2012 is here and today, nothing else matters. Throw out your 19 years of frustration, through out the gaping chasm that last year's collapse create, throw out every single one of your concerns about this team. Today, they don't matter. Take the things that you like about this group of players and hold on to them. Maybe this year will be different. It's not likely, but it is at least possible. As much as this year feels like it's a space-filling year between the Bad Old Days and the Bright Future ahead, it doesn't have to be. There are things that can happen this year that can make that future brighter, that can bring it closer than it's been for the Pirates in a very long time. The Pirates need things to go right this year, and that starts today. 

The Pirates will send Erik Bedard out for his Pirate debut against a decimated Phillies lineup. That Phillies' lineup may not matter today, since they can send Roy Halladay to the mound. Baseball is back. It's Andrew McCutchen's first game as a multi-multi millionaire. It's Neil Walker's first chance to earn his own contract extension. It's Pedro Alvarez's first chance to assuage all of our fears about him. It's the Pirates' chance to get off on the right foot, to earn a foothold before the Penguins start the playoffs, to prove that maybe this year will be the year that something goes right. 

The first pitch today will be at 1:35. I'm at work, unfortunately, but I'll do my best to be in the comment thread. Let's Go Bucs. 

Billy licked his lips, thought a while, inquired at last: "Why me?"
"That is a very Earthling question to ask, Mr. Pilgrim. Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is. Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber?"
"Yes." Billy, in fact, had a paperweight in his office which was a blob of polished amber with three ladybugs embedded in it.
"Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why."
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaugherhouse Five

When the Pirates fell apart at the end of the 2011 season, I took it way harder than just about anything that had happened to the team over the lifespan of this blog (April 11, 2005-present). It kind of confused me; I never really expected the team to compete for a playoff spot, even when they stuck in contention deep into July. There was a lot of smoke and a ton of mirrors but I could never really see the substance. Even though I tried to enjoy every moment for what it was (remember last year's mantra: build a wall around it), I fully expected the other shoe to drop. 

Then the shoe crushed me. Why did it crush me? I couldn't figure it out for a long time. As this new season approaches, it's finally started to make sense to me. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. For a couple of years worth of seasons previews I've been saying something along the lines of, "The Pirates won't finish .500 this year, but if things go right, we'll know how it's going to happen in the future." That was always nominally true in April, but it never came to pass. Things didn't go perfectly for the Pirates last year, but enough happened between their run to the top of the division, in the minor league system, and in the draft, that it's finally coming together. It's all happening. The Pittsburgh Pirates are not going to be bad forever. 

The problem is that it's just not here yet. It's not time. The Pirates are moving in the right direction and things are slowly falling into place and they're just not there yet. When I think about the Pirates right now, I feel like a four-year old on December 10th. You keep telling me Christmas is coming but it's never here and it's taking foreeeeeeeeeeeeeever! I know that I'm the guy that's been preaching patience for literally years now, but now that the Pirates are so close to breaking out of their slump I feel like it can't get here soon enough. Suddenly, I'm Veruca Salt. 

So here's the truth: the 2012 Pirates are probably not going to contend for anything except for fourth place. They're probably not going to finish .500, which means that we Pirate fans are going to be subjected to an unfathomable 20th consecutive losing season. I will say that I make this prediction every single year and I feel less certain of it this year than any year in the past, but despite the added talent to the Pirates' roster this year I just have too many questions about this particular team to get my hopes up quite yet. 

There are too many places for things to go wrong this year. I'm not sold on Alex Presley as an every day player. I'm pretty sure PNC will swallow Barmes and Barajas whole. Neil Walker's second half swoon in 2011 concerns me, whether it's related this back problems or not. I don't know if Jose Tabata will ever hit well enough to be a corner outfielder. I'm worried that Erik Bedard is too fragile and AJ Burnett is too old to make a difference. For over a year now, watching Pedro Alvarez makes me wonder if hitting a baseball is the hardest thing to do on the face of the planet. I still can't figure out why Jeff Karstens was so good last year and that makes me nervous. The amount of time that Charlie Morton spent sidelined with his hip injury this winter is concerning. James McDonald's struggles last year aren't necessarily things you grow out of. 

