Source: #Pirates reach agreement with Russell Martin, pending physical.

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) November 30, 2012

After some talk about a three-year deal yesterday, it appears that the terms between the Pirates and Martin are two years and $17 million. I was really, really harsh on the idea of signing Martin yesterday, but both Martin and my main issues with signing Martin go a little bit deeper than yesterday's post (and yes, now that you mention it, I was probably over-reacting just a bit). Since it looks like this is happening, let's go into it now. 

Russell Martin is a really good defensive catcher. I don't know how much better he'll be at throwing out runners for the Pirates in 2013 than Barajas and McKenry were in 2012 because I strongly suspect that the team's problem on that front had a lot to do with the pitchers, but Martin's value behind the plate goes deeper than that. When Mike Fast ranked the framing ability of all of baseball's catchers last fall for Baseball Prospectus, he ranked Martin as second to only Yadier Molina. The distance between Martin and Yorvit Torrealba in third place was not close. Fast works for the Astros now and so we don't have his 2012 rankings, but Jeff Sullivan at FanGraphs tried to quantify the framing ability of catchers from PitchFX for this season and put the Yankees on top, with Martin as their main backstop. The Pirates, both with the Ryan Doumit lead revolving door at catcher before 2012 and with Barajas/McKenry last year, ranked pretty poorly. I've got plenty of questions about this kind of analysis (mainly I wonder how certain types of pitchers affect framing and if a team that focuses on, say, sinkerballers, might be affected in the rankings, plus I also have some pretty huge questions about umpire bias against teams perceived to be bad), but it seems pretty clear to me that Russell Martin will add defensive value behind the plate for the Pirates in 2012 whether he throws out 30% of base stealers or not. 

That being said, Russell Martin is not Yadier Molina. After a promising early career, his bat has pretty much evaporated. He hasn't had an OPS+ of over 100 since 2008 and didn't hit well in either of his seasons with the Yankees (.224/.317/.405). The New Yankee Stadium has a reputation as a great hitter's park, but the reality is that it appears to actually be a pretty neutral park for right-handed hitters and much of its reputation as a hitter's park is based on the ridiculous way that the ball jumps out of the park for left-handed hitters. The problem, of course, is that PNC Park is deadly for righties, so Martin's move from New York to Pittsburgh won't be nearly as adventageous as AJ Burnett's. A move from the AL East to the NL Central will help him, but the shift in parks will probably offset that. 

Again, though, Martin is a better hitter than the guy he's replacing. He draws walks more than 10% of the time and he's got some power (his .192 ISO would've put him behind only AJ Pierzynski and Buster Posey among qualified catchers if he had a few more plate appearances), but he strikes out a ton and won't hit for a high average. He's not a good hitter by any stretch, but it's not really fair to compare him to Barajas. 

If you roll all of these factors together -- good-to-excellent defense (depending on how the team handles the holding runners situation), below average bat before considering that it's a bad fit for PNC Park -- and consider Martin's age (he'll be 30 in February), it's probably safe to peg him as a 2-3 WAR player for the next two seasons. Assuming that he plays at that level, he'd be an upgrade over what the Pirates have had at catcher recently and the price the Pirates would be paying ($8.5 million per year) would be more than fair value, based on the open market. 

The main problem that I have with the deal is that just because a player is worth $8.5 million on the open market doesn't make him worth $8.5 million to the Pirates. This is an important distinction. That's $14 million in Clint Barmes and Russell Martin for one year for a team that probably won't crack $60 million on the total payscale. This is a team that has to consider trading Joel Hanrahan this winter because paying a closer $7.5 million on a $50-60 million budget is ridiculous, but that is now suddenly spending $8.5 million on a two-win catcher. 

That might be fine if the Pirates had their backs pressed up against the walls to play Barajas again in 2013, but they I'm not sure that they do. Mike McKenry drew walks and hit for power for the Pirates last year and his defense is probably not as bad as it appeared (his minor league CS% was pretty good) and it doesn't seem at all outlandish to me to suggest that McKenry + a backup (be it Tony Sanchez or someone else) might only be worth one win less than a Martin/McKenry tandem. That means that the Pirates aren't really paying market value for Martin, they're really paying $8.5 million for what might turn out to be a marginal upgrade over what they already have. 

Of course, we can't say that for certain because the games haven't been played yet. Martin is a relatively known quantity and McKenry is a huge, huge unknown that may have been an offensive fluke in 2012. Some of that $8.5 million will pay for that certainty. Some of that $8.5 million is paying for a real free agent who had other options with real, legitimate contenders choosing to sign with the Pirates. These are real concerns for the Pittsburgh Pirates, who've certainly been burned by free agents in the past. 

