Even moreso than Gerrit Cole, Jameson Taillon's minor league career has kind of vexed prospect guys. Everybody that watches Taillon throw in person reports back that he's got borderline-elite stuff. You can check out the piece Kiley McDaniel did for FanGraphs last summer, when he slotted Taillon just behind Dylan Bundy as a prospect, said he has a "non-zero" chance of becoming an ace and that even if he doesn't (noting that there are never more than 15 or so pitchers in baseball that really qualify as "aces") he'll be a very strong #2 starter. McDaniel saw Taillon again over the winter at instructs and reported back that he looked basically the same. 

The vexing part is that despite having a great fastball and a great curve and a pretty good changeup for a pitcher of his age (he turned 21 in November), his minor league numbers haven't been great. In his minor league debut with West Virginia in 2010, he gave up nearly a hit an inning and allowed nine homers in 92 2/3 innings. Last year with Bradenton, his home runs and hits allowed came down a bit but so did his strikeouts. His K/9 rate in the Florida State League was 7.1/9 innings, which is right around the big league average. That's not quite what you want to see from a pitcher like Taillon at any level in the minors. 

The explanation that's mostly been used to explain this is that the Pirates keep their young pitchers on pretty tight leashes in the low minors, limiting how many breaking pitches they throw, stressing fastball command, etc. As a result they can occasionally get hit hard or have lagging strikeout rates, but that those things aren't necessarily reflective of the pitcher's talent so much as the Pirates' method of development. You can see the way that Taillon's being brought along and compare it to, say, Nick Kingham, and understand that he's more talented and that the team is higher on him and that his results are better, even if that's not technically born out in the numbers. Certainly, everyone that watches Taillon throw says that his stuff is still great and that he's still projectible and still on pace to be a good big league starter and all of those things. 

All of that being said, questions started cropping up last summer. I distinctly recall Kevin Goldstein, before he left Baseball Prospectus for the Astros, asking when it would be OK to start wondering about Taillon's mediocre results. That it's great that he's talented and it's fine that the Pirates have their own system for developing pitchers, but at what point do mediocre results outstrip immense talent? Taillon quieted some of that with his late promotion to Altoona when he absolutely blew the doors off of the Eastern League to close out the 2012 season. He only made three starts, but in them he struck out 18 and walked one hitter in 17 innings. He gave up 11 hits, no homers, and just three runs. Still, he went from being Baseball America's #15 prospect to #19. At MLB.com he went from #8 to #15. There's nothing wrong with being one of the 15-20 best prospects in the game, but it shouldn't go unnoticed when a prospect's stock drops like that. 

I think that the answer to Goldstein's question is that this is the year to really watch Taillon. He's been in the Pirates' system for two years now, he's no longer in the low minors, and he's the same age Gerrit Cole was last year. The leash has to start coming off this year. The first two years in the system, it's understandable that the Pirates wanted to build up stamina and work on command in a high school pitcher. At this point, it's time to transition towards building up an arsenal to pitch in the big leagues. If Taillon's results are still middling with Altoona this year, his prospect stock is going to drop quickly and there will be plenty of reason to worry about his future. 

The bigger question, of course, is this: will that happen? I don't really have any more evidence in either direction than what I've already offered. His stuff is still good enough that any scout watching him pitch drools over him, but his results up until now haven't been great. You can read the tea leaves a bit and say that the Pirates letting him pitch for Canada in the WBC is a sign that they're not terribly worried about him and you can put a lot of emphasis on his little run with Altoona at the end of last year, but I'd advise against reading too much into either of those things. I'm going to lean towards breakout, because I find it hard to believe someone with Taillon's talent won't break through and because being negative about Pirate prospects before they've collapsed is the final step towards Total Pirate Apathy and I'm not there yet. My point, though, is that I think that Taillon will start 2014 as either one of the two or three best right-handed pitching prospects in baseball or he'll be out of the Top 50 prospects entirely (or, I suppose, he'll dominate in the minors and get called up early enough to exhaust his prospect status, but that seems unlikely).

