She looked at him, seeing him again, and the future be damned, since all possible futures ever envisaged are -- rusty sinks, two-week vacations and bombs or collective fraternity or harps and houris-- endlessly, sordidly dreary, all delight being in the present and its past, all truth, too, and all fidelity in the word, the flesh, the present moment: for the future, however you look at it, contains only one sure thing and that is death. But the moment is unpredictable. There is simply no telling what will happen. -- Ursula K. LeGuin, "A Week in the Country"

For much of Sunday, I sat in a chair staring at an empty editing box, unsure of how this season preview needed to begin. The Pirates are at a new crossroads in their eternal rebuilding process. The team itself is probably a year or so away from really being a contending team, but the Andrew McCutchen clock has been ticking and the front office has been in place for five years now. This is probably the most talented Pirate team to take the field on Opening Day since 1992 (the only other team that you could make a case for is the 1999 team that probably would've finished better than .500 if not for Jason Kendall's horrifying ankle injury), but this is also a flawed team that seems just not quite ready for the big stage yet. 

This is a pretty dangerous place for a baseball team to be. The Pirates really are closer to something good than they've been since the Bonds era, but they're also far enough away from it and deep enough into the Neal Huntington era that it doesn't seem like it's the wrong conclusion to think that someone else should be running the team if things go badly this year. Actually, that didn't seem like the wrong conclusion to make after things went badly last year. Huntington has mostly stuck to his guns by not trading prospects and keeping his eyes focused on the future, even last year in the heat of a playoff race. Still, Huntington faces the same question that all of us fans face: how do you know when it's time to stop looking to the future and start hoping for right now? 

I've said this before, but I think that the answer is in center field. Andrew McCutchen is like no one the Pirates have had since Bonds. I've never, ever seen anything like McCutchen's run from June 16th to July 17th last year. He went into the second game of the Pirates' series against Cleveland hitting .321/.382/.543, which put him firmly in the middle of a breakout season. Over the next 26 games, McCutchen hit 11 home runs, seven doubles, two triples, drove in 28 runs, and put up a .481/.521/.889 line. The Pirates went 18-8. The list of players that are capable of doing that for a full month can probably counted on one hand. McCutchen took an undermanned, 33-31 team and dragged it kicking and screaming into first place in that month. They couldn't stay there, but the fuse was lit. Even players like McCutchen only get so many seasons like last year; when you have a player like him in his prime, you have to stop looking off into the distance and start looking at what's right in front of you. If the Pirates can't win right now with McCutchen, when can they ever win?

This is mixed news. All of us Pirate fans have spent a lot of time in recent weeks dwelling on the wave of crap that this spring training season has heaped up on the North Shore of the Allegheny. It's true that it seems like a team that's supposed to be peaking in Year Five of its rebuild shouldn't be taking the field that with Jonathan Sanchez and John McDonald and Brandon Inge and it's hard to swallow that after years of trades and big draft spending that this is what the Pirates have to deal with. It's also true that those guys only make up the back end of a roster that, as mentioned, is probably the strongest roster the Pirates have opened a season with in 20 years. It's easy to moan and gnash teeth when you see McDonald and Sanchez and Inge on the roster and to wonder what the Pirates did all winter and how it came to this, but the honest reality is that the Pirates' best hope to improve this winter was set in stone the second the final pitch was thrown in 2012, before one free agent was signed or one non-roster invitation was sent out. 

The Pirates' best hope this season and next season and the season after that is that the young talent base built up by Neal Huntington drives the team forward in the same way that McCutchen did last year. This year, those hopes fall most squarely on Starling Marte, Pedro Alvarez, James McDonald, and probably Gerrit Cole. Alvarez had a breakout year last year in that even the most optimistic among us was starting to wonder if the ship had sailed by late April, before he picked himself up by his bootstraps and became a 30 homer guy. The Pirates need Alvarez to be a 30 homer guy again, but they need him to be a 35 homer guy with a .340 OBP and a .520 slugging percentage. They need the strikeouts to go down and the walks to go up. Alvarez's season last year was a breakout, but it was the bare minimum of what's really expected of Pedro as a rock in the middle of the lineup. If he can be better, the Pirates will be better. The same holds true of McDonald. For at least a month and quite possibly longer, the Pirates' rotation is going to give 40% of its starts to Jeff Locke and Jonathan Sanchez. It's possible that those starts will go better than the worst case scenario I've got in my head, but in the event that they don't, McDonald is the rotation's tipping point. We know that he can be dominant, mixing a fastball, curveball, slider, and sometimes a changeup to look a lot like a younger version of AJ Burnett. We know that he can lose the strike zone and wear down and be the most frustrating pitcher on the staff. The Pirates need good James McDonald this year; good James McDonald makes a huge difference while the Pirates wait on Francisco Liriano and Jeff Karstens and Gerrit Cole and he can continue to make a huge difference even after the Pirates have those guys, because I'm not sure that any of that trio will be better than First Half 2012 James McDonald in 2013. 