My gut feeling is still that I don't love this signing, though. I'm a big proponent of letting the off-season unfold and waiting for a finished product to judge, but I think that the depth of the pitching staff is a huge question mark and so I think it's really concerning that the club just burned $8.5 million or so on what might only be a marginal upgrade. There's been a lot of talk about non-tendering Jeff Karstens this winter and while I know that that idea gives most Pirate fans the howling fantods, I understand why a team in the Pirates' situation might think that no starter that's only going to throw 140 innings is worth $5 million/10% of their payroll (for the record: I wouldn't non-tender Karstens if I were in the Pirates' position but I wouldn't hesitate to shop him right now), but that line of thinking just doesn't dovetail at all with signing Martin for this kind of money. 

I think I'm more bugged by the strategy than anything else here. The Pirates have a finite amount of money to spend and teams in that position can very rarely find real help in free agency. It's fine to spend $8.5 million Russell Martin if that's the last $8.5 million you need to spend to get to the playoffs, but that's not the situation that the Pirates are in right now. They went to the free agent well in 2012 and came up dry, but they're back fishing in it again in 2013. While I think Martin is a better signing than Barajas or Barmes, I just think that the Pirates have to be more creative with their spending than this if they really want to to be successful.

Russell Martin is a pretty good catcher that helps the Pirates in a couple of ways. He's certainly better than the Great Rod of Carkoon that sucked the air out of PNC Park on so many occasions last year. I think he's probably worth $8.5 million to someone in 2013, but I'm not at all convinced that that team is the Pirates. 

I'm a little behind the eight-ball on this one, but the Pirates made a flurry of roster moves this afternoon that are worth at least talking a little bit about even if I end up being the last person on the internet to weigh in on them. First up, they traded Luis Rico and Luis Santos to the Royals for Vin Mazzaro and Clint Robinson, then designated Matt Hague and Yamaico Navarro for assignment to make room for Mazzaro and Robinson. Then, they traded a PTBNL to Boston for Zach Stewart. Rico and Santos are international pitchers that haven't even made their US debuts yet; more than likely the Royals are just taking a flyer on two guys that they see some smidge of upside in for some roster space. Hague and Navarro are Hague and Navarro. Not much else worth saying on that front. 

Robinson, Mazzaro, and Stewart are all fringey 4A guys right now that are all have some potential value but that probably won't amount to more than depth. Mazzaro was drafted by the A's and traded to KC for David DeJesus in 2010. He had a mid-minor-league career shift from sinkerballer to more of a hard thrower that saw a Double-A breakout for him in 2008, but he's never really been able to either strike batters out or miss bats in the big leagues. He's 26 now and out of options, which makes him a weird choice to add for rotation depth, which is what I've got him pegged as. I suppose that having a fastball that has some velocity and a past as a sinker-baller makes him a pretty solid target for the Jim Benedict/Ray Searage treatment, so it's possible that the Pirates just want to get him into camp and work with him and see if there's something there that other teams haven't seen yet,

Stewart is in a similar boat. He's most famous for the players that he's been traded for thus far in his career: the Reds drafted him and sent him to Toronto in the Scott Rolen trade, the Blue Jays sent him to the White Sox as part of the Edwin Jackson trade that netted them Colby Rasmus, and the White Sox sent him to the Red Sox for Kevin Youkilis. He got a ton of strikeouts in the low minors and jumped from High-A in 2008 to Triple-A in 2009, but he's kind of stagnated since then. In the low minors he was striking out more than a hitter an inning, but in the high minors his K/9 hovers around 7.0. In his brief big league stints he's gotten hit very hard and give up a ton of home runs (25 in 103 innings). He's apparently mostly a ground ball pitcher at this point. If "groundball pitcher with a good pedigree that's fallen on hard times" doesn't tell you why Zach Stewart is a Pirate now, you haven't been paying much attention to the Neal Huntington era. 

That leaves Robinson, who's the most intriguing of the group. His career started late (he was drafted as a senior) and he hit the ball pretty well at every level of the minors, but he wasn't all that great in the low minors and as a result the Royals moved him through their system slowly. He didn't reach Triple-A until he was 26 and he made his big league debut last year at 27. Still, his minor league triple-slash line is .308/.382/.520 and 65 of his 110 minor league homers have come in the last three seasons. He's also a huge guy (6'5", 240), which means the Garrett Jones comparisons are inevitable here. He's only got four big league plate appearances, so it's impossible to really judge whether his offensive skill will translate to the big leagues, but the age at which he put up his big numbers in the upper minors makes me leery. There are a lot more Quadruple-A mashers that can't hack it in the big leagues than there are Garrett Joneses in the world. That said, Robinson doesn't strike out at an obscene rate and his walk rate is decent, so maybe there's something more to him than there is to the Brad Eldreds in the world. In the back of my mind there's a little voice that keeps saying, "Maybe the Pirates see something in Robinson and they're going to sell high on Garrett Jones this winter because let's face it, that dude's not hitting 27 homers in a season again and he might still fetch a nice trade return this winter," but that's probably nonsense and it's much more likely that he's around to provide depth. 

