeably improved in 2011. That was both something you could see with your eyes and something that was borne out in the metrics. That doesn't make him a good fielding second baseman, but it makes him a good enough fielding second baseman that he can play the position and be valuable there so long as his bat allows it. He's 26, which means that he's young enough that he might still improve but not so young that it's something that we should necessarily be counting on. If you're a playoff team and Neil Walker is your starting second baseman, you have no problems at second base. If you're the Pirates and you're trying to find complimentary pieces to help Andrew McCutchen, it's worth trying to figure out exactly what you have in Neil Walker. 

There are two aspects of Walker's 2011 season that concern me. The first is his power outage in the season's last 110+ games. Walker hit his sixth homer on May 20th, his 43rd game, and was cruising along at a .288/.361/.466 line. He only hit six homers in his 116 games after that, hitting .268/.324/.386. He played in 159 games last year, so it's hard to ascribe his struggles to an injury. If you want to try, though, I could point out that he did miss a game on June 30th and then didn't play on July 1st until pinch-hitting late in the game due to the back problems that occasionally plague him. Walker's two worst months by a decent margin were May and June (he was cruising in May until the 20th, then just basically stopped on a dime and the last ten days tanked his whole month's totals), so it's a little tempting to think that maybe his back bugged him and he played through it around that point in the season. I wouldn't dismiss the thought entirely, though the evidence of that is pretty scant. Post-June, though, Walker hit .298/.347/.434, which is quite solid for a second baseman and much better than his final line for 2011. Of course, we could keep going in circles like this and point out that he wasn't all that great in August (.260/.336/.385) or September (.268/.301/.433). The main idea, though, is that his season would look much different if he didn't have those six ugly weeks in May and June, and I think that stands either way.

My other concern about Walker for most of last year was his ability to hit from the right side of the plate. It's hard to get handedness splits by the month, but I know that on July 12th I mentioned he was hitting just .216/.280/.289 against lefties. That's obviously abysmal and unacceptable and way, way worse than he was in 2010 from the right side, but he finished up pretty strongly. His final line against left-handed pitching was .269/.322/.350. That's obviously not great, but it's a clear improvement on the mid-season numbers, especially when you consider that he only had about 70 plate appearances to pull his line upwards. That's a good sign from the second half of his season, even if you're a little discouraged by his August and September performances. 

It's not easy for me to make a solid conclusion as to what all this means for Walker going forward. On one hand, you can say the same thing that I said about Tabata earlier this week: if Walker's an average hitter, average hitters will have good months and bad months and it can be wishful thinking to say that if he can just eliminate the bad months he'd be a better hitter. On the other hand, those ugly numbers in May and June are pretty atypical of Walker's short Pirate career to date. Walker was very consistent in 2010 and he was mostly consistent in 2011 beyond those two months. On the third hand, you could say that his consitency in the Majors is the outlier based on his minor league performances. Still, even if you want to say that his struggles in the middle of 2011 were due to his back problems being worse than we knew (and again, it's not that that's an unreasonable position but it is one that's incredibly hard to prove from our vantage point and that makes it a dangerous assumption to make), that's not good news either because he's already missed some spring training time and back problems tend to not just up and go away. 

For now, there are a few things worth noting. Walker is improving based on where he was in the minors. His Triple-A walk rate was 6.3%; he's up to 7.9% with the Pirates. His discipline was the weakest part of his game in the minors. That it's improving (and continuing to improve: he went from 7.2% to 8.2% in 2011) is good news. If you asked me to guess, I'd say that I'm cautiously optimistic that Walker will improve on his 2011 line in 2012 and that I don't think it's out of the question that he approaches his 2010 numbers over the course of a full season this year. I think it's encouraging that his patience improved last year, even if his overall numbers didn't, and I think it's at least worth noting that his worst struggles were confined to a small part of the year. That being said, there's just not enough information here to draw a strong conclusion. It's certainly possible that the fact that he was terrible in June and not all that great in August or September is a sign that pitchers are figuing him out and he's going backwards at the plate and it's not a problem that can be easily solved. I hope that's not the case, obviously, I just don't feel like I know enough to say for certain that it isn't. 

Relevant links: Walker's FanGraphs page, Walker's BBREF page 

I really like Charlie's piece today on Matt Hague and Josh Harrison being bit players no matter what they do in camp this spring. I joked yesterday that I wanted to make a Venn Diagram of people that love Matt Hague and people that hated Steve Pearce, because I suspect that they're many of the same people even though Hague and Pearce seem, to me, to be very similar players. I'm perfectly fine with either, or both, of these guys making the Opening Day roster, but if either one of them ends up with more than a couple hundre plate appearances, it's more likely than not that something went wrong for the Pirates this year.