Starling Marte is his own category. I really have no idea what to expect from Marte, really, but I'm hugely excited to watch him play every day. He's unlike anything the Pirates have or have had in a while with his blinding speed, gap power, great arm, and great instincts in the field. If Marte can hit for the Pirates the way he's hit in the minors or the way he hit in winter ball, the Pirates have another dynamic middle-of-the-lineup hitter and MVP candidate to go with McCutchen. His talent means he's just capable of bringing more to the plate than a one-dimensional masher like Alvarez or a solid-but-unspectacular hitter like Neil Walker. The problem is that he's just so raw, it's impossible to know what to expect out of him this early in his career and it's really hard to count on anything more than spectacular defense and flashes of brilliance at the plate peppered by stretches of frustration.

Cole represents the future. Since early on in the Huntington era, the Pirates have cast their lot with pitching. As a result, the Pirates have a collection of minor league arms that rivals anything in baseball. Just about none of those arms have been able to help the Pirates, though, and the club is starting the season with Jonathan Sanchez in the rotation and Jeanmar Gomez in the bullpen. Cole can change that. He needs the work he'll get in the early season with Indianapolis, but if he breaks through, he'll get his shot with the Pirates this year. His talent level is unlike anything else the Pirates have in their rotation; at his ceiling, he's capable of dominating every night the way that Burnett and McDonald do on their best nights. He probably won't hit that ceiling this year, but he's the wild card in a rotation that's lacking right now. AJ Burnett, Wandy Rodriguez, James McDonald, Jonathan Sanchez, and Jeff Locke are decent and uninspiring at best, as rotations go. Gerrit Cole, AJ Burnett, Wandy Rodriguez, James McDonald and Francisco Liriano is a different animal entirely; one that could shut down opposing lineups for a week straight if all five guys are clicking at once. It's a rotation that could be very good, even if McDonald and Liriano are only performing inconsistently. 

Therein lies the difficulty in predicting what this Pirate team will do. On this Opening Day, it's easier than it's been in a long time to close your eyes and dream of PNC Park laced with bunting on a cold October night, to see your breath in front of your face and the Pirates in the playoffs behind it. This could happen in 2013. Most of the projection systems peg the Pirates as just about a .500 team right now. I've always said in the past that it's not all that hard for a team with 75-win talent to win 82 games. It's not impossible for a team with 80-win talent to win 87 games, either.

If that's what I want for this Pirate team in my heart, that's not what I see in my head or I feel in the pit of my stomach, though. There are still too many what-ifs. It'd be one thing for Alvarez to continue his progression forward or McDonald to finally put together a full season or Marte to just blow the doors off of the National League or Cole to come up in June and go straight into Verlander mode. It's not really unreasonable to expect any of those things to happen in isolation. It feels like a stretch, though, to hope for all of them to happen at once without anyone else going backwards. It could happen, but since when has everything going right for the Pirates all at once? And if everything doesn't go right, well, that's where the depth issues become a concern. What bugs me about John McDonald and Inge and Sanchez and Gomez isn't so much that they're on the roster, but that the Pirates have fallen apart two years in a row because they had no depth to cover for a long season. They had no contingency plans for when things stopped going perfectly in August and September. They still don't, and that's worrisome. Baseball seasons are inherently unpredictable, despite all of the work that goes into figuring out what will happen. I just don't think this Pirate team has a Plan B for when things go wrong, and it's foolish to think that something won't go wrong over the course of a baseball season. 

Could this be the year that things are different for the Pirates? It could be. Will it? I don't see it yet. I see another 75 win season, and I see a re-evaluation of the direction the club is headed when the season ends. We don't live in the future, though. We live in the moment and inside of the moment everything is possible.

Prove me wrong, Pirates. Please, prove me wrong. 

Really nice story by Brady McCollough in the Post Gazette today about Andrew McCutchen. I'm not just saying that because it quotes a certain handsome, beer-brewing, science-oriented blogger from North Carolina. I'm saying that because it's a really nice story. It is a rare occasion that we, as Pirate fans, have the ability to say that we're lucky. We're lucky to have Andrew McCutchen in black and gold. 

Not my words. 

If #Pirates fans were REMOTELY as demanding of their team as those of other two in town, they’d be cheering a winner, too.

— Dejan Kovacevic (@Dejan_Kovacevic) March 30, 2013

It feels like a lifetime ago, but last April was a brutal month for the Pirates' position players. The Pirates scored 58 runs in 22 games (2.6 runs per game). Andrew McCutchen didn't hit a home run, Pedro Alvarez went 0-for-the-first-two-weeks-or-so, Neil Walker continued a power outage that had started in the middle of 2011, and most of the rest of the lineup was absolutely terrible, too. Things picked up in May, but only a little bit -- the Bucs scored 89 runs in 28 games (3.1 per game). In June and July, Andrew McCutchen exploded and the Pirate offense shot into orbit with him. They scored 276 runs in 54 games in those two months (5.1 per game). Even as the Pirates collapsed in August and September, the offense didn't really revert back to it's ugly early season form, with 228 runs scored over the club's final 61 games (3.7 per game).