And so that's the Pirates' big day of roster moves. It's hard to see how it's more than innocuous shuffling right now, but offseasons should be viewed as a full body of work and not judged in a vacuum. The winter meetings are next week, and when they're done we'll have a lot more context for the things that happened on Wednesday.

When rumors about the Dodgers gargantuan new TV deal started floating around the internet yesterday, most people classified the reaction to the rumors as a "shockwave." It's true that the numbers are staggering: the deal's not finalized, but it will pay the Dodgers somewhere in the ballpark of $6-$7 billion over 25 years. That puts the annual figure in the $240-280 million ballpark, which is insane. 

Over in our modest little Pittsburgh Pirate corner of the internet, the link that got passed around yesterday was Wendy Thrum's great FanGraphs article where she outlines the TV deals of every single MLB team. The Dodgers will make a quarter of a billion dollars a year from their TV deal for the next quarter century. The Pirates' TV deal will barely cover Andrew McCutchen's extension every year by the time his deal is up. That's not to say that the Pirates are making $65.5 million a year between now and 2018, that's to say that they're only pulling about $121 million total between 2013 and 2019. 

That disparity itself was causing despair amongst Pirate fans yesterday, but honestly the huge revenue numbers isn't the source of the biggest problem. As currently constructed, baseball's revenue sharing system isn't perfect, but it forces teams like the Dodgers, with huge sources of revenue, to put money back into the pot so that teams like the Pirates (in theory, at least, we can use the Brewers in practice) can afford a roster that allows them to be competitive. That is, the Pirates can never have a $200 million payroll for an indefinite period of time, but they could probably support an $80-100 million payroll for a year or two as McCutchen and Alvarez get late into their arbitration and the team pushes for a final playoff run with this roster. It's not a perfect system by any means (the Pirates are generally screwed in free agency, which means they have to assemble their competitive rosters through other, more difficult paths), but it keeps teams like the Pirates from being completely hopeless. 

In theory, that revenue sharing system means that while the Dodgers will see a huge, huge windfall from their new TV deal that could elevate them to the Yankees' level in terms of big league payroll, they should also have to put more money back into the revenue sharing pot for the small market teams. That's not exactly balanced, but it is Baseball Balance and that's the best we can do. But what if even that doesn't apply? When the Guggenheim Group bought the Dodgers last year, they immediately went on a spending spree in August and that sparked some rumors that MLB had made some under-the-table concessisons to the GG that were hushed up and that one of them was that if the Dodgers started their own regional sports network, that they could cap revenue that had to be shared from the network at $84 million per year, even though revenues would likely be much higher.

That doesn't necessarily apply here, since the Dodgers will be on FOX and not on the Dodger Sports Network, but it's pretty telling that Baseball hushed things up at the end of the sale to make sure the uneven treatment of teams didn't become public. I'm guessing that there's a good chance that the Dodgers and FOX could finagle this deal to somehow take advantage of the revenue sharing cap and that we might not even have any way of publicly finding out. Certainly, the Lerners got a whole host of favorable things shoved their way for buying the Nationals (in the way of the publicly funded stadium and their constantly re-negotiable deal with MASN) that's set the Nats up very nicely for a long run of NL dominance. 

The long and short of it is this: the future of baseball is going to be closely tied to the contracts being handed out by these regional sports networks. The Pirates can never, ever hope to get the kind of money out of a TV deal that the big market teams can get, which means that this is already a rich-get-richer proposition. What's even more dangerous is that Major League Baseball doesn't have any problem tipping the already tilted table in the direction of it's bigger markets. Don't forget to keep that in mind along with the ridiculous dollar figures as these TV deals get hammered out.

Ken Rosenthal wrote this morning that the Pirates had "significant interest" in signing free agent catcher Russell Martin, though the Yankees are still the favorites to retain his services. I've made a list of ways that the Pirates could spend money that would be worse than spending it on Russell Martin. I think it's comprehensive, but I'm not sure: 

1. Just straight up lighting bills on fire in a huge bonfire on Federal Street. For bonus points, charge season ticket holders to attend, then feed the fire with their money in front of them.
2. Non-tendering Jeff Karstens and Joel Hanrahan, then instead of putting that money back into the team, asking for 12 million gold coins. Fill up a swimming pool with that money, then force Andrew McCutchen to dive into it head-first Scrooge McDuck style. 