At Pirates Prospects, Tim Williams had a great article on Tim Alderson yesterday. It casts some light on how the Pirates handle long-tossing among their pitching prospects and should go a ways towards dispelling the myth that the Pirates shoehorn all of their pitching prospects into a one-size-fits-all throwing program.

As tweeted out by everyone, Clint Hurdle named Erik Bedard his Opening Day starter and said that the rotation will be Bedard, Karstens, McDonald, Correia, and that they'll decide on a fifth starter when they need one based on Charlie Morton's health. I think Bedard's the right choice here, though you could've made a case for Karstens. 

As I do every spring, I wrote a fantasy baseball preview of the Pirates for Razzball. You should check it out. And yes, I am going to be calling Erik Bedard The French-Canadian Wheelchair Assassin this year, even though I know he's from Ontario and not Quebec.

As the season draws nearer, I'll be running a loosely affiliate series of posts that look at the things that most interest me in the upcoming 2012 season.

If you'll forgive the science analogy, Jose Tabata has always reminded me of a stem cell. That's because for a very long time, people have looked at him and projected any number of things onto him, making it seem like his career could go in any number of 100 directions. He'll develop a power stroke and be the next Manny Ramirez! He won't, and he'll be terrible! He's a leadoff guy! His body type is too bad to be a leadoff guy! He'll hit like a center fielder, but his defense won't let him stay there! He won't hit at all! He's a miserable jerk and a terrible teammate! He's a really nice guy who's just happy to be playing baseball! He's 23! he's 26! 

It seems incredible to me that Tabata's just 23 years old (we'll get to his age in a bit; for now, keep the snide remarks to yourself) and that he's only played in parts of two seasons for the Pirates. Because he was a Yankee prospect, I've been hearing about him since he was 17 or 18. Because he was a high-profile trade target, I paid a lot of attention to his minor league career in Pittsburgh. Because he played for Indianapolis when they came through Durham, I first saw him play in 2009. It seems like he's been a Pirate for forever. It really hasn't been that long.

Figuring out exactly what sort of player that Tabata will differentiate into is still difficult. A lot of it does depend on his age; I tend to be in the camp that believes he's the age he says he is for various reasons. There's no real evidence that he's older beyond whispers from a few corners of the industry, the Pirates should know how old he is better than anyone and they gave him that extension last summer, he's not from the Dominican Republic -- where a lot of the current crop of age-adjustments come from -- and is from Venezuela instead, and I'm a Pirate fan and as a Pirate fan I need to believe he's 23 and not 26 or 27, because there's a better chance his career will turn out well that way. It's entirely possible he's older than he says he is. This is baseball, this happens all the time, Tabata is a rich man now no matter where his career goes, and part of the reason the Pirates were willing to sign that deal with him is that he's so young. I'd hope that a guy that more or less openly worships Roberto Clemente in public would be better than that and I will assume that he is until it's definitvely proven otherwise, but if you're trying to really evaluate him you can't completely ignore the fact that some people think he's older than he says he is. It's true that doing that declares Tabata guilty until proven innocent and that there's no actual way for him to prove himself innocent and so the whole thought process makes me queasy, but it is what is. Some baseball players are not who they say they are and some people say Jose Tabata's older than he claims. It's something that you have to at least consider, even if you think, like I do, that the evidence that we have mostly points towards Tabata being 23 and not older.

Everything I'm about to say about Tabata is based on him being 23. If he's actually older, the older he is the less likely it is to come true. That doesn't make it impossible; if he's 26, for example, he's still young enough that we could reasonably expect his best years to be ahead of them. At this point, Tabata should be playing to see where he goes and that's true if he's any age between 23 and 26. The real danger for the Pirates lies on the road ahead; how long do you give him to develop? How do you interpret a moderate step forward for him in 2012? How do you evaluate him against Alex Presley if the two have similar seasons this year? These are long-term problems, though, and for now I'm mostly concered with what Tabata can do on the big league level.

Now that we're past the difficult stuff, let's get to the real questions: what has Tabata done so far with the Pirates, and based on that what's a reasonable expectation for him in 2012? What role should the Pirates expect him to play. For a quick reminder, here are his pertinent stats through two big league seasons:

Provided by Baseball-Reference.com: View Original Table
Generated 3/21/2012.