The final result was that even though they didn't even average three runs per game over the season's first two months, the Pirates scored 651 runs and finished 10th in the National League in terms of runs. The run scoring environment is quite a bit different in 2012 than it has been in the past (in 2006, for example, the Pirates scored 691 runs and finished last in the NL) but that tenth place finish is somewhat noteworthy; it was only the third time since PNC Park opened that the Pirates finished in the NL's top ten in terms of runs scored. In a 16 team league this is a sad thing to be excited about, but we Pirate fans take what we can get. 

The Pirates need to be better than that at the plate in 2013, though. Really, they're going to need the offense to carry the pitching for at least the season's first two months and quite probably for even longer than that if the team is going to be worth watching at all in 2013. The good news is that this doesn't seem like an impossible proposition. The Pirates managed their mid-season offensive explosion and their almost-average offense in 2012 despite quite a few hurdles. An incomplete list: 

- Clint Barmes sucking the life out of 493 plate appearances with an insane OPS+ of 66. 

- Rod Barajas being very nearly as bad as Barmes. 

- Many of the club's corner outfield at-bats going to Alex Presley (370 PAs, 89 OPS+), Jose Tabata (374 PAs, 86 OPS+), and Travis Snider (145 PAs, 84 OPS+). 

- Not that he got a ton of plate appearances or anything but I'd like to remind you that Nate McLouth had an OPS+ of 10 with the Pirates last year. Like, it was so low that you almost have to spell it out in a sentence instead of using digits. 

- Clint Hurdle.

- That's an easy joke, but seriously: 73 stolen bases (last in the NL), with 52 caught stealings (most in the NL), along with (by my count) 30 sacrifice bunts and who knows how many sacrifice bunt attempts by position players alone. 

There is good news here. Barajas is long gone, replaced by Russell Martin. Martin is not Buster Posey, but he should still have some pop in his bat and he should take a few walks. An OPS+ of 90 isn't great, but it's not awful for a catcher and it's much better than Barajas was last year. It's also true that it seems like Barmes should be better at the plate this year simply by virtue of being a human being with a pulse and a baseball bat. Again, I'm not expecting Barmes to suddenly morph into Cal Ripken, but if he just draws a few more walks and gets his wOBA up into the .280 range and fields like he did last year, he'll be just fine at short. 

The outfield should be better, too. Starling Marte is not a sure thing to match his minor league numbers right off the bat, but I think if he's allowed to play he can at least match his triple-slash line from last year, which was .257/.300/.437. That's not great, but it's definitely better than what the Pirates had in the corners for most of last year. His ceiling is much different than Presley and Tabata's too, and it's possible that he could be quite a bit better than that. Snider and Tabata might not reach the potential that was once forecast for them, but it's not hard to think that they could make an acceptable platoon in right field. Neither was very good last year, but Snider battled hamstring injuries for much of his time in Pittsburgh and Tabata dealt with who-knows-what-but-it-seemed-like-something in a more intangible form. Again, it's possible for those two to be an improvement on last year without being All-Stars. 

There are, on the flip side, reasons to be pessimistic. It seems pretty crazy to think that Mike McKenry will hit a home run once ever 23 or 24 plate appearances, although there's just not enough information about The Fort to really know either way at this point. There is plenty of information on Garrett Jones, though, and it's enough to know that we probably shouldn't expect 27 more home runs out of him. Pedro Alvarez could really go in any direction. I've got serious concerns about Neil Walker's ability to play 162 games, and the club still doesn't really have a solid replacement for him in the event he gets hurt again. Once you run past the platoons (Tabata/Snider, Jones/Gaby Sanchez), the bench is flat-out awful, which means that there's not a whole lot of room to spare with injuries. 

If we take all of this together, I think it's probably fair to say that the Pirates offense will be better this year than it was last year. Even if you assume a small drop off for McCutchen, as we discussed on Wednesday, I think that a full season of Marte (even if he doesn't go nuts), plus a Snider/Tabata platoon, plus the potential that Pedro Alvarez draws some more walks and becomes a legitimate middle-of-the-order threat, which is something that he really only threatened at last year. Really, I think it's possible that the Pirates could finish with an NL-average offense this year or maybe even a little better, dependent mainly on Marte and Alvarez. 

The larger question, of course, is whether the offense being a little better is enough to offset the worries about depth and the pitching staff. That's not an easy question to tackle, but I'll try in the forthcoming season preview, which will be posted either Sunday afternoon or Monday morning.