From a more zoomed out perspective, what Taillon does in 2013 won't be just about Jameson Taillon. It's also going to be a referendum on the Kyle Stark/Jim Benedict pitcher development program. To this point the Pirates' strategy of taking young pitchers and focusing on fastball control in the low minors has mostly fizzled. There have been a few success storys, but all of the guys that took middling low-minors numbers and translated them into upper-minors success (Rudy Owens, Kyle McPherson, and Jeff Locke come immediately to mind) were all generally relatively low-ceiling guys either drafted by Dave Littlefield or acquired in a trade. It's hard to say whether the system failed guys like Zack Von Rosenberg and Zack Dodson and Quentin Miller, or if the scouting team simply failed to identify high school pitchers that truly had a high ceiling. Taillon, though, has all the talent in the world and even after two years of middling results in the low minors, no real reason to not reach his ceiling. If things don't work out, there are going to be plenty of questions to ask about what went wrong. 

I spent most of the winter bemoaning the Pirates' lack of pitching depth, but the whole time that I was doing so there was a significant elephant in the room: Gerrit Cole.  Cole is in camp with the Pirates, pitching big league innings, ranked in the top ten of most prospect lists and he rose to Triple-A in his first minor league season and people like Baseball Prospectus's Jason Parks write things like this about his ceiling: 

Fantasy Future: Could develop into premier starter; 20-game winner; perennial Cy Young award candidate.

As a result, I think that there's the perception among some Pirate fans that the fact that Cole won't start 2013 because the Pirates are trying to keep his arbitration clock from ticking. Whether or not that's a justifiable reason to keep a pitcher in the minors is its own debate (short answer: I think that it definitely is), but I'm not sure it's applicable to Cole here. The reality is that Cole is a good prospect and he's got a high ceiling, but I'm not sure he's such a phenom that he only needs one Triple-A start before showing up in Pittsburgh. He'll start the year out with Indianapolis because he's got things to work on, not because the Pirates are holding him down. So what does he have to work on? And when can we expect to see him?

There are a few things to watch with Cole both in spring training and in his future time with Indianapolis. The first is his changeup: his fastball and slider are already big league pitches, but there are varying reports on how much work his changeup needs. To be clear: everyone thinks that his changeup can be a plus pitch, just that he needs a bit more work on it. Kiley McDaniel watched Cole in instructs in January and wrote pretty much that: 

Cole threw one curveball at 81 that he should scrap, just a slower version of the slider and only threw two changeups in the low 80’s. The changeups showed plus potential, turning over with fade and bottom but the changeup is a pitch that comes with feel, something Cole can’t have throwing it twice a game. His command was fine for the level, but would waver more than you’d like, usually missing up in the zone.

If you go back to the first link, Parks' scouting report of Cole, you'll read that while Cole's fastball meets the hype in terms of velocity, it tends to flatten out when he leaves it up in the zone. And when you read McDaniel's report, you see that Cole's remaining command issues have to do with him leaving the ball up in the zone. Whenever you read a report on Cole, even going back to his days at UCLA, that says that he has all of the disparate parts needed to make an ace (explosive fastball, plus slider, the beginnings of a plus changeup) but that for some reason his results don't quite match the talent, I'm pretty sure that this issue with the elevating fastball is why. 

Do you remember the 2012 Futures Game? Cole came out throwing gas, striking out Xander Boegarts on four pitches with a fastball that touched 99 mph. Then he got a ground out, walked a hitter, and fell behind Jae-Hoon Ha (who's not a Top 100 prospect and is presumably more well known for his defense than his offense given his minor league numbers) 2-0. Cole came back with two fastballs up in the zone. Ha fouled one off, then homered to right field. I suspect that the same thing happened when Cole got lit up in his Triple-A playoff start with Indy last year. My hypothesis is this: when Cole gets excited, his command dips, when his command dips, he elevates his fastball, when he elevates his fastball, he gets pounded. 