That being said, there's a lot less squinting to do with this team to see something that resembles a good baseball team. We know what Andrew McCutchen is capable of and I think he's going to be ever better in 2012. We've seen Walker and Tabata and Alvarez all have big league success and they're young enough to find it again. Erik Bedard and AJ Burnett make the pitching staff different than last year's staff in a very good way. Charlie Morton and James McDonald are imperfect, sure, but they're also talented. For every Pirate team of the last 20 years, it's been possible to identify 100 things that could go wrong before the season started. This team has the rarer feature that it's also possible to identify a lot of things that could go right for them. 
 
At least for now, though, we're probably better served as Pirate fans to view this team with one eye towards the future rather than thinking about what could happen if everything goes right. You know the drill because you've been here before. Who's carrying the team? Are they winning games because of young players, or because of the old ones who won't be here in two years when things really start to come together? Are the good things that are happening sustainable or flashes in the pan? 

It's always easy to be excited on Opening Day and it'll be easy to get frustrated if and when this season takes the turn that we're all expecting, but that doesn't mean it won't be worth watching. Andrew McCutchen himself is turning into a must-see player and at the season's high points last year, seeing him lead the team to wins in concert with Walker and Tabata, on the occasions that they were playing well, and Morton and McDonald, you could see the seeds for something bigger being planted. If everything goes according to plan, that's what we're looking for in 2012. We're watching for the genesis of something that will finally culminate in a good Pirate team. The puzzle is already being assembled. If it looks better when this season ends, then it was a good season.

With all of the speculating we did about the final roster move in the last couple of days, the Pirates managed to do something unexpected and place Chris Leroux on the 60-day DL with a "pectoral injury." That has the neat and tidy effect of both allowing the club to keep Jared Hughes (who's been much better than Leroux and who I think is super-awesome) and the full Matt Hague/Josh Harrison/Yamaico Navarro trio, plus opening a 40-man roster spot for Juan Cruz without having to expose someone like Leroux or Dan McCutchen or Duke Welker to waivers. 

I don't have much else to say; this is an awfully convienient injury (which is another way of saying that it seems hard to believe that it's not a manipulation of the system by the Pirates) that lets the Pirates put a better roster on the field tomorrow without losing anyone. Sometimes, being the team that no one pays attention to isn't a bad thing. 

Beyond that, I'm happy for Hague, who clearly hit his way onto the team this spring. I also think it's probably best for Navarro and Harrison (based on his spring) to be in Pittsburgh and not Indianapolis. 

Part six in the hastily completed loosely affiliated compendium of posts you can refer to as the WHYGAVS Season Preview. Photoshop work by bwzimmerman.

Neal Huntington has done good things for the Pirates on more than one front, but one aspect in which he's repeatedly struggled as GM is in adding established talent to the Pirates over the off-season via the free agent market. The Pirate careers of players like Lyle Overbay and Matt Diaz and Ramon Vasquez and Ryan Church and Bobby Crosby and even Aki Iwamura (not quite a free agent acquistion, but close) have been unforgettable, but not for any of the right reasons. Over the course of the earlier parts of this preview, I've talked about Jose Tabata and Neil Walker and Pedro Alvarez and Andrew McCutchen and James McDonald and Charlie Morton. There's no mistaking that those players are the bulk of the Pirates' core this year. They're not perfect players, but there's more talent there than the Pirates have had in the past. If everything falls into place (and I think I've done a pretty good job laying out why that's a big if at this point) the Pirates could end up in a better place than a lot of people expect, but we're still only talking about four position players and two starting pitchers. That's not a team. 

