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. 

I'm working on Part 2 of WHYGAVS prospect week as we speak and it'll be done tonight/tomorrow morning. Until then, tide yourself over with this great Baseball Prospectus guest piece by Jorge Arangure about why Dominican players have trouble drawing walks in the big leagues. The story traces the journey of the Indians' Carlos Santana, but could be easily applied to a lot of young Dominican players. Like Starling Marte, for example. 

"Manny Machado is awesome." 

That's the tweet I sent out during the Yankees/Orioles series after the 20-year old infielder hit his first playoff home run. There was no deeper meaning to it than the words I typed. The reason I like watching the playoffs so much is to see players I don't regularly watch for all of my regular-season Pirate-watching. Machado was high on the list because he's such an exciting prospect and because he plays for the Orioles, who I can never ever watch through Bud Selig's Blackout Curtain Of Doom. Machado didn't have a great series against the Yankees, but he came up with a couple of big hits and it's always cool to see young players do things like that. 

I closed the computer down shortly after I sent that tweet out and went out for a bit. When I came home, I realized that a bunch of Pirate fans had responded to it with some pretty heavy bitterness that Machado was an Oriole and not a Pirate. If you recall, the Pirates had more or less narrowed their choice with the #2 pick in the 2010 draft down to Machado and James Taillon; for a while it seemed like they were leaning Machado, then Taillon emerged as the pick a few days before the draft. At the time, no one had much criticism for the Pirates. The general consensus was that both players were stars in the making, that Machado was going to be a heck of a hitter as a third baseman or shortstop and that Taillon was one of the best right-handed high school pitchers in the recent history of the draft. Really, there's still not much criticism for the pick. Machado entered 2012 as Baseball America's #11 prospect, Taillon came in at #14. Machado had a pretty good year at Double-A and earned his promotion because the Orioles needed him for a playoff run. Taillon had an uneven-but-solid year with High-A Bradenton, then made a few brilliant starts with Double-A Altoona to end 2012. Taillon will probably be somewhere in the 10-20 range in this year's Baseball America list. Machado no longer has prospect status, but would probably be somewhere in the top ten if he did. 

Still, I thought on this some and I realized that a very similar situation played out in the 2011 draft, too. The Pirates looked in on a bunch of players with the first overall pick in that draft and seemed to strongly consider a few of them, including Dylan Bundy, before finally deciding on Gerrit Cole with that pick. The Orioles, picking three spots after the Pirates at #4, took Bundy. Cole is still a great prospect; he's usually listed by prospect-watchers as one of a handful of minor leaguers with the talent and build and makeup to become the elusive "true ace." He's still got some rough edges and that lead to a few ugly performances in big spots in 2012, but he breezed through High-A and Double-A and will, without any unforseen setbacks, probably be in the Pirates' rotation by sometime around the All-Star Break in 2013. 

Bundy, of course, has been even a little bit better than that. He started in Single-A, where he struck out 40 hitters and walked two and gave up five hits and no earned runs in 30 innings, jumped to High-A where he was flat-out dominant, made three fairly solid Double-A starts, and made two appearances out of the Orioles' bullpen down the stretch. When the prospect lists come out this winter, he'll probably be ahead of Cole for the second year in a row (Bundy was #10 and Cole was #12 at BA last year; Bundy will be close to #1 this year, Cole will probably be in the 5-10 range). 

It is way too early to be making value judgments on Machado vs. Taillon or Cole vs. Bundy; Machado has 202 big league plate appearances and Bundy has 1 2/3 big league innings. Machado turned 20 in July, Bundy turns 20 in November, Cole just turned 22 in September, and Taillon will be 21 in November. All of these players are young and talented and as of today, they all have the world at their fingertips. It's more than fair to argue that Machado and Bundy are better prospects right now, but it's not nearly as easy to argue that they're certain to have better careers than Taillon or Cole. 

