Our favorite baseball team, the Pittsburgh Pirates, are in the news once again this past week:
- One of the Pirates NL Central rivals, the fellow small market Milwaukee Brewers, acquired outfielders Christian Yelich via trade from the Marlins and Lorenzo Cain via free agency. Both are all-star caliber players and represent a long term payroll commitment in excess of $120 million from the Brewers. The Brewers, who won 86 games last season, now become legitimate threats to the Cubs and Cardinals in the Central Division. Just like the Pirates are not.
- Pitcher Nik Turley, one of Neal Huntington's dumpster dive acquisitions this off-season, has been hit with an 80 game suspension for PED usage. I now set the Over/Under for the number of games in which Turly will ever appear from the Pirates at One-Half Game.
- Finally, I commend this full column that appeared in today's Post-Gazette, probably written by Joe Starkey, but we can't be sure because of the "byline strike" currently taking place among the PG's columnists and reporters.
- However, if you don't want to read the full column, allow me to cut and paste this verbatim response from Huntington to a question about the Pirates' recent trades posed by talk show hosts on The Fan this past week. Honest-to-God, you just can't make up bullshit like this:
“Well, the Gerrit Cole trade, our internal projection model — and my guess is most of the external projection models — really wouldn’t change that much. We add Colin Moran, a left-handed-hitting third baseman with developing power … and we add what we believe is going to be a good major league starting pitcher in (Joe) Musgrove, and we add a good reliever in Michael Feliz, who, again, his metrics and his indicators are better than his surface ERA. It reminds us of guys we’ve had a lot of success with here, that have quality stuff, but the results are less than the indicators, and then eventually the indicators catch up to the actual, because stuff plays and strikeouts play.
“So that trade, the projection models, we actually got a little bit better in some, a little bit worse in others, but it did not have a strong impact on our projected win total, which is not good enough to be in the postseason as we sit here today but on the edge …
“With only replacing Andrew, or replacing Andrew, with a reliever, potentially, that one does cost us wins in the projection model. It still leaves us on the outside looking in at the projection model of the postseason. It’s actually pretty close to where we were in ’13, ’14, ’15 and actually worse than where we were projected to be in ’16 and ’17. So what that means is we’ve added some variability with our veteran players that we’re anticipating bouncing back and our young players that we’re anticipating getting better. They’re not all going to do that, but we believe, much like like ’13, ’14 and ’15, we have some things go in our direction, we can do what the Twins and Brewers did a year ago. We can do what the Pirates did in ’13 and find ourselves in a playoff hunt and do that sooner than later.
“So it’s not really an either-or. It wasn’t, ‘We’re out of it with no chance regardless,’ and it wasn’t it eliminated our playoff odds. They stayed pretty much the same with those two trades, the second trade knocking us back a little bit, yes.”
- Makes perfect sense, doesn't it? As a Pirates fan, this makes me fell a LOT better about the upcoming season. How about you?
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