So, what we have is a 23-year old corner outfielder with very little power, but with an on base high enough that his two-year OPS is just about league average. If you apply linear weights, Tabata's wOBA through two years is .328 and his wRC+ is 104, which tells us the same thing. He's about an average hitter. He's a pretty good base stealer, with a success rate of just above 70%. That's just above the break-even point, which means that Tabata's a good enough base stealer to be allowed to run fairly regularly. It's interesting to me that his batting average dropped off quite a bit last year, but his OBP stayed at the same level it was at in 2010. We can't really draw a conclusion from that, but the same thing happened to Andrew McCutchen and it makes me wonder if Clint Hurdle and Gregg Ritchie aren't working on improving the patience of their young hitters. Tabata wasn't necessarily impatient in the way that, say, Starling Marte has been in his minor league career, just that his walk rate improved quite a bit in 2011. Let's look at his minor league numbers (with last year's rehab stints thrown out): 

Provided by Baseball-Reference.com: View Original Table
Generated 3/21/2012.

You can see that there's a bit of a trend here, too, as Tabata's patience seemed to improve a bit in 2010 compared to the earlier portion of his minor league career. It's not as dramaticallly as in 2011, but it's the only year he walked in more than 9% of his plate appearances and it definitely marks an upward trend if you consider last year, too.

We'd all love for him to suddenly hit 20 home runs, but that seems like an awfully unreasonable expectation for the guy in 2012. That sort of power just isn't there yet and to think it'll happen overnight is crazy. What I'd really like to see from Tabata in 2012 is for him to stay healthy over the course of a full season (he missed significant time at least in 2008 and 2011; I'm not sure about 2006 or 2007 as the Yankees may have just been cautious with him due to his age) and to develop into a real leadoff hitter. I'd love to see something in the ballpark of a .370 OBP from him; to see him couple that ~.300 batting average from the minors with the walks that he's started to take in 2010 and 2011. If he does that, it won't matter if he only slugs .390.

The question is whether or not that's actually reasonable. Most of the projection systems put his 2012 OBP somewhere between .340 and .350 (Brian Cartwright's Oliver, which is available with a subscription to The Harball Times' Forecasts, which, full disclosure, I write player comments and forecast playing time for, has him in the same range), so maybe I'm shooting a little high. That's generally based on a batting average of around .280. I don't think .280/.350/.390 is a good enough season from Tabata, though, and I really hope that he does at least a little better than that. 

That's not to say Tabata's not capable of the .300/.370/400 line I'd like to see; he opened 2011 up on a tear (.289/.389/.474 with three of his four homers in the season's first 20 games), and he got hot again when he came off of the disabled list in August (.340/.411/.520 in the first 12 games back). He had looooong dry spells, though, that can't be explained away by his injury. Lots of average and even bad hitters can string together a few hot 10-20 game stretches in a season, though. Tabata has to prove he's capable of more than that because the Pirates need him to be more than that. 

Tabata's never had an overwhelmingly good season, though it's always been perfectly reasonably to look past that given his age relative to each level and the fact that he never really stayed at any one level for too long. He's heading into his third year at the big league level, now, and I think it's reasonable to hope to see some improvement, even if Tabata's still relatively young at 23. That means that I, personally, want to see him go beyond what the projection systems have him pegged for. Really, the most important thing (to me) is to see that he's progressing beyond where he was when he came up in 2010. I think that that's most likely to come in the form of an improved OBP, but I won't complain if his power stroke starts to develop a bit more in 2012. Right now, Tabata hits like a decent center fielder. The Pirates didn't trade for him to be a decent centerfielder, nor is that what they need him to be. Hopefully 2012 will be the year he starts to move beyond that.

Michael Sanserino, on why Josh Harrison has looked so good at the plate this spring: 

In 10 appearances this spring, Harrison is hitting .600 with five doubles, a triple and five RBIs. Harrison credits his spring success to a patient approach at the plate. His coaches credit it to a mix of experience, confidence and determination. 

Harrison has drawn two walks in 15 plate appearances this spring. He had three in 204 with the Pirates last summer and seemed mostly unrepentant about his inability to occasionally get on base via some method other than the base hit. 

Obviously it's a tiny sample and that makes it meaningless, but it's good that Harrison is at least acknowledging that patience is something that he needs to have at the plate. He is fairly good at putting his bat on the ball and hitting it hard somewhere; if he could just find some modicum of patience at the plate I think he'd be a pretty useful utility player. I'm more intrigued by Yamaico Navarro at the moment (I think the Pirates are, too, given the number of at-bats the two players have gotten this spring) because he represents at least some ability to play shortstop and the sort of minor league profile that might grow into a more productive player, but I just wanted to mention Harrison because despite all of the jokes I made about his OBP in the last nine months, I do think there's a spot for him on the team if he can improve his approach at the plate. 

Sorry for the relative silence the last few days; TAing has me busy, as usual, and my internet went down last night. I'll have more interesting things posted soon, I promise.