This is, in some regards, pretty much the exact same thing as the criticisms that are being leveled at the Pirates drafting and prospect development this winter. The Pirates' farm system is much, much better now than it was in 2007. This is not up for debate. When Baseball America listed their top prospects in every league, the Pirates placed 14 players on the various lists, which was as many as any team in baseball. When Baseball America releases their top 100 this winter, the Pirates will have Cole and Taillon and Alen Hanson and Gregory Polanco and Luis Heredia all on the list. Starling Marte flew up the mid-season list before being called up and exhausting his eligibility for the 2013 list. Josh Bell will be able to get himself back on the list with a strong year in 2013. With teams in the Dominican Summer League and Gulf Coast League winning their leagues, there's plenty of reason to hope that there are more Polancos and Hansons on the way. The Pirates do not have the best system in baseball and they do still have some top-heaviness, but they have some excellent, excellent prospects that are making their way closer and closer to Pittsburgh. 

And still, there's a definite perception that the Pirates' system isn't good enough and I don't think that criticism is necessarily undeserved. It's true that the Pirates have spent more on the draft than anyone since 2008, and that it seems like their best minor league prospects are increasingly coming from Latin America. It's true that their "projectible high school pitcher" strategy is seeming more and more like a failure, and it's become increasingly clear that Tony Sanchez was a really bad pick at #4 overall in 2009. Still, it's not at all easy to know where to point the finger for this. We can criticize Greg Smith and the scouting team for poor drafting, but they still managed to pick two of the top 15 or 20 current prospects in Taillon and Cole, plus Pedro Alvarez, plus a wild card in Josh Bell. It's easy to blame them for Sanchez, but the player drafted right before Sanchez (Donovan Tate) hasn't reached the Majors, nor have the two picked right behind him (Zack Wheeler and Matthew Hobgood). Most of that first round now looks like a vast wasteland, except for Stephen Strasburg (who went before the Pirates picked) and Mike Trout (who 21 other teams passed on). 

So what about development? It's easy to point the finger at Kyle Stark's crew because they're obviously unpopular with a lot of people and their methods are unconventional. It sure seems like they haven't done a great job developing the Zack Von Rosenbergs and Zack Dodsons and Trent Stevensons to this point, but it's also true that someone helped turn Rudy Owens from an also-ran into a fringe big league prospect and that Nick Kingham and Clayton Holmes are both worth watching at this point and that someone has done something with Luis Heredia. Since Heredia's pitched almost exclusively in America since his signing, you can't give credit for his 2012 success to the international staff. Both Hanson and Gregory Polanco, along with Starling Marte, blossomed from toolsy guys into legitimate prospects after coming to the Pirates' American facilities. Someone put finishing touches on Andrew McCutchen and Neil Walker, both of whom you could argue have become better pros than their minor league careers at the time of Huntington's hiring might have suggested. 

If it seems like I'm going out of my way to defend Huntington and Stark and Smith, I'm not. I'm pointing out that there are valid criticisms and that all of those criticisms have valid defenses. Of course every scouting department that passed on Mike Trout needs to ask themselves why they didn't see what the Angels saw in Trout. Trout went from the 85th best prospect before 2010 to the 2nd best prospect before 2011. It wasn't even a slow process; he started playing and was awesome. Of course the Pirates' scouts need to ask themselves if the upper-middle rounds are best spent drafting gangly projectable pitchers when they chose those sorts of players over both Brandon Belt and Paul Goldschmidt in 2009 (Nathan Baker over Belt in the fifth and Colton Cain over Goldschmidt in the ninth). And of course the development team needs to ask themselves why their "projectable" pitching projects don't seem to be progressing and why it took Pedro Alvarez so long to find a groove and Sanchez has crashed and burned and why their employees are so willing to sell their bosses out in the press at the drop of a hat, apparently. 

The larger point is that you can't judge a development team or a scouting team or a draft class or a minor league system by each prospect that makes it or doesn't make it. The Pirates spent a ton of money from 2008-2011 on their drafts, sure, but they also didn't have a lot of high picks in those drafts and so, to some extent, that money was spent on improving their fishing expeditions after the first couple of rounds. It doesn't look like that's born a ton of fruit, but it's also still a little early to say given the nature of all of those picks. Some of what the Pirates have done since the start of the 2008 season has worked and some of it hasn't. That's the nature of scouting and development, even for the best teams. The Pirates need to be constantly evaluating their process. it's fair for us as fans, bloggers, reporters, analysts, what have you, to be asking questions about these methods, but I'm not sure this is the sort of thing that we can really, truly evaluate while we're in the middle of it and it'll be much easier to judge when we're five years out from now.  