That's where Huntington's off-season acquisitions come in. Rod Barajas and Clint Barmes will start and play almost every day, Erik Bedard and AJ Burnett will have regular turns in the starting rotation, Nate McLouth and Case McGehee will have prominent roles on the bench. So are they enough to keep the team afloat if the young guys struggle? Are they enough to compliment the young players if the young players break through? 

I'll be up front. I'm really worried about the offensive abilities of Rod Barajas and Clint Barmes at this point in their careers. Neither guy brings much to the plate besides the ability to hit an occasional home run (career OBPs of .284 and .302, respectively) and even if you throw out the fact that they're old and on the down slope of their careers in terms of offensive production, they're right-handed hitters that are moving to PNC Park. Barajas hit 16 home runs last year, 13 were pulled. Barmes hit 12, 11 were pulled. I won't go so far as to say that I think either player will have a Matt Diaz power outage in 2012, but I'm not afraid to be blunt and to say that I think that both guys will struggle and be worse at the plate than they were in 2011. 

Neither guy was signed solely for their bat, though. Barmes almost always grades out as a plus defender and he was good at short for the Rockies in 2010 and the Astros in 2011. Barajas graded as one of the best pitch-blocking catchers in recent years and he's replacing a guy who was widely renowned as one of the worst defensive catchers in the league. The difference between bad defense and good defense is real and important, as we've seen the Pirates fluctuate between the two extremes in past years. The question, though, is whether their defense will be good enough to justify what could be some dreadful offense. 

Doumit, Cedeno, and Mike McKenry were worth 3.2 wins above replacement last year. Barmes was 3.1 WAR himself and Barajas was 1.6. Even if you consider WAR to be a pretty rough estimate of value, it's pretty clear that the Pirates have players in place that were better in 2011 than the players that they had. What's not clear at all to me is that Barajas and Barmes will hit the same level of performance in 2012. They certainly might, but I'm concerned.

Barmes and Barajas weren't the Pirates' biggest acquisitions this winter, though. The biggest acquistions were the pitchers, Erik Bedard and AJ Burnett. As I wrote last night, I don't know that there's a lot to say about these guys. Bedard was excellent with the Mariners last year and not as bad as people seem to think with the Red Sox, striking out 124 hitters in 129 1/3 innings, walking 48, and giving up 14 homers to go with his 3.62 ERA and 1.28 WHIP. The problem is that 129 1/3 innings is only 34 2/3 innings fewer than he threw in 2008, 2009, and 2010 combined due to recovery from a torn labrum. It seems like he's OK now and he looked awfully good in spring training, but it'd be foolish to count on even 150 innings from a guy with his injury history. It might happen, if his shoulder is truly healed, and if it does the Pirates could have an absolute bargain on their hands at $4.5 million. Honestly, though, I'd be happy if he just matched his 2011 performance and made himself attractive at the trade deadline. 

Burnett, on the other hand, doesn't have the same injury problems but does have a huge gopher ball problem. A move out of Yankee Stadium and away from the AL East should help him, but PNC isn't the best place in the world for him, either, because it's friendlier to left-handed hitters than to righties and it's not exactly a herculean task to put the ball over the Clemente Wall from the left side of the plate. It's also worth noting that Burnett's 35 now and that his fastball has lost some zip in recent years. Velocity might be the most important thing to watch as he comes off of the disabled list in May. Can he still pop the glove in the mid-90s regularly (his fastball averaged 92.7 last year), or will he lose some more this year? 

The key, of course, is that every inning Bedard and Burnett throw, someone else doesn't have to throw them. That should be an important boon early in the season when the Pirates' other rotation options are Kevin Correia and Brad Lincoln and Jo-Jo Reyes and it provides some key protection for late in the season on the (rather safe, at this point) assumption that Jeff Locke and Justin Wilson and Rudy Owens and Kyle McPherson aren't ready for the big leagues. On one hand, it's true that Bedard doesn't have to throw 200 innings and Burnett doesn't have to be great for them to be important upgrades for the Pirates, but on the other they do need to see something at least resembling health from Bedard and they need Burnett to reap some positive effects from his shift to the NL Central. 

