Spring training games start tomorrow, which means that we're at an exciting but excruciating juncture of the off-season. It's almost time for baseball to start and there are some things to watch during spring training games, but really what we've got now is a month of people fine-tuning before the real start of the season in April. For the Pirates' part, there aren't many things of importance at stake this spring. Their entire outfield is set, almost all of their starting infield is set, three-fifths of the rotation is set and the other two spots will be determined by injuries that shouldn't have long-term consequences either way, not performances. That said, there are a few things of import going on this spring, so let's talk about the things that I'm particularly interested in seeing shake out before the season begins. 

1. Pedro Alvarez
This is one of those situations where I know we're looking for something, but I have no idea what that something is, exactly. Spring training stats don't mean anything, so a bad spring for Alvarez could be fine if he's working on something and improving as March goes along. By the same token, a great spring for him could be meaningless if he's feasting on Double-A fodder and just sticking balls high into the currents at McKechnie. I don't know what I'm really looking for here, just something. To see him jump all over a first pitch fastball and destroy it. To see him keep his hands back on an 0-1 curveball and hit it 500 feet if its a hanger. Something. Anything. 

2. The last two roster spots
This one will relate back to #1 and the team's confidence in Alvarez. If we do some quick math, the club will probably open the season with five starters, seven relievers, three starting outfielders, two catchers,  we know who three infield starters will be (Walker, Barmes, Jones), and we can probably put Alvarez into the fourth spot. Nate McLouth and Casey McGehee almost certainly have bench spots locked down, which brings us to 23 players. One of the final two spots will go to a utility player that will almost certainly be Yamaico Navarro, Chase d'Arnaud, or Josh Harrison. Harrison can't play short, so it'll probably be Navarro or d'Arnaud. I'm a little interested to see Navarro play, just to be able to take stock of what the Pirates have. If he gets a spot over d'Arnaud, is it because the Pirates want d'Arnaud to get regular time in Triple-A or because they don't think he's a big league player? Who gets the last roster spot? Do the Pirates carry five outfielders or will they stick with four because Garrett Jones is on the roster? Who would the fifth outfielder even be at this point, Brandon Boggs? If Nick Evans or Matt Hague make the roster with McGehee and Alvarez, should we read that as a low level of confidence in Alvarez? Obviously we won't see everything that goes into these decisions, but at least the spring training performances and how the Pirates are using these players should let us take some stock into what the team is thinking and how they're evaluating their own players. 

3. The right-handed relief logjam
If the Pirates are taking seven relievers north with them, we can be certain that two will be lefties (Tony Watson and Moskos/Slaten/maybe Jo-Jo Reyes). Joel Hanrahan is a lock for one of the five right-handed spots and Jason Grilli and Chris Resop are awfully good bets, too. With AJ Burnett likely not coming back until March, we can put Kevin Correia into a rotation spot, which means that either Brad Lincoln or Dan McCutchen will take a long relief spot. That leaves one bullpen spot for Evan Meek, Chris Leroux, and Jared Hughes. Is Meek healthy enough to make the team? Does Chris Leroux have a leg up because he's out of options? Will the club use Watson or Leroux or maybe even Hughes, all of whom started in the minors or in winter ball, as the long relief and let McCutchen go? That last idea makes sense to me, and at this point I think I'd take Leroux and Hughes (who I like quite a bit and see as the dark horse to win the "Who will replace Joel Hanrahan after he's traded to the Red Sox on July 31st" sweepstakes that will unofficially be taking place this season) north and leave Meek behind. It's also possible that Burnett's injury and the state of Morton's recovery might make the Pirates put together a bullpen that keeps as many arms in-house as possible. They'd have to DFA McCutchen and risk losing him if he doesn't make the team, so they might wait until Burnett and Morton are healthy to do something like that. 

4. Are we seriously going to be doing this Kevin Correia thing again?
All I'm saying is that if I were making the decisions, I'd be very seriously considering eating Correia's salary and putting Lincoln in the rotation until everyone's healthy. It's possible we end up with both guys in the rotation anyway if Morton's not ready to go on Day 1, but yeah, I'm not sure how long I'd be sticking with Correia if he looks the same this spring as he did last July. 

A.J. Burnett has been diagnosed with an orbital fracture of his right eye...He will undergo surgery tomorrow in Pittsburgh.

— Pittsburgh Pirates (@Pirates) March 1, 2012

Are you serious? Being a Pirate fan is the worst. 

THE WORST.  

AJ Burnett bunted a ball into his eye socket this afternoon while taking part in Clint Hurdle's annual bunting tournament. 
AJ Burnett bunted a ball into his eye socket this afternoon while taking part in Clint Hurdle's annual bunting tournament.
AJ Burnett bunted a ball into his eye socket this afternoon while taking part in Clint Hurdle's annual bunting tournament.
AJ Burnett bunted a ball into his eye socket this afternoon while taking part in Clint Hurdle's annual bunting tournament. 

This is A Thing That Actually Happened. This is A Thing That Can Only Happen to the Pirates. This is A Thing That I Actually Kind of Expect to Happen to the Pirates.  