Being a Pittsburgh Pirate has an unfortunate side-effect: what you've actually accomplished on the field never really matters, because all that's important is what you're going to do on the field whenever it is that the Pirates actually get around to being good. Andrew McCutchen's 2012 season was an amazing thing for Pirate fans to watch unfold: a player that we knew was good and thought was special accelerated beyond all of our expectations to become something else entirely. Franchises don't pull themselves up out of the doldrums without players like Andrew McCutchen doing things like he did in 2012. The problem is that the Pirates didn't pull themselves up out of the doldrums in 2012 and now the only thing that matters is whether or not he can do it again. 

This is a tricky question to answer. As I mentioned in February, there are 200 players that have had at least one season with 7.0 WAR or more in all of baseball history. Of those 200, 115 of them only had one 7+ win season (this includes maybe 10 or 15 active players, Andrew McCutchen included, that could join the list of players with multiple 7+ win seasons). This is a downer to mention, but the point is that past excellence does not ensure future excellence. 

Let's eliminate questions of injury and just focus on comparing what McCutchen did last year with what McCutchen did in the past. You probably know the base stats well enough; in 2011, 'Cutch hit .259/.364/.456 with 23 homers. His isolated power was .198, his BABIP was .291, his line drive rate was 20%, his walk rate was a career high 13.1%, and his strikeout rate was also a career high 18.6%. At this time a year ago, I thought that the next logical step for 'Cutch was for his strikeouts to come down some, which would result in his putting more balls in play, and then logically a higher batting average and OBP. I can't claim any sort of victory on that prediction, though, because while McCutchen did hit .327/.400/.553 last year, his strikeout rate jumped even higher to 19.6%. His walk rate dipped to 10.4%, his ISO jumped up to .226, his LD% rose to 21.9%, and his BABIP went way, way up to .375. 

What all of this means is that while McCutchen did hit for a higher batting average, which in turn drove his OBP up, which coupled with his power surge to make him an MVP candidate, it didn't happen because he put more balls in play. It's true that McCutchen's .291 BABIP in 2011 was on the low end of the spectrum for him, but it's also true that he wasn't as fast in 2012 as he was in prior years. His line drive rate went up, but it didn't go up a ton. In short, Andrew McCutchen is not terribly likely to be a .327 hitter in 2013 and we should probably consider ourselves lucky if he hits .300 in this coming season, particularly if his strikeouts hover around 20% again. 

And what about his power? McCutchen hit eight more homers in 2012 than he did in 2011, but his flyball rate bottomed out at 34.3%. That left him with a home run/flyball rate of 19.4%, 19th in all of baseball. That's not exceptionally high for a power hitter (the guys above him on the list are almost all sluggers), but the question is whether or not McCutchen is really a power hitter. This is tricky to figure out, but from what I can tell, the power surge from last year was real. If we go to the Hit Tracker, just four of McCutchen's 31 homers measured as "just enough." In 2011, that was true of eight of his 23. Basically, McCutchen didn't increase his home run total and HR/FB rate with a bunch of Jack Wilson foul pole shots and bloops into Houston's idiotic Crawford Boxes, he did it by inflicting grievous injuries upon multiple baseballs. I don't know if he'll hit 31 homers again, but I'm more than happy to guess that he'll hit somewhere between 25 and 30 if he doesn't get there, and that's just fine for a player like McCutchen. 

Of course, if the power surge is real it might also indicate that he hit the ball harder than his small increase in LD% might indicate, which in turn means that it's possible that some of those gains in BABIP that I dismissed above might be more legitimate. He almost certainly won't hit .375 on balls in play again, but it might be possible for him to get to where he was in 2009 (.327) again, despite losing a step or two in terms of overall speed (please note that he's still quite fast, but he's not quite blazing fast the way he used to be -- you can see this in the way that his awful jumps on base stealing attempts don't get covered up in quite the same way that they used to). 

So what does all this leave us with? Steamer and Oliver both see McCutchen as about a six-win player in 2012. ZiPS sees him as a five-win player. Steamer and Oliver both call for him to hit approximately .290/.375/.500 with 25 homers, which feels right to me, though I might even argue for a smidge more power. In short, there's every reason to believe that McCutchen is going to be a great player in 2013, even if it's probably unreasonable to think he'll be quite as good as he was in 2012. This Pirate team has plenty of things to worry about, but it's hard to think that #22 will be one of them. 

With a few announcements today, the Pirates have all but set their Opening Day roster for 2013. As expected, Jeff Locke will take the last unannounced rotation spot (I'm hesitant to call him the "fifth" starter whether the team does or not because he's not really the fifth best starter) while Kyle McPherson and Vin Mazzaro go back to Triple-A. The last bullpen spot goes to Jeanmar Gomez, which is hugely unfortunate but was unavoidable news since Bryan Morris was demoted to minor league camp in the middle of last week and Jeff Karstens was put on the disabed list. 