Guys like Casey McGehee and Nate McLouth could end up having a bigger impact on the team this year than people are anticipating at this point in the spring. The Pirates' biggest problem on offense last year wasn't that Ronny Cedeno and Mike McKenry didn't hit, it was that they had no platoon partner for Garrett Jones and no real first baseman before the Derrek Lee trade and no contingency plan whatsoever for the stinkbomb that Pedro Alvarez laid down. McGehee and McLouth are on the team to provide depth for the two position players that I'd say are the likeliest to flame out in 2012; Pedro Alvarez and Alex Presley. 

That's not to say that McGehee or McLouth are guaranteed to be better than the players the Pirates had to turn to last year; they're both coming off of terrible years and are regarded by pretty much everyone as flashes in the pan who are past their primes. It's not an ideal situation for the Pirates to be leaning on either guy for 400+ at-bats and if it happens, chances are good that the season has taken a pretty ugly turn for the worse. That said, I think that both players could benefit from being placed in limited roles that maximize their abilities, similar to (but on a smaller scale than) Garrett Jones last year. McGehee can help keep Alvarez out of tough situations and if Alvarez actually does break out, he can give depth to the platoon at first base if Matt Hague can't keep his hot spring going into the season. McLouth at the very least prevents Starling Marte from having to be called up too soon and keeps Gorkys Hernandez, who I think would be completely lost against big league pitching, from having to be on the roster. Maybe he'll benefit from a return to PNC Park. At the very least, he can't be worse than he was last year. 

All of the players the Pirates picked up this winter are flawed. That's why they ended up on the Pirates. The most important thing for the club is to not rely on any of them too much; that was part of the reason that last year's first place run was a house of cards. As things are set up now, the only ones that the Pirates really have to rely on are Burnett and Bedard, who are the best of the group. That's subject to change, of course: if Alvarez doesn't hit, if Tabata and Walker can't find their way out of the ruts they hit last year, if no one bails Garrett Jones out against lefties, then suddenly it'll be much more noticeable that Barmes and Barajas aren't hitting, suddenly McLouth and McGehee will become much more exposed. That's not why the Pirates signed these players, so let's hope it doesn't come to it. 

Part five in a series of previews that I'm increasingly running out of time to finish since I have three more posts and 36 hours to write them in.

This spring, Erik Bedard and AJ Burnett have gotten the brunt of the attention as it relates to the Pirates 2012 pitching staff. This is only fair; they pitched for the Red Sox and Yankees, respectively, last year, they make a lot of money, they're talented guys that change the focus of the entire rotation. They're also more or less known quantities. Bedard is a very good pitcher who will be effective and miss a ton of bats, but who you can't count on for more than 140 or so innings at this point in his career. Burnett is getting older, but he's still capable of racking up strikeouts and stringing together some good starts. He won't be great, he'll give up some home runs, he probably won't throw more than 170 or 180 innings, but he should be solid enough. The two of them might seem interesting, but really, there's not much we don't know about them besides "how healthy will he be" or "how quickly will he age?"

The two guys that are much more worth watching this year are James McDonald and Charlie Morton. Both guys are talented but flawed pitchers that are both young enough that they could take a step forward and old enough that we should know better than to expect it. They'll also almost certainly throw more innings combined than Bedard and Burnett, which means that they're going to be more important to the team, one way or another. Their skillsets are such that they can be very effective pitchers if they do harness their talents, though, and if they can make it happen in concert with Bedard and Burnett giving their expected level of performance, the Pirates rotation could be better than people think this year. Of course, the opposite is also true; if they're not very good this year, the Pirates rotation will probably be about what people expect from it. 

The obvious question is what Morton and McDonald need to do to be better pitchers in 2012. I spent quite a bit of time trying to answer this question in regards to Morton back in February; Morton's sinker rescued his career last year, but it's a water balloon to left-handed hitters. Morton clearly made some attempts to fix the problem as the season wore on last year by working a cutter into his repertoire. It seemed to me that he made some progress with it, but there's not a whole lot of data to work with and the results varied quite a bit. What's clear is that Morton and the coaching staff both know that Morton can't lean on his sinker against lefties and that they started to address the problem last summer. 