All joking aside, here are some real facts about Russell Martin: 

1. He hit .211/.311/.403 last year, which means that he can't really hit. 
2. He's right-handed, so his offensive skills might not even reach those levels at PNC Park.
3. He'll be 30 in February so he's not really young. 
4. He made $7.5 million last year and the Yankees are interested in him, so he's not really cheap.
5. He threw out a career-low 24% of base stealers last year. That's just barely below the league average of 25%, though I suppose the Pirates CS% of negative a million infinity probably dragged the league average down a bit.

Everyone talks about the defense, but even if he bounces back up from 24% CS last year, it won't matter if the Pirates refuse to hold runners on base again. So he's an aging right-handed catcher with declining offensive value and defensive skills that will be of dubious help to the Pirates. He's basically a younger Rod Barajas that's probably more likely to be a minor disaster than an abject one. 

Pirate fans like to joke (or to seriously complain) about the team not spending enough money, but the Pirates poured gasoline on and put a flint to $11 million last year in the form of the Clint Barmes contact, then took an extra $4 million and just ran it through the shredder in the form of the Barajas contract. If they sign Martin this winter, they're going to waste $20 million over two years on three players that are barely better than replacement value and who offer no tangible upgrades over the much cheaper internal options the Pirates have. 

The Pirates have money to spend. The Pirates do not have money to waste. If they sign Russell Martin, it's a pretty good indication that they can't tell the difference between the two. That's a really, really bad thing.

I have a little mental tic where every time any big trade goes down involving any baseball team, I ask myself what it would take for the Pirates to complete the trade themselves. This was born, I think, during the Dave Littlefield era when the Pirates would only rarely target players I thought they should be interested in. I'd see players that I wanted the Pirates to acquire headed to other homes and I'd ask myself if the Pirates were even capable of completing the trades that I wanted to see them make. Under Neal Huntington, the Pirates have been much better about acquiring players that I'm happy to see them acquire, but I still evaluate a big chunk of baseball's biggest deals in my head this way. 

When the Marlins traded a huge chunk of their roster to Toronto last night, my first thought was this: "The Pirates would be win the NL Central next year with Mark Buehrle, Josh Johnson, and Jose Reyes." My second thought was this: "That is true, but crazy." My third thought was, "Seriously, they could never afford that trio and they'd have to gut the farm system for a crazy one-year run that would probably end horribly anyway." In my head, though, I kept constructing a trade because these are the things that I do in my head. After I put together a prospect package, I imagined a panicked Neal Huntington trying to make the case for this deal to Frank Coonelly and Bob Nutting and getting laughed out of the room. 

The Pirates getting in on the Marlins Fire Sale is a ridiculous concept, of course, for the ideas laid out above, but one part of that idea stuck with me. If we accept that the Pirates are at a better point today than they have been on past November 14ths, but that they're still a massively flawed baseball team (they are) and we assume that Neal Huntington has to get the Pirates at least above .500 and probably into the playoffs in 2013 to keep his job (I'd say that he probably does), then I think that a huge question worth asking is how Huntington is planning on approaching this off-season. 

After five off-seasons at the helm, it's not hard to discern Neal Huntington's off-season strategy: look for bargains everywhere. Look for them on the trade market, look for them in free agency, look for them on the scrap heap. In general, this has not yielded a ton of huge returns for the Pirates. Really, you can argue that outside of the bullpen, the only two off-season acquisitions during the entire Huntington era that have helped the Pirates at all have been Garrett Jones (who was a needle-in-a-haystack miracle) and AJ Burnett (who fell into the Pirates' lap). That'd be fine given the market realities of being the Pittsburgh Pirates in 2008-2012, except that the Pirates have tried and failed to fill legitimate holes with free agents (Bedard, Barajas, Barmes, Church, Crosby, etc. etc. etc.) and trades (Iwamura!) over the winter. 

It's tricky to try and gauge what that means for this winter: on one hand, Huntington might feel the urge to do something drastic to save his job, but on the other hand if he does do something with long-term ramifications (say, signing Edwin Jackson to a four-year/$60 million contract), he'll be the person that has to deal with it if it works out. He's also the person that presumably has the most faith in the methodology of this front office, because it's his front office. 