This is not a huge problem for someone with the raw stuff of Gerrit Cole. When he works out his changeup and can throw it more consistently, hitters won't be able to sit on fastballs and hope he leaves a straight one up in the zone for them. Really, it's more like fine-tuning that needs to be taken care of before he's completely ready for the big leagues. 

So when will he be completely ready? Even Stephen Strasburg made six Triple-A starts, and while Cole is a good prospect  that Strasburg was. Still, six Triple-A starts is a nice baseline as an ideal number. I think that we have to assume that he gets that many, because even if he just blows the doors off from the beginning it'll probably take that many starts to be sure that he's made the progress that needs to be made. If we do want to take financials into account, the Super-Two deadline (which slides from year to year) is generally somewhere around the beginning of June. PLUS, every minor league start will be a tightly controlled situation, in terms of pitches and innings. That means that the longer he stays in Triple-A, the more potential flexibility the Pirates have with him down the stretch should they need him to pitch in a pennant race without having to shelf him, Strasburg style. You're laughing now, I know, but this is stuff that someone should at least be thinking about at this point in the spring. 

If we add all that together, I'd say that there's practically no chance that Cole comes to Pittsburgh before June 1st, even if he flat-out dominates at Indianapolis (given the precarious health of the Pirates' staff and the chance that Cole certainly could go to Indy and flat-out dominate, I won't say that there's no chance at all, but I do feel like it's pretty small). Indy has 59 games in April and May and their season opener is also their home opener, so that means 12 starts for Cole if he pitches every fifth game and eight starts for him if they hold him to once a week to keep a leash on innings. Instinctively that number of starts feels about right. He made 13 starts with Bradenton and 12 starts with Altoona last year. I suspect that the Pirates won't let him pitch every fifth day, though, and that when June 1 rolls around he's somewhere around 8-10 starts instead of 12. As a result it could be closer to July when we see him. 

I feel pretty good about that ballpark, though that's partially because I'm pretty optimistic that things will come together quickly for Cole in Triple-A (and that I'm optimistic more out of a need for sanity at this point in the season that anything else). It's certainly possible that he struggles a bit at the beginning of the year and needs more time to work things out. Still, between his talent and the Pirates' lack of pitching depth this year, I'd say that while I wouldn't expect Cole much earlier than June 1st, I also wouldn't expect him much later than the All-Star break. 

After Gerrit Cole's Grapefruit League debut yesterday, Jameson Taillon will start against the Red Sox today at 1:05 PM. Taillon probably won't get many spring training appearances with the Bucs this year since he'll be joining Team Canada for the World Baseball Classic shortly, which is an even better reason to pay attention to him today. 

You can read about Cole's outing against the Rays yesterday here. Clint Hurdle's quote about his appearance has a pretty fantastically loaded elipsis. That quote could literally mean anything with that thing in there. 

As Charlie notes, Gerrit Cole and pretty much every other interesting Pirate pitcher of consequence is taking the mound against the Rays today. I'm not much interested in spring training results but I am curious to see how Cole fares against big league hitters. He's high on my list of things to talk about during spring training and I'm particularly interested just to see how he fares in situations where he's out of his comfort zone. 

Speaking of things to talk about this spring, I've been thinking about how I want to do spring training and season previews and here's how it's going to go down: every day I'm going to try and answer a question about the Pirates in the coming season (stuff like "When will we see Gerrit Cole?" ). I have a long list of questions to tackle, but if you have anything on your mind leave it in the questions or holler at me on Twitter. If it's not on the list and I think it's interesting, I'll try to get to it. 

I did the Pirates' portion of the season preview for Big League Magazine this spring. You can check out an excerpt of it here. Their preview issue is a heck of a thing: bloggers and writers familiar with all 30 teams wrote a couple thousand word previews for each club in addition to other season preview articles. Which is to say that it's not free, but there's lots of stuff for the $4.95 that the preview issue costs. (Full disclosure: my payment is based on how many copies of the issue get sold.)