In that regard, Morton's hip injury concerns me quite a bit. It would be nice to know that Morton spent the winter throwing and getting comfortable with his cutter, but obviously that wasn't possible. It's not the end of the world, but with Morton looking kind of rusty in his spring training starts it does make me wonder if he's going to get off to a slow start in 2012. His struggles with lefties are secret to no one and he's going to see lineups stacked with lefties from his first start onwards. Hopefully the cutter's something he's been working on concurrent with his rehab and it's certainly something that'll be worth monitoring as Morton returns and the season wears on. 

McDonald's case is trickier. It's obvious that he throws too many pitches and that can get him into trouble, so I pored over his Brooks Baseball page to try and find evidence that he pitches away from hitters after he gets ahead in the count. Given things like foul balls and the fact that pitches threw more pitches early in the count than later just by pure probability, this seemed to be a bit of a fool's errand. In the end I found that McDonald pitched to a full count at about an average rate last year and couldn't say more than that. What I can tell you is that McDonald threw his four-seam fastball for a strike close to 68% of the time last year and his two-seamer/sinker for a strike in the ballpark of 60% of the time. His curve only went for a strike about 55% of the time, and his changeup only 46-47%. The knock on McDonald when the Pirates got him was that he was a two pitch pitcher, that his changeup wasn't good enough to make him a reliable starter. If he can't throw it for strikes more, then that's going to hold true. 

Of course, Ray Searage and his staff have done good work helping pitchers increase their control. I've written about McDonald's changeup in the past; his fantastic Pirate debut in 2010 against Colorado came mainly on the strength of the pitch and the nights that he pitches the best, the changeup tends to be working. He needs to throw it for strikes more often. That sounds overly simplistic and maybe it is, but the fact is that we know McDonald can throw his fastball for strikes and we know that he has more trouble getting his offspeed pitches and his breaking pitches over. The general perception of McDonald is that he struggles to finish hitters off and ends up pitching deeper than he should into counts. It seems to me that a pitcher that throws fastballs for strikes but not other pitches would find himself in that situation quite a bit. Can he throw those pitches for strikes this year? Can he get hitters out if he does? Those are the questions I have about McDonald for this year. 

Can Morton throw his cutter to get lefties out? Can McDonald throw something for strikes other than his fastball? Two easy questions without easy answers and for the Pirates, I think there's a whole lot riding on whatever those answers might be. 

Danny Moskos was sent down to Triple-A today. That confirms that Tony Watson will be the only lefty out of the bullpen, which is what we've sort of been figuring made the most sense all along. That leaves 28 players in camp, including Juan Cruz. With AJ Burnett and Charlie Morton destined for the DL, that leaves 26. That means the Pirates still have to take someone off of the 40-man roster to make room for Cruz, and that they have to pare someone off of the roster between Chris Leroux, Evan Meek, Jared Hughes, and Matt Hague.

Leroux is out of options and talented enough to make the team, so he's a no-brainer despite a bad spring performance. As I've said before, it makes plenty of sense for Hague to make the club with Pedro's struggles early this spring and Garrett Jones' need for a platoon partner. That leaves one spot for Meek and Hughes. Most other people seem to be assuming that Meek will make the club, so maybe I'm just projecting my own fear that Meek isn't completely ready yet and that Hughes is going to be a lights-out reliever by even thinking that there's a chance Meek won't get a bullpen spot. If it were up to me, though, I'd take Hughes to Pittsburgh and leave Meek in Triple-A to build up some arm strength before putting him into Major League games. 