And yet, it's clear that the way that Huntington has approached the off-season in the past hasn't yielded good results and whether or not Huntington thinks his job is on the line, changing the team's off-season approach can't hurt. I'm guessing that if it's going to be different this winter, it's going to be centered on how the Pirates handle arbitration-eligible players. Joel Hanrahan is due to make about $7 million in arbitration, which is a huge chunk of the Pirates' payroll. Jeff Karstens is due about $5 million, which is a lot of money to pay a starter who's unlikely to throw more than 120 innings. Dejan Kovacevic, in particular, has been saying all fall that Karstens probably won't return. Whether the Pirates should keep Karstens or not is certainly its own discussion, but these are the two guys to keep an eye on when figuring out if the Pirates are going to take a different path this winter. 

Either way, this is less of a prediction and more of something to keep in mind as the hot stove heats up. The Pirates have been pretty quiet so far this winter, but I'd be surprised if that lasts much longer. 

Buried in yesterday's election news, Bob Nutting made an appearance yesterday afternoon to give a vote of semi-confidence to Neal Huntington and his front office for 2013, basically saying that while he was upset by the collapse that he thinks that controversial military-style training needs to be toned down, that he thinks the front office deserves another year to build on the runs to almost-contention in 2011 and 2012. 

This is not surprising. This is not really news, either. The World Series ended ten days ago. The general manager meetings are starting today and the winter meetings are in the offing. If Neal Huntington was going to be fired, it was going to be either during the season or at the very end of it to give the Pirates enough time to prepare for the off-season. If Kyle Stark was going to be fired for running military-style training during fall instructionals, it would've probably been before he was allowed to run military-style training during fall instructionals  this year (it's not like this new). Letting Stark run the instructs and Huntington stay on through the World Series was an implicit vote of confidence and honestly, Nutting probably made his decision a while ago and tried to bury it on election day because he knew that his announcement was likely to bring histrionics from the people that have the most influence on how people think about the Pirates in Pittsburgh. 

You certainly noticed that after powering through the end of a baseball season that almost broke me as a Pirate fan and declaring that I was back as a blogger, that I almost immediately disappeared again. It is not a coincidence that this happened when the Gregory Polanco/Kyle Stark story broke a few weeks ago. 

Here's the reality as I see it: building a case for or against Neal Huntington and his staff is an incredibly complex thing. They were handed an impossible mess that was only going to get worse before it got better. All of their short-term attempts to fix it failed miserably and so everything bottomed out in 2010. Things have been getting better slowly since then, but no one honestly knows if they're going to get to a point where the Pirates are contenders. You can say that the team's slow recovery is due to strong work by the scouting team with their first round picks, or you can say that the reason that it's not happening quickly enough is that they haven't drafted well enough out of the first round. You can credit Kyle Stark and his development staff for molding Starling Marte and Gregory Polanco and Alen Hanson and Luis Heredia into real prospects while developing some useful players from the chaff that Dave Littlefield left lying around, or you can blame him for not developing the mid-round projects handed to him by the scouting team well enough.

All of that is to say this: if I were Frank Coonelly or Bob Nutting making a final decision on Huntington and his staff at the end of 2012, I probably would've fired them and cleaned house. Where I see the Pirates headed in the next five years with this front office is to exactly where Cleveland -- the place that Huntington came from -- has been mired for a while. There will be talent on the Pirates and when things break right, they'll have a chance. It won't always be a good chance, but it'll be a chance. They'll contend for the playoffs sometimes and less occasionally things will really come together and they'll make a serious run at a pennant, but the norm will be the fringe contention that we've seen the last two years. That's not bad. It's better than where the Pirates were five years ago. It's vaguely acceptable.

Who wants "vaguely acceptable" from their favorite sports teams, though? Not me. I don't want the Pirates to be the Indians, I want them to be the Rays. I want them to build a monster of a farm system that steamrolls the NL Central every year, no matter how much money the Cardinals or Cubs spend. I don't want to worry about the team only having until 2018 to contend, because they'll be screwed when Andrew McCutchen finally has to move on. I want a team that can make the playoffs and content for a pennant without everything having to go right. It's possible, even in Major League Baseball in 2012, but I think that sort of thing will take a better front office than the one the Pirates currently have in place. All of that being said, I can accept and acknowledge the accomplishments of Huntington's time as GM and I can respect Bob Nutting and Frank Coonelly's decision to give them another year. I don't think 2013 will be the year the Pirates get over the top, but I'm willing to give Huntington and Smith and Stark one more year to prove themselves. I can honestly understand the argument that they've earned that, even if I'm not certain that I agree with it myself. 

In that vein, my concerns with Kyle Stark's were basically as follows:

1.) Does it work?
2.) Is anyone getting injured?
3.) Is the perception of injury scaring people away from the Pirates? 