Jason Parks put out his Top 101 prospects at Baseball Prospectus yesterday. Parks loves high upside guys and that's reflected in his rankings of Pirates: Gerrit Cole is at #3, Jameson Taillon is at #11, Gregory Polanco is at #44, Luis Heredia is at #53, and Alen Hanson is at #66. That's about where Polanco and Hanson come in on other lists, but those are particularly high slots to find Cole and Taillon and Heredia in, I think. Not that I'm complaining, of course, just noting that most lists have those guys a bit lower. 

I'm doing World Baseball Classic previews over at The Outside Corner this week. On Monday I ran down the qualifying round, I did Pool A yesterday, Pool B will be today, and so forth. I'm shooting to have them run at 2:30 every day, if you're interested in checking back in. I'm also trying to pass them around on Twitter. 

Chris Jaffe of the Hardball Times notes that today is the 40,000th day since the Pirates reached the .500 mark as a franchise for the first time in their history. In general, the Pirates have been good enough that they're still above .500 as a franchise today, even though they haven't had a winning season in some 7,000+ days. They don't have much longer to turn things around, though, if they want to stay above .500 as a franchise: Chris estimates that if they keep losing they'll fall under the mark by about 2016. 

Baseball history is so cool sometimes. The Pirates less so. 

Tomorrow the Pirates will hold their "Black and Gold" intrasquad scrimmage game in anticipation of Saturday's Spring Training opener against the Rays. Nothing gets old quicker than spring training games (the first ones are exciting, then it's a month of blah before real baseball starts), but there's one pretty cool aspect to the Black and Gold Game this year: 

It will be Cole (Blacks) VS Taillon (Golds) in Friday's #Pirates intrasquad game at McKechnie Field. First pitch, Noon.

— Tom Singer (@Tom_Singer) February 21, 2013

Can you hear it? That's the future! It's bearing down on us! Instead of worrying about it (which I'm going to do plenty of in the next few weeks), let's just sit back and enjoy the fact that the #2 overall pick from 2010 is facing off against the #1 overall pick from 2011 in an intrasquad scrimmage in 2013 and that things have gone well enough since those drafts for this to be a pretty exciting event. 

*This post has been edited from its original form to reflect the fact that today is Thursday and not Friday. Which kind of sucks. I know.

It only takes about ten minutes of watching Starling Marte to understand why being a baseball scout is such a difficult job. Why even the best scouts pile up tons of misses for every diamond in the rough that they unearth. I am not a scout by any means, but since moving North Carolina 5 1/2 years ago I've watched plenty of minor league baseball. Most of that baseball has been Triple-A baseball and the reality of Triple-A baseball is that it's mostly a vast wasteland of Quadruple-A replacement-level talent, stowed away in case of big league emergency.

Still, watching the Durham Bulls regularly means that I've seen plenty of Tampa Bay's prospects come through, and when talented guys play in Triple-A, their talent tends to kind of pop off of the field. Maybe it's just confirmation bias (you know who the prospects are by the time they come to Triple-A), but in the vast Triple-A wasteland it's immediately apparent when Andrew McCutchen flicks his wrists through the zone and sends a fly ball screaming to the warning track or when David Price's slider keeps guys flailing, even if his control is a bit off. You can't help but notice Matt Wieters tower over everyone in the batter's box and understand that he's built differently than other catchers and that this is what the scouts rave about. 

And so by the same token, you can't miss Starling Marte on the baseball field when he's in front of you. When I watched him last spring, he was playing so shallow in center field that he might as well have been playing rover in slow pitch softball. On a couple of occasions I'd see a hitter rip a flyball towards deep center or left center, remember where Marte was playing, and think, "There's no way he's getting there." He'd be practically there waiting for the ball before I could even turn my head to watch the play. You notice it on TV, too. Remember the time Paul Goldschmidt thought he could stretch a single into a double with Marte in left field? Oops. At the plate, he can blister the ball. He homered on the first big league pitch that he saw and he tripled in three straight games. When he's on, he's magnetic. You can't not see him on the field or on your TV screen. 