Being a Pirate fan is not easy. There are obvious reasons for this, with the primary one being that the Pirates are bad at baseball. They've been bad at baseball for just about as long as anyone can remember. Pirate fans that have suffered through 19 consecutive losing seasons have dealt with watching baseball games in a toilet bowl, the specter of the team moving, the inept management of Cam Bonifay and Kevin McClatchy and Dave Littlefield, and an uncountable number of losses in ways that can only begin to be described. That barely scratches the surface, of course. Once you count the embarrassing players (Derek Bell, Raul Mondesi, "Welcome to Hell" Jason Kendall and numerous others), embarrassing managers (Lloyd McCledon's ridiculous antics, Jim Tracy's lackadaisical approach to his entire career as a Pirate, John Russell's corpse impersonation), the stupid PR moves made by the Nutting/Coonelly regime, and things that I've probably intentionally repressed down into the dark recesses of my brain, you've got a mountain of reasons to not be a Pirate fan that no one would blame you for taking. 

As a result, the Pirates are the red-headed stepchild of Pittsburgh sports. That's OK. I understand that neither local paper wants to waste their best journalist in the Pirate beat. I get why the Pirates almost never pop up on ESPN or MLB Network other than to fulfill the annual "wacky pre-season prediction" quota. I get why PNC is always empty when the Penguins are in the playoffs and when the Steelers are playing. You don't have to explain it to me, and I don't hold it against people that would rather cheer for Pittsburgh's more successful sports teams. The Pirates have been bad for a long time to the point that they became an embarrassment to the fans and anyone that wanted to jump off the bandwagon at any point after about 2006, I understand. 

Here's the thing, though: Pirate fans do exist. Maybe the Pirates don't have a "Nation" of fans the way the Steelers or Pens or Red Sox do, but Pirate fans do exist. In fact, just saying that Pirate fans exist sells us way short. Pirate fans are amazing. I don't mean that as hyperbole, I don't mean that as "for lack of a better term." I mean that Pirate fans are amazing. There are few fan bases that have had been heaped under as much garbage as Pirate fans have in the last 20 years, and all you have to do is pull up a computer to find a legion of smart, funny, eloquent, die-hard Pirate fans writing blogs or commenting in game threads or just hanging around on Twitter. It's self-perpetuating, but the reason that Pirate fans are able to exist are other Pirate fans. Being a Pirate fan requires a type of loyalty that being a Yankee fan or a Steeler fan never will.

It sounds cliched, but this is why I don't care that the Pirates get ignored by the national media and mostly marginalized by the local media. Being a Pirate fan is like being in the best kind of secret club: who cares if no one realizes how good Andrew McCutchen is or how beautiful PNC Park is or how good the Pirate blogs are? We all know it and we know that there are other Pirate fans that appreciate the same things we do and have been through the same crap we have and so, somehow that makes it OK. When my friend Adam talks about his Bucco Playoff Kegger in October, every single Pirate fan knows what he's talking about. Someday, the Pirates going to find their way out of these woods and when they do, we long-time Pirate fans are going to let out a huge collective sigh of relief and talk about all of the things we went through as fans to see the club through to this point and have one hell of a party. We know we'll have other Pirate fans to share it with and the anticipation of that moment alone is worth waiting for. 

All of this is a roundabout way of saying that I'm fine with the local media treating the Pirates like second class citizens and I'm fine with the national media generally pretending like the Pirates don't exist, but what really works me up more than anything is when people treat Pirate fans like they don't matter. How is it that the local media can spell tough, nonintuitive names like "Roethlisberger" and "Lemieux" right every single time, but so many writers and editors consistently misspell an easy name like "McCutchen?" (Make no mistake; it was the linked PG story that set me off today, but this is not an isolated problem) Andrew McCutchen is one of baseball's best centerfielders. He's an All-Star and a rising young star in general. He's signed the most important contract extension in the history of the Pirates. His last name is both distinctive and easy to spell. In all of Major League history, Andrew McCutchen and Dan McCutchen are the only two McCutchens to step onto the field. There has never been a big leaguer with the last name McCutcheon. 