The answers to these questions are not at all apparent. Some of the best results that Stark and his team have gotten have been with very young ,very raw international players (Polanco, Hanson, Heredia, Marte), who are the players that are generally present at instructs at the end of the season. Stark's record is certainly not perfect, but I do think that he's generally got more positive hash marks in his column that Smith does. I don't know that military-style training is or isn't responsible for that. I don't think it's really something that's knowable. 

The injury question is much more opaque than it appears, too. It's certainly true that Polanco aggravated an ankle injury this fall, but given that he was injured during the season and cleared to play before West Virginia's 2012 campaign ended, it's never been clear to be if the injury was a result of the training itself or of a player being cleared for something he shouldn't have been cleared for. That's a small but important distinction in this case. In any case, the injury may have been "more serious" the second time around, but it still didn't appear to be a hugely serious injury. The same thing goes for Jameson Taillon's knee injury after the 2010 season. It's not good that he got hurt, but how many young players get injured during regular team's conditioning drills? How bad was the injury, really? I don't really care that Taillon or his agent complained about the style of the training after that, because of course they're going to complain about something like that. Teams don't do any sort of conditioning because the players love doing it. In any case, it's possible that the Pirates' military training is injuring players, but it's impossible to draw that conclusion from the data we've been presented with. 

The final question is nearly impossible to answer, but I'll simply say that it seems like Taillon's injury was something that was whispered about for a while and so my guess would be that Scott Boras knew all about it in 2011 and Josh Bell still signed with the Pirates when he absolutely did not have to. Neither Boras nor Mark Appel ever indicated that Appel's not signing with the Pirates had anything to do with anything except money in July, either. Again, it's possible that the Pirates' reputation with this training is scaring people off, but from the information available I think it's impossible to make that judgment. 

This conversation got hijacked and twisted a long time ago, though, and I ceased to have any desire to participate in it. That's still the truth, but with the World Series over and the GM meetings starting and the winter meetings following, there are actual, important baseball issues to discuss, and so that's what I'm going to be doing.

The reality is this: I think that Nutting's statement yesterday tells us that he's giving Huntington one more year to prove himself. As I said above, I've already made up my mind and I think that he's a competent and unspectacular general manager in a market that needs a spectacular one to be a true competitor in Bud Selig's 21st Century Major League Baseball. I'm hoping I'm wrong, though. If Nutting is willing to give Huntington and his staff one more season, then I'm willing to plant a seed of doubt in my own conclusion and see how this winter and the coming season unfold objectively. As a Pirate fan, is there really any other choice?

The #Pirates announce former Bucco infielder Jay Bell as new Pirates Hitting Coach

— Pittsburgh Pirates (@Pirates) October 31, 2012

A few weeks ago, Deadspin ran an excellent piece on Jay Bell, where Bell looked back on his career and told stories about his time in Pittsburgh and Kansas City and Arizona and New York (I can't link to it now because the hurrican took out Gawker's servers). While reading it, I thought to myself, "Man, it seems like Jay Bell would make an excellent coach or manager." In particular, there was a story about a conversation that Bell had with Chili Davis early in his career about how Davis lost most of his tools and changed his swing to hit for more power later in his career, and how Bell applied that to himself as he got older. I have no idea if Bell will be a good hitting coach or not, but then I have no idea if anyone is really a good hitting coach or not and having read that story about Bell, I'm happy to know that he'll be in the Pirates' dugout. 

The Bucs also announced that Dave Jauss, who was hired as a Major League scout last year, will be in the dugout in 2013 and that Rick Sofield will replace Luis Silverio as first base coach, while Silverio moves into a role with the Latin American scouting crew. Jauss has worked as first base coach and bench coach with a few teams, most notably Grady Little's Red Sox, so this move isn't a huge surprise. Sofield managed the West Virginia Power last year and according to Wikipedia, has been friends with Clint Hurdle since 1975.

If you recall, when Hurdle was hired, much of his coaching staff was comprised of people that already worked for the Pirates. Seems to me that what's happening here is he's being allowed to bring a few more of his guys on board, at least in terms of Jauss and Sofield.

I'm very happy that Andrew McCutchen hit well enough to win this year's National League Gold Glove Award in center field. I hope he continues hitting well enough throughout his career that he can accumulate several more of these prestigious defensive awards. 

(I know I'm being cynical, but that's pretty much how the Gold Gloves are awarded and since the Pirates' collapse will keep McCutchen out of the upper tier of the MVP discussion this year, I suppose I'm happy to see that he won even a dumb award because it means someone else was paying attention to the great season that he had, even if they're recognizing him for an aspect of his game that he's certainly the weakest part of his game by a pretty wide margin.)

