I really like Charlie’s piece today on Matt Hague and Josh Harrison being bit players no matter what they do in camp this spring. I joked yesterday that I wanted to make a Venn Diagram of people that love Matt Hague and people that hated Steve Pearce, because I suspect that they’re many of the same people even though Hague and Pearce seem, to me, to be very similar players. I’m perfectly fine with either, or both, of these guys making the Opening Day roster, but if either one of them ends up with more than a couple hundre plate appearances, it’s more likely than not that something went wrong for the Pirates this year.
At Pirates Prospects, Tim Williams had a great article on Tim Alderson yesterday. It casts some light on how the Pirates handle long-tossing among their pitching prospects and should go a ways towards dispelling the myth that the Pirates shoehorn all of their pitching prospects into a one-size-fits-all throwing program.
As tweeted out by everyone, Clint Hurdle named Erik Bedard his Opening Day starter and said that the rotation will be Bedard, Karstens, McDonald, Correia, and that they’ll decide on a fifth starter when they need one based on Charlie Morton’s health. I think Bedard’s the right choice here, though you could’ve made a case for Karstens.
As I do every spring, I wrote a fantasy baseball preview of the Pirates for Razzball. You should check it out. And yes, I am going to be calling Erik Bedard The French-Canadian Wheelchair Assassin this year, even though I know he’s from Ontario and not Quebec.
