Welcome, Daniel Moskos

Daniel Moskos made his major league debut for the Pirates last night with one scoreless, 14 pitch, three-up-three-down inning of relief in the Bucs 4-1 loss to the Rockies last night. Here's hoping that this will be the beginning of a long and productive big league career for Moskos.

Unfortunately, Moskos, through absolutely no fault of his own, will always be a symbol of the inept Dave Littlefield Regime as Pirates' GM as well as a symbol of the long established and well known penury of the Pirates Management. You will all recall that in 2007, the Pirates had the 4th overall pick in the Entry Draft that year, and everyone speculated that the Bucs would use that pick to select catcher Matt Weiters. The Pirates bypassed Weiters, who they knew would command a big signing bonus, and went for Moskos, who signed very quickly and, relatively speaking, cheaply. Littlefield went on to say that the Pirates had rated Moskos very highly when no other pre-draft source had even rated him as a top ten pitcher in the draft, much less the #4 overall pick. Littlefield was pretty much ridiculed over the entire Moskos-over-Weiters selection.

The Orioles, as most of you know, snapped up Weiters with the next pick, and he made it to Baltimore in 2009 where he has been ever since.

Another way to look at the Moskos selection is to see it as the beginning of the end of Dave Littlefield, and the marking of a change in Pirates philosophy. Before the 2007 season ended, Littlefield was fired, Bob Nutting hired Frank Coonelly as team president, and shortly after the season, Coonelly hired Neal Huntington as GM. The new management team's goal, as we have been told over and over, was to spend money on the draft and build from the ground up. The team has not shied away from drafting the big name prospects (Alavarez, Taillon) and spending "above slot" to sign the other players that they did draft. This has produced, according to Huntington, complete success on every level except for that pesky little area of "wins and losses on the major league level." Oh well.

In case you are curious, the players selected ahead of Moskos and Weiters that year were: 1. David Price, Rays. 2. Matt Moustakas, Royals. 3. Josh Vitters, Cubs. Other players of note in that first round were 2010 World Series hero Madison Bumgarner at #10, the Braves' Jason Heyward at #14, and the Tigers' Rick Porcello at #23. Another interesting selection was #22 pick Tim Alderson by the Giants, who came to the Pirates in the Freddy Sanchez trade and who now toils in the Pirates minor league system.

On the other hand, maybe Littlefield wasn't so stupid. Seventeen pitchers were taken in that first round of 2007, and, without doing any real in depth research, I can say that only Price, Bumgarner, and Porcello have had any impact in the majors thus far. If any of the 13 pitchers other than these three and Moskos have made it to the Bigs, their impact has been insignificant as yet.

As I have said before, there is no more inexact science than scouting for major league baseball talent. It may well be that when we look back on the 2007 entry draft in ten or fifteen years, the very best player may turn out to be some guy who was selected in the 22nd round.