Look at the Pittsburgh Pirates as constructed. Be brutally honest with yourself. What are the strengths of this team? What are their weaknesses. What can you say about them for sure entering 2013? 

If we're starting with strengths, we can say for sure that the Pittsburgh Pirates do not need a center fielder. Andrew McCutchen has that job locked down until 2018, and if he stays healthy he'll be one of the premier players in the National League from now until then. His outfield companions are less certain. Travis Snider is talented and fairly young, but he's already hit a few stumbling blocks in his early career and there are plenty of questions about him. Starling Marte is talented and fairly young, but he's still very raw and it's hard to say anything for certain about him. It's easier to make strong statements about Alex Presley and Jose Tabata, but it's harder to say nice things about them. Tabata still might make a decent non-traditional leadoff hitter, but he's got a number of issues on and off the field that need to be worked on. Alex Presley might be a pretty good fourth outfielder for someone, but it's hard to think that relying on him for more than that is wise. 

Let's move into the infield. What do you want to say about Pedro Alvarez if we're talking in absolutes? The power is real. The strikeouts are real. That let him be a pretty good hitter in 2012 and a pretty bad one in 2011. That sort of profile has resulted in a pretty uneven career arc for Mark Reynolds. Counting on a player that strikes out in 30.7% of his plate appearances is tough. And what about Neil Walker? He's a pretty good second baseman. Definitely in the top half of the league, maybe in the top ten. He has thus far improved at the plate and in the field every year, but he's 27 now and that's probably not going to continue much further. He's got back issues. Back issues are scary.

The rest of the infield is tougher. Clint Barmes is not a long-term solution at shortstop. Jordy Mercer is probably not good enough defensively or offensively to justify an every day job, though it's hard to draw a conclusion from the way the Pirates failed to use him in 2012. Brock Holt is a utility player. Shortstop is an issue, both in 2012 and beyond. Garrett Jones and Gaby Sanchez probably make an acceptable but not exceptional first base platoon. Jones can hit consistently if put in the right situations (read: against righties) and Sanchez isn't quite good enough for the job on his own, but can carry the short end of a platoon and shore Jones up defensively. Mike McKenry probably deserves 120 starts in 2013 to determine if he's an every day catcher. He might be, but I'm not sure I'd pencil him in long-term based on 275 plate appearances in 2012. 

This is what that leaves us with in the field: a star center fielder, talent and uncertainty in right and left field as well as third base, a solid every day second baseman, an acceptable first base platoon, a gaping hole at shortstop, and a catching situation that probably (but not definitely) could use an upgrade. Let's move on to the rotation. 

The Pirates' rotation for 2013 currently includes AJ Burnett who is most assuredly AJ Burnett at this point. He's talented and solid enough and getting old. He will keep you in the game every five turns of the rotation and he will win a game by himself once every three or four starts. He's not a horse or an ace or a stopper. He'll be 36 in January, and so he's not a long-term solution. James McDonald is an enigma. The talent is there but the je ne se quoi that separates the talented pitchers from the successful starters is often absent. Sometimes his changeup is good. Sometimes it's not. Sometimes his slider is sharp enough that he looks like Good Young AJ Burnett. Sometimes he's a two-pitch pitcher that can't locate and serves up home runs like crazy and he looks like Yankee AJ Burnett. He's 28, and the clock is ticking on him every completely figuring it out. Jeff Karstens is the living embodiment of that old story about Ray Miller: Work Fast Change Speeds Throw Strikes. That's gotten him further than I ever expected, but I'm not sure it can take him far beyond where he is at the moment, which is a solid mid-rotation guy that probably can't handle more than 150 innings in a season. Wandy Rodriguez is an aging lefty who's replacing swings and misses with craft. He'll likely get by on that for at least two more years and be a solid upper-middle-rotation type of pitcher. Charlie Morton is unknowable, practically an adjective all to himself. Jeff Locke and Justin Wilson are not ready. They might not ever really be ready to start. 

The summation of all of this is easily encapsulated in what could be a description of the 2012 Pirate season. There is talent in Pittsburgh right now -- moreso than just about any point in recent Pirate history -- but that talent on its own is not quite enough to put the Pirates over the top and they need help. Pretend for a moment that all you know about the Pirates is what was written in the prior paragraphs of this story and that they are a small market baseball team hoping that they're hitting the peak of a rebuild. In short, that they're talented and flawed but that they hope that they have a minor league system that will provide enough for them to put them over the top in the immediate-to-near future. Pretend that you know nothing at all about that minor league system. Now answer this question: What would you hope was on the way? 