There's no actual indication as to how bad the injury is. The story linked above makes it seem like he was up pretty quickly and laughing about it, but he's also going back to Pittsburgh for further evaluation. 

As I've mentioned a couple times before, I'm working as a TA this semester and it occasionally limits my time pretty seriously. Those times are generally when the undergrads take a test. That happened yesterday, so I'm going to be mostly out of commission until sometime early this evening at the absolute earliest. I'm wasting time right now as I type this!

WHYGAVS has made the final four of the Pittsburgh Sports Blog tournament as the champion of the Dave Clark Division. I'm up against Pitt Script in the semifinals. They all seem like a bunch of nice guys and they're fellow Bloguineers, but I'm not losing to a Pitt blog. It's not happening. Help make sure it doesn't happen.  

Trevor Gooby, all-around great guy and the Pirates' Director of Florida Operations who's helped me quite a bit on my two trips to Bradenton, delievered a baby at McKechnie Field yesterday in a pre-spring training event. That's one way to rebuild fan relations!

Jeff Polman, who you probably know as the guy who replays old baseball seasons with Strat-o-matic cards and then writes fictional stories framed by his new alternate baseball history, has moved on to a replay of the 1958 season. It's a noirish tale based in San Francisco with updates three times a week. Most baseball fans recognize 1958 as the year baseball moved to California (it's why Jeff chose the season), but most Pirate fans probably know it as the year that Branch Rickey and Joe L. Brown's rebuilding project finally started to come together and the Pirates' 1950s long losing streak ended. Jeff was kind enough to let me "manage" (which basically means pick the lineups and the rotation and let him do all the hard work) this version of the Pirates and as always, I'm more than happy to point you to the site to see exactly where he takes things on the best pseudo-historical baseball fiction blog on the internet.

In today's Tribune Review, Rob Biertempfel talks about the current state of contract extension discussions between the Pirates and Andrew McCutchen. You should check out the whole piece, but the basic idea is that as things stand right now McCutchen's camp is looking to sign a deal in the ballpark of the extensions signed by Justin Upton and Jay Bruce, both of which topped out around $50 million, whereas the Pirates are hoping to pay him in the ballpark of $10 million less than that. 

Let's look at Bruce and Upton's deals. Bruce signed his deal prior to the 2011 season, with a little more than two years of MLB experience. He turned 24 right around Opening Day last year, whereas McCutchen turned 25 last October (McCutchen's a year older, for baseball purposes). Bruce got a $250,000 signing bonus and the deal paid him $2.75 million in 2011, and it'll pay him $5 million, $7.5 million, $10 million, $12 million, and $12.5 million from 2012-2016. The Reds hold a $13 million option for 2017 with a $1 million buyout. Upton signed his extension just before the 2010 season started. He also had just over two years of big league experience, and he was the youngest of the three players when he signed at the age of 22 (remember that we're talking about Bruce and Upton's ages when they signed, compared to McCutchen's age now, not their actual ages). His deal gave him a $ 1.25 million bonus and annual salaries worth $500k, $4.25 million, $6.75 million, $9.75 million, $14.25 million, and $14.5 million fro 2010-2015. The Diamondbacks don't have any options. 

To summarize, Bruce got six years and $51 million to cover his age 24-29 years, which includes his first two free agency seasons. The Reds got an option on his third year of free agency. Upton got six years and $51 million to cover his age 22-27 seasons, also including his first two free agency years with no option. If McCutchen were to sign a six year contract today, it'd go from ages 25-30 and also include his first two years of free agency. 

I suppose the next logical question is whether or not McCutchen deserves the same kind of deal that Bruce and Upton got, given that that's supposedly what's being discussed here. How does the trio compare? Let's break out the WAR graph.

Source: FanGraphs -- Justin Upton, Andrew McCutchen, Jay Bruce

McCutchen's clearly had the best career through his first 2+ seasons, though he started his career at an older age and thus he's older at this juncture of his career. If the Pirates are trying to make the case that he's worth less than Upton or Bruce, that's really the only ground that they have to stand on; that theyr'e signing him at an older age and they'll be paying for more seasons post-peak. Otherwise, it's easy to see from that graph (use this graph for reference) why McCutchen and his agents would have pegged his value to Bruce and Upton.

Really, the existence of Bruce's deal more or less sets McCutchen's value, no matter what the Pirates want to do here. I think that McCutchen's a better player than Bruce; he's a more complete hitter and he plays a more valuable defensive position. The one year in age difference isn't worth $10 million, especially if McCutchen's willing to sign away two years of free agency to the Pirates. 

Biertempfel says that the Pirates are willing to negotiate here, and that's good. What worries me is that I think that McCutchen's capable of a year that blows 2011 out of the water. As Jonah Keri pointed out two weeks ago, McCutchen's shown a lot of different tools over the last three years and though he's had awesome stretches, he hasn't managed to put everything together over a full season yet. If he does that in 2012 (and, let's be honest here, we all hope he does as Pirate fans), there's no way he'll sign a five-year deal for $48 million for two of his free agency years. 