Charlie has been writing at Bucs Dugout most of the week about how players like Gomez and Sanchez are making the team because that's the only way for the Pirates to hold on to them as badly needed depth pieces while Karstens and Liriano and Morton rehab from their injuries. That's true, to an extent, but having a 25-man roster that includes John McDonald, Jonathan Sanchez, Jeanmar Gomez, and maybe even Brandon Inge is absolutely exasperating for what is supposed to be a young team about to come out of its shell. 

The real decision point on keeping Gomez is that he's on the team for now instead of Bryan Morris. This is a tough call to make; Morris was not particularly good this spring, nor did he finish 2013 strong for Indianapolis. He pitched last Monday against the Red Sox in a game that I was at; he didn't have great command, and the Red Sox scrub crew squared up on several of his pitches. You can't really make a judgment on one inning, of course, but you also can't really argue that Morris should've made the squad on merit based on his spring. Of course, that's also true of Gomez, who was mostly terrible except in his start against the Rays last Friday when he was only a little terrible.

In any case, this sort of decision sets the Pirates up for the same fall they took with the bullpen last August. They kept Juan Cruz up well past his sell-by date and they kept giving big innings to guys like Chris Resop instead of bringing Morris up earlier in the year. They didn't really need Morris (or any other young reliever) until August, but because they hadn't used them in the big leagues to that point they decided they had no confidence in them. And then they got stuck with Chad Qualls. Using a bullpen spot on Gomez now instead of Bryan Morris or Vic Black or Duke Welker just starts the cycle over again. 

It would appear to me that Gomez is around to be a long-man and an insurance policy in case Sanchez or Locke are terrible. As insurance policies go, though, Gomez is about as useful as volcano insurance for someone that lives in the eastern United States. The Pirates clearly see something in him because they keep making ridiculously glowing statements about him, but I'm just not convinced that there's anything there to be seen. I'd like to say he won't be around long and the Pirates won't need to use him much, but I know better. 

When word leaked out yesterday that the Brewers had come to a three-year/$33 million agreement with Kyle Lohse, a lot of Pirate fans immediately started wondering why the Pirates didn't make more of a push for Lohse given their current rotation woes. There are a lot of fairly straightforward answers to this question: Lohse is due for some regression and is much more likely to be a ~3.50 ERA/2 WAR guy in 2013 than the <3.00 ERA/4 WAR guy he was in 2012, $11 million a year is a lot of money for the Pirates to give to any player that's not a slam dunk, and due to their not being completely terrible last year, the Pirates' first round pick at #14 in this coming draft is not protected. Since Lohse is a Type A free agent or whatever they're called now, the Pirates would have to sacrifice their pick to the Cardinals in order to sign Lohse.

There's room for some debate on this topic over whether Lohse is really worth $11 million (he might be) over three years (he's not), whether or not the Pirates can afford to spend their money that way (they can't), and when the Pirates can start sacrificing draft picks for the present (probably never) . The reality as I see it is that there's no cognitive dissonance between saying that the front office did a pretty poor job building a rotation that's likely to be bad for 2013 and saying that we simply do not live in a universe in which the a team like the Pittsburgh Pirates can spend $33 million + a draft pick on the likes of Kyle Lohse at any point, especially not at this one.

One question that I thought was interesting, though, was this: why can the Pirates trade a draft pick for Gaby Sanchez (under the new CBA the picks from the bullshit competitive balance lottery are tradeable and the Pirates swapped the 35th overall pick in next year's draft along with Gorkys Hernandez for Gaby Sanchez) but not Kyle Lohse? The answer is complicated, but it's also interesting and worth diving into. 

The first step is to note that the gap between Sanchez and Lohse might not be as big as you think. If you go to their Fangraphs pages and look at projections (Lohse, Sanchez), you'll see Sanchez pegged as ~1 win player and Lohse pegged as ~2-3 win player. If you like Sanchez's defense (UZR does, DRS does not; I tend to default to DRS), Sanchez was a 2-3 win player in both 2010 and 2011, though, and it's not impossible to see him getting back there in 2013, especially if his hot spring training is an indication that he's fixed whatever was wrong with his swing last year and, say, Garrett Jones gets traded or plays right field a lot because Jose Tabata and Travis Snider both suck. You could say the same of Lohse, of course, but Miller Park is a pretty bad fit for a flyball pitcher. I'll freely admit that it's wishcasting on my part to hope that Sanchez is anything more than a competent platoon player and pinch-hitter, and so let's peg the difference between Sanchez and Lohse at one win. That's a real difference, but it's not as big as the 3-4 win gap between them in 2012. 