Removing bias like this is an impossible task, really, but let's try to complete it. I would want pitching above everything else. I always want pitching. It's true that this is because I like thinking about pitching and talking about pitching and writing about pitching. It's also true because the Pirates, as currently comprised, have a rotation that you can talk yourself into but that is almost certain to let you down in the end. I would hope that a real, reliable, powerful bat to couple with Andrew McCutchen in the heart of the order. Walker is more of a complimentary piece and Alvarez and Jones are capable of being that bat, but I'm not certain either should be relied on. I'd hope that bat was a corner infielder, though a corner outfielder would be acceptable (I'm more than willing to give Marte in particular and also Snider a chance, though, so corner outfielder isn't high on this list). I'd want a shortstop, because a 1 WAR shortstop is not acceptable no matter how good his defense is. And finally, I'd be hoping for a catcher to pair with McKenry to create the sort of rotation that Barajas and McKenry didn't last year. That's a long wish list for our theoretical minor league system, but that's probably the order of priority for me: pitching, power bat to round out the lineup, acceptable shortstop, acceptable part-time catcher.

Here's what the Pirates have coming in the immediate-to-near future: pitching. Gerrit Cole is coming. Jameson Taillon is behind him a little ways. Those two, should they reach their potential, have the ability to completely re-make a pitching staff. A rotation similar to the 2012 Pirates' rotation only with a fully-realized Cole and Taillon at the top of it has the ability to drag a team places, kicking and screaming if necessary. Of course, the "fully-realized" part is the huge variable here; if we assume that Cole makes his debut in 2013 and Taillon in 2014, how long does it take to get both of them to start really realizing their potential at a big league level? They still have rough edges as things currently stand. Do we need to wait until 2015 until the rotation really hits full stride, should it hit it at all? 

There's not much else in the upper minors, either. Tony Sanchez kind of might sort of maybe be an acceptable part-time big league catcher, but his bat has dropped off a ton in the last two years and the glowing reports about his defense have slowed up. Maybe that's part of the Pirates' organizational hatred of catchers playing defense and maybe it's not; it's hard for me to say without seeing him play. Matt Curry is a sort of fringe first-base prospect. Right now it looks like he could be a Gaby Sanchez-type player if things break well for him, but even that might be a bit optimistic. There are no shortstops worth discussing ahead of Alen Hanson besides what we've already seen in Chase d'Arnaud, Jordy Mercer, and Brock Holt. Of that group, my hunch is that Mercer has the best chance of being an acceptable shortstop in a younger Clint Barmes kind of way; pretty strong defense and at least some pop, but not really a standout in any way. 

Getting into the lower minors, Hanson and Polanco are obviously very good prospects that have a lot of maturing to do and will almost certainly not arrive in Pittsburgh before 2015. Alex Dickerson has shown some pop and might be able to provide something from the first base position as soon as 2014, if you're the optimistic type. Gift Ngoepe has a great glove at shortstop but can't hit at all; he's still something of an unknown. The danger with these guys is that once you get to 2015-2016 as arrival dates, you're pushing awfully close to the end of the Andrew McCutchen era in Pittsburgh, which is tentatively penciled in for 2018, though it could come a year earlier depending on the option. 

That means this: if you go by what the Pirates have right now and what the Pirates have coming from the upper minors, any hopes for extended contention during the Andrew McCutchen era rest pretty squarely on Cole and Taillon, plus Alvarez and Marte blossoming into star players. Meaning being good and staying good and really contending for a playoff spot from, say, 2013-2017 and not making one final blow-out run at contention in 2017 or 2018.

That doesn't seem so bad, really, since Alvarez has had some big league success and Marte and Cole and Taillon are all talented as hell and we know that McCutchen is capable of being other-wordly for extended stretches. My trouble with it is that it still requires a lot of dreaming, and honestly, at the five year point of any GM's tenure my gut feeling is that we should be past the dreaming stage. It's easy to come up with plenty of reasons and excuses and explanations as to why the top of the Pirates' system isn't overflowing with prospects right now, but the buck has to stop somewhere. The reality is that the Pirates could have Gerrit Cole turn into a Justin Verlander style ace, and that still might not be enough to get them over the top. That's very, very worrisome to me. 

The bottom line here is that the Pirates' system is definitely better off than it was five years ago, but that building a minor league system is both about accumulating talent and working towards a final goal. The Pirates have done at least a decent job of accumulating talent under Neal Huntington and Greg Smith, but after five years on the job there are still a ton of questions about how to make the next five years better in Pittsburgh. That's not good.