Of course, this is what leads into the big question that I think occasionally gets lost for the trees when we squabble over the smaller questions or focus on one data point in a set of thousands. The Pirates' system is better than it was in 2007 and I don't think that's worth debating. Most prospect-watchers would probably call it a good system at this point, though probably not a great one. No one anywhere argues that there's some real top-notch talent in the Pirates' minor leagues. The quality of the Pirates' system may or may not match the level of spending that's been done in recent years; this is certainly a topic worth discussing. The bigger question for me, though, is if the Pirates' system is adequate to put the current Pirate team over the top during the Andrew McCutchen era in Pittsburgh. In short, the system is better, but much of that talent is very young and very far away from Pittsburgh. Does the talent that will help the Pirates in the immediate future (Taillon, Cole, Mercer, Holt, Sanchez, Locke, Wilson, Black, Welker, etc.) propel the Pirates from fringe contender to real contender in the next year or two or three? If the answer is yes, the follow-up is "Well, are you absolutely sure?" and if the answer is no, the follow-up is "Well, how do we get there?"

And that's the question that I'll try to look at in more depth tomorrow. 

Over the weekend and into Monday, stories about Game Seven of the 1992 NLCS were inescapable. This is logical. It's one of the most memorable games in recent baseball history, and Sunday was the 20th anniversary of it. We as Pirate fans have a visceral reaction to this kind of thing, but the reality is that that game embodies everything that people love about post-season baseball and the memory of it is only enhanced by the complete destruction of the Pittsburgh Pirates as a respectable baseball entity that followed it. It is, essentially, the game that broke the Pirates and launched the Atlanta Braves into a different stratosphere. Of course people were going to mark the anniversary. 

I haven't read many of those remembrances. I've talked and written about the game ad nauseum. My own Game Seven story was immortalized for the whole world to read at Grantland this summer in what was supposed to be the closing act of an exorcism, and yet it's all still relevant in October. I had no intention of wallowing in the misery of that game again. 

Baseball, however, rarely lets us forget. Last night, as I prepared for my committee meeting tomorrow, I watched the Tigers and Yankees. The Leyland-managed Tigers built a 2-0 lead through eight innings on the back of a gutty performance by their ace. Justin Verlander didn't quite have his best stuff last night -- his breaking pitches weren't as sharp as they normally are and he wasn't missing bats the way that he normally does. That didn't matter, because he's Justin Verlander and because he's Justin Verlander the Yankees had two hits and no runs through eight innings. He entered the ninth having racked up quite a pitch count, though, and it was apparent early in the ninth inning that even though his fastball was hitting 99 mph that he was gassed. 

Stop me if you've heard all of this before. 

Earlier this week, Jim Leyland gave a press conference announcing that Jose Valverde was going to be removed from the closer's role indefinitely given his struggles in the early portion of these playoffs. If you haven't been watching, Valverde rapidly turned a 3-1 lead in the bottom of the ninth of Game Four of the ALDS into a 4-3 loss. Three days later, he coughed up a 4-0 lead to the Yankees in Game One of the ALCS. The Tigers still won the game, but it took 14 innings and what should've been an easy win turned into a bullpen-draining marathon. 

The result of the two meltdowns was a weird press conference where Leyland both defended traditional closer usage and made a compelling case against it, announcing that he'd be abandoning it for the playoffs. It's debateable whether or not Leyland's doing this (he's more or less used Phil Coke as a closer in the two games since then but in both games Coke initially entered because the Yankees had lefties due up), but the larger point is that Leyland's abadoned his struggling closer, rather than sticking blindly with him. 

Let's go back to last night. 