I think it's pretty early on and we don't know a whole lot about what the two sides really want right now so I'm not willing to say that the Pirates just need to step up and give McCutchen the money, but I do think he's worth the same sort of deal that Bruce got and if it turns out that the Pirates weren't willing to give it to him, I'm going to be pretty disappointed. We're a ways away from that, though, and so at this point I'm just going to be heartened that they're talking and that McCutchen's apparently willing to talk about a deal that will give the Pirates some control over his free agency.

If you're the sort of person that wonders about uniform numbers, the AJ Burnett trade probably made you a little curious. Burnett's worn #34 for almost his entire career (save a bit of time early in his career, when he wore 43), from Florida to Toronto to New York. In Pittsburgh, that's Dan McCutchen's number. So what happens? Bill Brink has the story: 

Some players get a watch when a veteran who joins the team takes their jersey number. Daniel McCutchen got a college fund. For his unborn daughter, due in May

During the interminable "We know AJ Burnett is going to be traded to the Pirates but we don't know when," phase of this story, someone asked me about the thought that some people had that Burnett was a surly veteran who didn't want to come to Pittsburgh and would be miserable and a bad teammate, etc. etc. I said that I thought the whole idea was laughable, that Burnett was "the pie guy" with the Yankees that everyone credited for loosening the team up, and that if the Pirates somehow managed to be any good in 2012, that Burnett would end up getting a ton of credit for it as the veteran guy who's been there before and who taught the Pirates "how to win." Obviously we're a long ways away from any of that and it's still plenty possible for Burnett to be a jerk, but in light of this story, I'm standing by my prediction.

When I saw the news about Frank Coonelly's DUI yesterday, I groaned. I didn't groan because of the actual crime, but because I knew the fallout from it was going to be ridiculous. Then, I groaned again because of my own cynical reaction to it. DUI is serious; it deserves a serious discussion, and my cynical reaction to the anticipated reaction by other people is unfair to the seriousness of the situation.

Nearly a full day later, though, I'm already worn out by this story. If you haven't heard by now, late yesterday afternoon word starting cropping up on Twitter that the Pirates' new flagship station, 93.7, hadn't mentioned the incident on-air at all except in their newsbriefs every 20 minutes. That story started with Mark Madden, but it was quickly confirmed by more reputable people. Some people chose to heckle the hosts, who I can tell you had absolutely nothing to do with the decision not to talk about the incident, on Twitter. Most people assumed, given the Pirates' occasional tendency to operate like an Orwellian Ministry of Truth under Frank Coonelly's regime, that the station had been silenced by the team itself. The story picked up steam and ended up on Deadspin. Shortly after that, Chris Mueller got permission to talk about Coonelly and take calls about it on his Late Shift program. 

As it turns out, the Pirates had absolutely nothing to do with the gag order. The FAN was being cautious in their new partnership and it seems like they were probably a little too cautious; in the post linked directly above Dejan Kovacevic indicates that the Pirates were horrified by the radio silence, likely because they knew what a PR debacle it was causing for them and because they know that they're going to take some blame for it no matter what the truth might be. Still, given what we know about the way the Pirates' front office tends to control sensitive information, it's easy to see how the powers that be at the FAN made a decision to err on the side of caution with the club. That in of itself stinks; even if the Pirates aren't directly controlling the message at the FAN (and for now, we don't have reason to think that they are), there's now reason to be suspicious of the relationship between the team and the station. That stinks for the actual fans, that stinks for the hosts who don't deserve this and weren't involved; it's a bad situation for everyone. 

And now here I am, feeling like I'm talking about something other than the real issue at hand here. Read Dejan's column about it. Read this story at the Trib about how seriously Coonelly is taking this. Draw your own conclusions about Coonelly. 

But really, is it time for baseball to start yet? Because these sorts of real life issues are the exact things that I like to use sports to escape from.

The pertinent details are here. In short, he got a DUI shortly before Christmas, he's ashamed, and Bob Nutting is disappointed. It seems like Coonelly is willing to accept the consequences for his actions and it seems like Nutting is willing to stand behind him. I don't really have a lot to add: I'm sure that the significant portion of the fanbase that dislikes Coonelly will villify him for this and in this case he'll certainly deserve it. All I really feel comfortable saying myself is that from the details Coonelly gave of the incident (he turned the wrong way up an HOV lane on the Parkway North), it seems to me that this could've had a distinctly more tragic ending and I hope this is something he can learn from. 

At FanGraphs, David Laurila has a very interesting interview with Pirates' scouting director Greg Smith, with a lot of talk about Josh Bell and the future of the draft going forwards. Definitely an interesting read worth your time. 

The Pirates have four prospects in Baseball America's Top 100.

Pirates Prospects is releasing their annual in the very near future. Matt Bandi is celebrating by liveblogging his VHS tapes of the 1988, 1990, and 1991 Pirates. I expect this will be as awesome as it sounds.