And of course therein lies the caveat: he's not always on. He gets lost at the plate and can strike out a ton. When he's struggling at the plate, he presses in the field and weird things happen. He's already 24, which is not terribly young for a raw prospect. We can talk about his lack of time in the US or his relative inexperience due to not playing a full minor league season until the age of 22, but that doesn't change the fact that he's already 24 and that some of the stuff that needs to happen for him Marte to become star simply might not happen. Marte could literally be anything at this point in his career: he could turn into Michael Bourn or Carlos Gomez or Jacoby Ellsbury or Drew Stubbs or Alfonso Soriano or Andrew McCutchen. All I feel like I know for sure is that his speed and defense will make him a big league regular. After that? Who knows. 

This is frustrating, because there's nothing that could help the Pirates more in 2013 than Starling Marte having a breakout year as a hitter. The Pirates have Andrew McCutchen, who is a known superstar-level asset, they have Neil Wakler, who can be counted on to be a solid contributor at the plate if healthy, and they have Pedro Alvarez, who will probably fall somewhere in between with some danger of cratering. Marte will, at the very least, contribute real value to the team defensively, but the Pirates need more than that. They need another dynamic hitter that can help drive the Pirates' lineup to be something other than below average. They need Winter Ball Starling Marte, who drew 13 walks and only struck out 23 times in 120+ plate appearances to go with all of his extra base hits (four doubles, four triples, two homers). Starling Marte could be that hitter for the Pirates, but there's absolutely no way to be sure about it right now. 

I wrote about Travis Snider and whether or not I thought he was a breakout candidate last week. About halfway through that post I thought to myself, "This is silly. Starling Marte is way more important to the Pirates." His approach at the plate is one of the few things to keep an eye on in spring training that might be important for the coming season. Really, I think it's this simple: it's hard to imagine the Pirates being a good team in 2013 or 2014 without Marte becoming a legitimate top or middle of the order hitter and it's not a slam dunk that he will be. 

Remember when I said that this season was making me awfully nervous? This kind of thing is exactly why. 

Rob Biertempfel tweeted from Bradenton today that Jeff Karstens isn't throwing for a couple of days because he's being cautious with a sore shoulder. The whole thing is made to sound like it's not a big deal and that Karstens will be fine in a couple of days. That doesn't mean I'm not concerned, though. 

Let's play detective here. The Pirates were unwilling to even tender Jeff Karstens a contract this winter, despite being due a relatively modest raise to the ballpark of $4 million. They were unable to trade him as the deadline to tender him approached. Karstens became a free agent, and no one wanted to touch him even though Kevin Correia got a two-year/$10 million deal from Minnesota. The market for him was so poor that Pirates re-signed him for $2.5 million, a $600k pay decrease from last year. 

Presumably, part of the reason that there was such little interest in Karstens was his health. Karstens missed time in August of 2011 with a shoulder injury, then spent more than two months of the early part of last year on the disabled list with shoulder problems. Today, we get news about another sore shoulder. Literally just yesterday, Russell Carleton published a piece at Baseball Prospectus (no subscription required) about predicting pitcher injuries. You should read the whole thing, but the conclusion is that nothing predicts injuries better than previous injuries. Elbow injuries beget more elbow injuries and shoulder injuries beget more shoulder injuries. 

Jeff Karstens has had shoulder issues two seasons in a row. Jeff Karstens already has shoulder issues a week into camp. This is pretty concerning, no matter how much it's being downplayed right now. 

Rob Biertempfel says this morning that the Pirates have extended Clint Hurdle through the 2014 season with an option for 2015. We're at a slow point for spring training news (everyone's in Bradenton but nothing's going to happen) so I suppose this will probably get some play in the news for the next 18 hours or thereabouts, but I think that it's pretty uninteresting as far as news goes. 

Hurdle's contract was due up at the end of 2013 and "lame duck" status for managers is something the media loves to drum up into controversy, so this takes care of it. The reality is that 2013 is probably Neal Huntington's last shot at putting a winning team on the field at PNC Park. If the Pirates are disappointing in any way this year, Huntington will be out the door and if he goes, Hurdle will almost certainly follow him. The actual status of his contract probably doesn't matter much.