The second step is to look at 14th overall picks vs. 35th overall picks. It's a pretty striking gap. There have been 48 MLB drafts, which means that 48 players have been taken 14th overall and 48 players have been taken 35th overall. 32 of the #14 picks have made the big leagues, and quite a few of them have turned into decent players. The list includes Jason Heyward, Aaron Hicks (a Top 100 prospect in the Twins' system who got as high as #14 in the BA rankings before losing some luster in recent years), Billy Butler, and the Pirates' own Travis Snider in recent years. Historically there's also Derrek Lee, Jason Varitek, Cliff Floyd, and Tino Martinez, all of whom had careers of at least 20 WAR. At #35, only 26 of 48 have made the big leagues. There are no recent standouts picked at #35, and only Matt Davidson of the Diamondbacks is currently on Top 100 lists. Historically, both Johnny Damon and Mark Langston were picked 35th and they're better than any of the players listed as 14th picks, but after them only Aaron Rowand (18.9 WAR) even tops 10 career wins above replacement. In other words, if you pick 35th and get Gaby Sanchez out of that pick, you're probably lucky. 

All of this doesn't even take into account the effect that having two first round picks has on financial flexibility in the new draft. Last year, the Pirates sort of took a blind shot into the dark when Mark Appel fell into their laps with the eighth pick. They pretty seriously had now way of knowing how the process would pan out or how much money needed to be saved to sign Appel. I still think it was a good risk to take, but it obviously didn't work out in their favor. If something similar happens this year and a top five talent falls to #9, the 14th pick gives them some financial wiggle room. If it doesn't, well, the Pirates still have two first round picks. 

The final argument is even more straightforward: as it stands right now it seems like the Pirates were kind of dumb to trade even the 35th pick in the draft for Gaby Sanchez. I'm happy they didn't compound their mistake by giving away the 14th pick, too.

Michael Sanserino is tweeting out a bunch of news today, but the most important points are here: Jonathan Sanchez has made the Pirates' rotation and Brandon Inge will make the Pirates' roster, though he may open the season on the disabled list. I've talked quite a bit about Sanchez already, particularly in yesterday's post about the rotation. There's some room for discussion over whether Neal Huntington did enough to bolster the rotation this winter (Francisco Liriano's weird injury was unforseeable and came at a pretty late date in the winter, Jeff Karstens' shoulder injury was only unforseeable if you're blind, obviously Kyle McPherson pitched poorly this spring and the team probably hoped for better from him, etc.), and so it's pretty unfortunate that Sanchez has made the rotation, but it's still hard to be hugely upset over it. As I wrote, the rotation is in a fluid situation for the early part of the season and at least if he sucks, there will be other options to try. Those options might suck, too, but it is what it is. Sanserino's other news is that neither Francisco Liriano nor Charlie Morton will go on the 60-day disabled list, which means that the Pirates are targeting fairly early-season returns for both of them. This rotation is ugly right now, but it should at least be acknowledged that it's a work in progress.

It's incredibly hard for me to stomach a roster that puts (or presumably will put) both Brandon Inge and John McDonald on the 25-man roster. If Inge starts the season out on the disabled list it's possible that it won't ever come to this, but the possibility is now looming. There is no universe in which Inge and McDonald don't replicate their skills; neither can hit, Inge can field well at third and no where else, McDonald can field well at short and at least passably at second and third. Still, neither can hit, and at some point the Pirates will need some bench players that can do that. It's true that the Sanchez/Jones and Snider/Tabata platoons will leave someone on the bench that can hit, but they'll always be same-handed and frankly, I think it's generous to say that Jose Tabata and Travis Snider can hit anyway. 

One way to approach this decision is to remember what Brandon McCarthy said about Inge and Jonny Gomes and their role on last year's Oakland club: that having fun guys that love to play baseball and make life easy for the young players is very seriously invaluable in a way that you simply cannot understand if you've never played Major League Baseball. McCarthy is a really smart guy -- definitely one of the smartest players in baseball -- and while I'd brush off most players making comments like this, he's one of the few players whose opinion I'd respect on something like this. I think he intentionally overstated the opinion that each was worth 10 wins to the club to get people to pay attention to him, but the point is taken. Sometimes it's good to have Brandon Inge or John McDonald around. 

On the flip side of that is this post by Wilbur Miller, which basically says that you'll never know if young players are any good if you don't just let them play. Jordy Mercer has a slick glove, good instincts in the field, and a little bit of pop in his bat. John McDonald and Clint Barmes are basically the same player. Why not leave Mercer around instead of one of those two, let him play against some lefties, slowly phase him in, and see if he can't be better than the 1-2 win shortstop that you've already settled for? Josh Harrison really hasn't hit much in Pittsburgh but he hit quite a bit in the minors. Frankly, even though I'd say that Inge and McDonald are both "better players" right now, I'd rather have Harrison at second for a long stretch if Neil Walker goes down again. I rag on him all the time, but if you want to talk intangibles, Harrison honestly has an infectious joy for baseball that makes even me smile sometimes. And I haven't even mentioned Ivan De Jesus: I know he's a project because of some maybe lingering issues from his long-ago broken leg, but why on earth would you even want to trade for a young guy that's not better than Brandon Inge or John McDonald? How are the Pirates better served with old, known-quantity guys than young players like this that might have even any upside at all? 

