0 comments by Pat Lackey on 1/26/2015
Neil Walker is a perfect storm. He, perhaps first and foremost, a wonderful story. He was drafted out of high school by his hometown team as a catcher in 2004, but he wasn’t all that well suited to the position and injuries eventually forced him to third base. In 2007, he moved to third base. […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 1/23/2015
This is an unpopular opinion, but I think there’s a decent chance that Pedro Alvarez will be the exact first baseman the Pirates need him to be in 2015. This is buried well underneath the throwing problems, the position change, the power outage, and the foot injury, but in 2014, Pedro Alvarez finally did the […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 1/22/2015
The problem with the question, “How do you replace Russell Martin?” is that it’s a trick question. If we define “Russell Martin” as a very strong defensive catcher with an emphasis on pitch-framing that has decent on-base abilities (at least as it comes to walk-percentage) and decent pop for the position, well, I think the Pirates […]
The key passage from Miles Wray’s article:
But I’d like to propose that, at least when it comes to fielding, Kang and the Pirates are a wonderful fit for one another, defensively speaking.
I say this because Neal Huntington and his analytics team have been pulling off a wonderful trick for the last three years: in each season, the Pirates have put together an above-average defensive BABIP despite having a roster full of mostly-below-average defensive players.
I’d recommend checking the whole thing out because there are a lot of interesting thoughts, but yeah, I think that that’s the value of the Pirates’ shifting: hiding sub-par defenders that can hit (Neil Walker, Pedro Alvarez in 2012 and 2013) inside of a functional defense that’s good at turning balls in play into outs. In that regard, the Pirates taking a risk on Kang makes a ton of sense, because they might be able to hide him at a premium defensive position better than other teams.
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0 comments by Pat Lackey on 1/21/2015
Honestly, Vance Worley is one of the pitchers that I found the most interesting as last year wore on, and he’s probably going to get the shortest post in this whole series. The reason is that Jeff Sullivan at FanGraphs more or less did my work for me here, with his post from late last […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 1/20/2015
I have probably written more words about Charlie Morton than any other Pirate pitcher of the last five years, and so I’m a little embarrassed to say that it’s probably easy enough to preview Morton’s 2015 season thusly: if he’s healthy, he’ll be fine, but it’s always hard to say if Charlie Morton will be […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 1/16/2015
0 comments by Pat Lackey
The Pirates officially announced this morning that they’ve agreed to a four-year deal with Jung-ho Kang with the club holding a fifth year option for 2019.
0 comments by Pat Lackey
If you eliminate all of the drama surrounding AJ Burnett’s departure from the Pirates last winter, we’re left with a few important facts. AJ Burnett is 38 years old, coming off of a relatively bad season in which he pitched with a sports hernia and saw his strikeouts go down with his velocity while his […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 1/15/2015
This shouldn’t be surprising, but I’m not a big fan of anecdotal analysis like, “Francisco Liriano is only good every other year.” It works nice as a descriptive device, but it doesn’t give us much actual understanding about Francisco Liriano. In Liriano’s case, the pattern doesn’t even hold true: Liriano was excellent in 2006, decent in 2008, […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 1/13/2015
This is Gerrit Cole’s traditional box score in eleven starts spread out over two Septembers: 71 1/3 IP, 60 H, 23 R, 22 ER, 16 BB, 84 K, 3 HR Those numbers represent the ideal Gerrit Cole, the snarling bastard that can throw four pitches that look the same out of his hand, but can […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey
I have a problem during the off-season. I have a vanishing amount of time to blog in, and whenever I don’t write anything for a couple of days, I tend to try to make up for it by writing something gargantuan, which then exceeds the scope of what I can contain within the small amount […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 1/12/2015
We learned last week that the Pirates were close to a deal with Korean infielder Jung-ho Kang, and we got a little bit more confirmation of that last night when
pirates, kang move close to a deal. expected to be for 4 years. http://t.co/emkkgVTgGa
— Jon Heyman (@JonHeymanCBS) January 9, 2015
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Charlie’s latest post looks at the odd shape of this off-season and asks about something that I’ve been struggling with for the better part of the last year: Once you have a team good enough to make the playoffs, what’s the value in making them better than that?
Sam [Miller] also suggests another factor, though — teams have realized there’s a lot of value in just getting to the playoffs and letting the chips fall where they may. As you might have heard before, the playoffs are a lottery. A slightly weighted lottery, maybe, but a lottery nonetheless. Billy Beane famously said over a decade ago that his “**** doesn’t work in the playoffs,” and if we needed a reminder, there was Beane last summer acquiring Jon Lester and Jeff Samardzija down the stretch and getting bounced in the Wild Card game, or the Tigers acquiring David Price and getting eliminated a round later.
Probably unsurprisingly, I go back and forth between this all the time. Lose the Wild Card Game at least in part because your third best starter is Edinson Volquez? Well then just being good isn’t good enough! But watch a decent Giant team and a mediocre Royal team play in the World Series? Well, then, dammit, getting to the playoffs is the only priority because anything can happen from there!
Honestly, every question about the Pirates at this point (unless you want to get way into the financial woods) is just a variation on this one. It’s pretty much all I think about over the off-season, and I still have no clue how to answer it.
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