Andrew McCutchen doesn't care if you know how to spell his name. He's got his contract extension, he's got his All-Star appearance, he'll have his endorsements. Andrew McCutchen probably doesn't even read the baseball coverage in the PG or the Trib. No, the people that read that coverage are the Pirate fans. The people who've had long, long winters that have had April 5th circled on their calendars for months. The people who say to themselves, "This week has been rough, but if I can just get to 1:35 on Thursday, it'll all be OK." The people that go to PNC Park when it's 42 degrees and rainy in April and when it's 102 degrees with 99% humidity in August. The people that watch every game on their computer, even though they live hundreds of miles from Pittsburgh. The people that know that Tim Neverett has a depth perception problem on home runs, that Pedro Alvarez's toe-tap this spring is new, that saw Charlie Morton last spring and said, "Wow, that looks different" without ever having to be told that he dropped his armslot.

And when we see "McCutcheon" in print, we roll our eyes and swear under our breath. How can you write a story about the plight of the fanbase and misspell the name of the team's best and most exciting player? Andrew McCutchen is the Pirates right now; his talent and potential and his extension represent the things that make this Pirate team different from every Pirate team that's come before them over the last 19 years. If you can't do enough homework to spell his name right, how can you possibly write anything else about the team? Making a mistake that simple (and I'm not singling out the writers and reporters here -- I know how easy it is to make a typo in a long piece and I'm sure you'll find at least one in this post -- because newspapers have editors for a reason) and careless says to me that you don't care who reads it. It's just a piece about the Pirates, right? Who cares? Who cares if Andrew McCutchen's name is spelled right? No one will read it anyway.

I care. I'll read it and I'll notice when it's wrong and I'll remember it, too. It's OK, though, because even if people like to pretend that Pirate fans don't exist, we Pirate fans know differently. And when things finally turn around for the Pirates, we'll lose our minds and we'll toast Andrew McCutchen and we'll pack PNC Park and we'll be impossible to ignore. I can't wait. 

The Pirates sent Dan McCutchen and Brad Lincoln to Triple-A yesterday, which helps clarify the roster picture just a little bit more with only a few days left to finalize things. As it stands right now, we can pretty be sure that the bullpen will include Hanrahan, Resop, Grilli, Watson, and Juan Cruz with Danny Moskos, Chris Leroux, Jared Hughes, and Evan Meek as candidates for the final two or three spots. 

The biggest question at this point is whether the Pirates will carry 11 or 12 pitchers, I think, for the span of time that Charlie Morton is on the disabled list and the team doesn't need a fifth starter. If they go with 11 pitchers, that means that there are two spots for Moskos, Leroux, Hughes, and Meek and they can keep Yamaico Navarro, Josh Harrison, and Matt Hague. If they go with eight relievers, they have to cut a position player. 

I'd been of the opinion that the team would take 12 pitchers north, but that one of them would be Dan McCutchen for the purposes of being a swing man while the rotation takes time to pitch itself into shape. With McCutchen going down, I'm much more inclined to think that the team will take two from that final group of relievers (Leroux and ... someone; I'd prefer Hughes, I'm guessing either Meek or Moskos will get the spot) and all three position players, but I guess we'll wait and see. 

The Pirates let the Diamondbacks keep Rule 5 pick Brett Lorin today in exchange for minor league pitcher Robby Rowland. Rowland's got pretty ugly minor league stats since being a third round pick in 2010, but he's a really tall guy, which fits Neal Huntington's Theory of Giants Being Good Pitchers. It's hard to say how much upside there really is in Rowland, but he's very young (20), and the Pirates can probably find innings for him in the very low minors. Lorin, meanwhile, is 25 and hasn't thrown an inning above Advanced-A due to a slew of injuries. 

Lorin's shown enough promise that I had hoped the Pirates would either not lose him in the draft or get him back, but it's not hard to see why the Pirates probably don't think there's much upside and since there should be quite a bit of talent breathing down his neck for pitching time this year, depending on how he looks in Altoona and how the young guys at Bradenton look, I think this is an understandable move.