I suppose what bugs me the most is that in Year Five of Neal Huntington's run as GM, the Pirates are going to break camp with Jonathan Sanchez and John McDonald and maybe even Brandon Inge all on the roster. How are there not better options than this? How can you run a team for five years and build things from the bottom up, and not be able to do better than this for your Opening Day roster? I hope I'm wrong about all of this and given the fluid situation with the rotation and Inge possibly starting the year out on the disabled list, I'll freely admit that I might be. Still, this isn't where I thought we'd be in 2013 and I don't have a very good feeling about it. 

Here are the pitchers that I'm comfortable with in the Pirates' pitching staff (in order of confidence), one week before the 2013 season begins:

1. AJ Burnett
2. Wandy Rodriguez
3. James McDonald

That's not a great trio, but it's a pretty good one. Burnett had a strong year last year in the National League and in a friendly ballpark, with the Pirates' coaching staff helping him induce as many ground balls as he ever has in his career. He's getting older and he clearly ran out of gas late in 2012, but I don't really think there's any reason that he shouldn't be able to just about replicate his 2012 season for the Pirates in 2013.

Wandy Rodriguez was the Pirates' best starter after the trade deadline last year. He's 34 now and his strikeouts keep dropping, but he gets more groundballs now than he ever has and this is the sort of thing (quite possibly the only thing) the Pirates' coaching staff seems to be able to work with. Like Burnett, I'd expect his 2013 to look at lot like his 2012, which means 200-odd innings, a nice K/BB ratio, some groundballs, and mostly good starts with some bad ones peppered in the middle.

There is a caveat to both Burnett and Rodriguez. It's easy to look at how a pitcher has pitched and see no huge health issues and say that they'll be about the same in the coming season. The problem here is that Burnett is 36 and Rodriguez is 34 (they both have January birthdays). Eventually these two are going to wake up and be not quite the pitcher that they were the year before, for no reason other than that they're on the downside of their careers. I feel OK about Burnett even though he's older, because his rate numbers last year looked just about like they did during his last few years in Florida and his first year in Toronto. They weren't quite as good as his best years, but I don't think it's a precipitous drop. I'm concerned about Rodriguez a bit, though, because his velocity and strikeouts have been falling for a couple of years already. He's adjusted by getting more groundballs, but it's going to bite him eventually. I don't think that this year will be the year that either guy starts to really decline, but it's not fair to talk about how they're going to pitch in 2013 without mentioning their age and what that might mean for them.

James McDonald is a talented but wildly inconsistent pitcher, which means that he's going to have brilliant stretches and awful ones. Hopefully with age will come a stabilization of his mechanics and an adaption to the long big league season, which would probably tip the scales in favor of the brilliant stretches and make him an AJ Burnett-like pitcher. This is not a sure thing. 

These are the pitchers that will help the Pirates at some point in 2013 that are not available to them right now, in order of potential impact: 

1. Gerrit Cole
2. Francisco Liriano
3. Jeff Karstens
4. Charlie Morton

Gerrit Cole is starting 2013 in Triple-A because he is not ready for the Major Leagues quite yet. Frankly, I'd say that anyone that tells you otherwise is either uniformed or has a blatant agenda. That being said, the second that Cole steps foot on the mound in black and gold, he will become one of the most talented pitchers in Pirate history. This is not hyperbole -- the Pirates just haven't had nearly as many super-talented pitchers as you might expect a franchise founded in 1887 to have had by now. Talent is a guarantee of nothing, though. You surely remember Kris Benson. That's particularly true of someone as young as Cole is right now. Even if he blows the doors off of Triple-A and joins the Pirates in June, he's likely to get beaten up a little bit in the early part of his career. 

Returns diminish quickly afer Cole. We've been over Liriano ad nauseum this winter. He's talented, but even if he were 100% healthy he'd be a gamble to perform. He's not healthy and frankly, I don't think anyone outside of the team has any idea how his broken non-pitching humerus will really affect his pitching this year. Karstens is a decent pitcher, but his shoulder injuries scare the crap out of me and I don't think he should be counted on for anything substantial this year. Morton is more intriguing from an intellectual standpoint, because of the way he completely altered his approach to succeed in a non-traditional way for a starter. I do think that he's talented enough to come back from his Tommy John surgery to be a decent back-of-the-rotation guy, but I also realize that that's far from a slam dunk and that he wasn't really all that great of a pitcher before he got hurt, so relying too heavily on him is pretty stupid. 