Verlander gave up a home run to the punchless Eduardo Nunez on a hanging breaking ball. Leyland left him in face Brett Gardner and it took Verlander eight pitches to put Gardner away. His pitch count hit 132. Leyland could've left his struggling starter in a batter too long. He could've gone out and put his unreliable closer in the game. In a situation with very little room for error, a mistake would've let the Yankees cut the Tigers' series lead to 2-1 with CC Sabathia waiting in the wings for Game Four. Leyland made neither mistake this time around, and now he's on the verge of his third World Series. 

This is the sort of thing that occasionally strikes me. It's been 20 years since the Pirates were last relevant. In the 20 years since then, Jim Leyland left Pittsburgh. He went to Florida, then to Colorado. He took six years off, then came back to manage in Detroit. This is going to be his third World Series in a timespan in which the Pirates have had zero winning seasons. Put simply, Jim Leyland has has a full career since he left Pittsburgh, and the Pirates have barely budged. 

I'm not one of those Pirate fans that spends time wishing Leyland were back with the Pirates (show me a team that needs a new manager and I'll show you a team that's got problems that run much deeper than the manager), but I do root for Leyland.  Leyland's closely associated with his mentor Tony La Russa and La Russa's one of my least favorite people in recent baseball history, but for me Leyland's qualities come from all of the ways he's different than La Russa. Leyland's cracks and flaws have always been on display for the world. He smokes in the dugout. He cries all the time. At the end of a terrible two-season stretch in 1998 and 1999 in Florida and Colorado, he looked like he was two decades older than his 54 years. 

I'd never blame even the closest post-season loss on a manager; it's easy to pin That Loss on Leyland for leaving Drabek in too long or going to Belinda or leaving Belinda in for too long, but it's easier to pin it on Jose Lind for his error or for the team simply not executing at the level they should've in a seven game series. Even with Leyland's mistakes in the ninth inning of Game Seven, the Pirates should've won that series. The same would've been true if the Tigers had lost last night with Verlander or Valverde on the mound. They didn't, though, because Leyland's a very different manager in 2012 than he was in 1992. He's moved on, even if we Pirate fans haven't been able to. 

Sorry for the lack of posting this week; I had to give lab meeting this week and I have a committee meeting next week and that's resulted in a lot of time in lab and a lot of time trying to piece things together. When you throw in a lot of time watching playoff baseball, well, there's just not much time left for anything else. 

The good news is that I did have time to talk to CocktailsFor2 and the Rumbunter Podcast on Monday evening, to talk about the Pirates both with Cocktails and SoxDetox and to listen in on the Clint Hurdle interview that's obviously the selling point for the whole thing. There's a lot of good stuff there, and so if you've got the time I'd recommend checking it out. If you're unfamiliar with SoxDetox, he's a converted Red Sox fan that brings a pretty interesting take to being a Pirate fan; there's a huge contrast between the way that he and I reacted to the end of the season. Perspective is good. 

The Hurdle interview is interesting, too, if only to give you some insight into what happens at the end of the season for these guys. As soon as the season ended, Hurdle went to Bradenton to work with the young guys for fall instructionals and once that's done, he's headed into meetings with the front office to figure out how to plan for the off-season. During spring training 2011, I spent a day at Pirate City when the Pirates had a day off in their spring training schedule. As a result, Hurdle was at minor league camp for the day's scrimmages and I was really impressed by how involved he was. He was constantly moving, working with different players, standing up in the crow's nest talking to coaches, checking in on everything. It's one of those things that managers do outside of in-game management that you'd never see unless you looked for it. Hurdle strikes me as the sort manager that's really good at these things, which is why I'm often willing to overlook some of his maddening in-game decisions (at least, ones that I think are pretty common among baseball managers).

Also -- if you were thinking that Frank Coonelly's "vote of confidence" for Neal Huntington and company didn't represent ownership's view, I think that this is a pretty good indication that it does. The Pirates are in Florida and they're preparing for the winter. If they were planning on changing courses, Neal Huntington/his staff/Clint Hurdle would all be out already, because there's a limited amount of time to find replacements before the real off-season starts when the World Series ends. Huntington and his guys have one more year. 

In any case, I think I'm going to use next week to do minor league writeups. That means prospect rankings, discussion of where the system is and where it's headed, etc. I'll do my best to get ahead on some of this stuff over the weekend so that next week won't be so light on content.