It's probably accurate to say that what the Pirates have right now is a decent middle of a rotation with Burnett and Rodriguez and McDonald. There aren't any aces among that trio, but you can get away without having a true top of the rotation if you also avoid having a true bottom of the rotation. That is, you'd have a pretty decent rotation if you had five #3 starters. You can even argue that if Cole comes up and sets the National League on fire and the coaching staff helps Liriano find his old form during his rehab that by 1 July, we're going to look really dumb for worrying about the rotation in April. 

There are two problems with that scenario. The first is that it's hugely optimistic. The second is that roughly one half of the season will be played between 1 April and 1 July. How, exactly, will the Pirates bridge that gap? This is where things get really dicey. Really dicey. Here are five more pitchers likely to log innings for the Pirates in the season's first half, based on how many innings they will probably throw in black and gold: 

1. Jeff Locke
2. Jonathan Sanchez
3. Kyle McPherson
4. Jeanmar Gomez

Jonathan Sanchez is number two! And not in a scatological humor kind of way, in an actual "This guy is going to make the rotation and if he doesn't the options aren't really a whole lot better" kind of way. I wrote about Locke and McPherson a couple of weeks ago; I'm not really impressed or hugely encouraged by either guy, though I will admit that there is some upside to them. Logically (that is, based on minor league stats, overall level of experience, and not being a shambling disaster this spring) Locke is the one that deserves the first shot and he'll get it. 

I feel like I covered Sanchez pretty well in my post on him from Bradenton. Sanchez is 1.) coming off of a disastrous year, 2.) left-handed, and 3.) capable of striking out a ton of hitters. Numbers two and three mitigate number one to the point that he's the sort of pitcher that will always get another shot (see: Perez, Oliver -- LOOGY extraordinaire, Seattle Mariners), but I'd much rather that that shot start in Indianapolis and not Pittsburgh. It's one thing to think that you can fix Jonathan Sanchez; any pitching coach worth his salt must think he can fix Jonathan Sanchez. It's another thing to actually rely on fixing Jonathan Sanchez as part of your strategy for a season. Given the existent questions about McDonald, Locke, McPherson Liriano, and Karstens, the Pirates are now perilously close to relying on Sanchez before moving on down to Jeanmar Gomez. 

Jeanmar Gomez is kind of like Charlie Morton; he works in theory, but not so much in practice. He's a decent-sized guy (he's listed at 6'3"), he's capable of throwing fairly hard (his fastball/sinker can sometimes get into the lower-mid 90s), and he can induce groundballs. It's just not all there, though, and he gets hit hard a lot and he's not very good. He could maybe, possibly, make some decent spot-starts against right-heavy lineups in a park like PNC, but needing him to do more requires him to be a better pitcher than he's been in the past. He's only 26 and he has some tools, of course, so it's not completely impossible, but counting on this to happen is pretty foolish.

That means that what the Pirates have on Opening Day is the aforementioned solid middle of the rotation (Burnett, Rodriguez, McDonald), but no top of the rotation and a potentially disastrous back-end of the rotation. This is really bad news for as long as this situation persists. Locke and Sanchez/McPherson could absolutely combine to give the Pirates a decent back end of their rotation that's much better than it seems like they will be right now, but I can tell you that putting your eggs in this basket seems like a good way to end up with a basket full of rotten eggs. 

The problem is that what the Pirates need for the rotation to be any sort of good (Cole coming straight out of Triple-A as an ace, Liriano being relatively healthy and relative good, McDonald putting everything together) seems less likely to me to happen than the scenarios that make the Pirates' rotation a disaster (Liriano not really pitching much all year, Karstens not pitching much, Cole not rushing to the big leagues and having some growing pains at least at first, Sanchez, Locke, McPherson, etc. being really, really bad). Burnett and Rodriguez and McDonald are nice enough pitchers, but they're just not good enough to prop up a rotation that could be 40% lead anchor.

There's plenty of potential here. Burnett and Rodriguez and McDonald all have enough raw ability that they could actually be better than they were last year (not that it's likely, just possible) or that they could go through a blazing stretch of out-pitching peripherals to open the season and keep things afloat while Locke and Sanchez or whoever are still making regular starts. And with Cole coming and McPherson and maybe Irwin in Triple-A and Liriano, Morton, and Karstens all expected to make varying sorts of returns, the rotation shouldn't ever get stuck in a static state of terribleness. There should always be someone else that has a non-zero chance of being a useful pitcher (that is, no Dana Evelands or Hayden Penns, though Jeanmar Gomez and Jonathan Sanchez are awfully close to that level) that the team can give starts to if someone is struggling. That being said, a plan of "toss a bunch of crap at the wall and hope that something sticks" isn't really all that good of a plan when your top three starters don't include any elite pitchers.

There are a few places where this could go right and a lot of places where it could go wrong.