0 comments by Pat Lackey on 2/10/2015
In his two seasons as a Pirate, Mark Melancon has this line: 142 IP, 111 H, 30 R, 26 ER, 19 BB, 141 K, 3 HR This is so good that it’s borderline comical. Three home runs and 19 walks in 142 innings? Out of every pitcher in baseball that’s thrown at least 100 innings […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 2/9/2015
When I’m trying to figure out what a young or an unproven player will do in a coming season, most of the time I’ll try to find some sort of statistical signifier that points in one direction or another: Josh Harrison’s xBABIP, Gerrit Cole’s short stretches of dominance, etc. For Gregory Polanco, the argument is […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 2/6/2015
In Charlie Wilmoth’s Dry Land (a great read to prep yourself for spring training if you didn’t read it last year!), he’s got an interview with former Indianapolis Indians’ play-by-play guy Scott McCauley where Scott talks about how Pirate fans would obsess over minor league players in a way that sort of befuddled every other minor league broadcaster that he’d ever […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 2/5/2015
Besides Gerrit Cole, the two players that will have the most bearing on whether the 2015 Pirates are a good team or a great team are most likely their corner outfielders. Just like you can track the club’s mad dash in August and September to the NL’s second wild card with Gerrit Cole’s return from the disabled […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 2/4/2015
Spring training is quickly approaching with the Super Bowl behind us, but the Pirates are not done making minor roster moves to get ready for the coming season. Last night they picked up Steve Lombardozzi from the Orioles for cash in move unrelated to the Travis Snider trade, and today
0 comments by Pat Lackey
I’m not sure any player validates the whole Neal Huntington front office approach quite as much as Jordy Mercer. That seems like a crazy place to start, so bear with me. Mercer was a third-round pick in 2008, drafted one round after Chase d’Arnaud (correction: Mercer was drafted one round before d’Arnaud, but I’ll hold to […]
One of the first questions that I often get about WHYGAVS is “Where did the name Where Have You Gone, Andy Van Slyke? come from?” When I’m in a particularly eloquent mood, I tend to answer that the name just kind of popped into my head when I decided to start a Pirate blog, and that I liked it because of the way that it (to me, at least) perfectly evokes the idea that nothing can ever be quite like watching sports and having a favorite player when you’re five or six or seven or eight years old. I don’t know if that’s exactly what I was thinking when I decided to become a 20-year old baseball blogger, but that’s certainly what it all means to me now that I’m ten years older.
In that vein, Ted Anthony wrote this wonderful story at Medium about his eight-year old son, his son’s love of Travis Snider, and the heartbreak that comes from a trade that looks minor to pretty much everybody else. It’s easy to evaluate a trade from a financial ledger or a sabermetric spreadsheet, but it’s much tougher to think about it as someone’s favorite player being sent away or as someone’s connection to home being severed just a little bit more. In the end, though, are any of us baseball fans without our own personal Travis Sniders? Anyway, go read the whole piece.
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0 comments by Pat Lackey on 1/28/2015
The Pirates and Orioles agreed on a trade to send Travis Snider to Baltimore tonight in exchange for minor league lefty Stephen Tarpley and a player to be named later. On its face, this seems like a bit of a strange move for a contender to make: even if you assume that Gregory Polanco was […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 1/27/2015
Source: Travis Snider deal to Baltimore believed to be done. Class A pitcher Stephen Tarpley one of the prospects going to the Pirates. — Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) January 28, 2015
Nothing is done yet, but from Dan Connolly at the Baltimore Sun:
The Orioles have rekindled their trade talks with the Pittsburgh Pirates to acquire outfielder Travis Snider and are discussing a deal that would send one or two minor leaguers to Pittsburgh, according to industry sources.
[…]
Neither minor leaguer being discussed is thought to be on the Orioles’ 40-man roster, but at least one — and possibly both — is a pitcher.
Steven Brault), so you should follow him for the latest news. I don’t really want to spend a ton of time speculating beyond noting that while Snider was a very useful player down the stretch last year, the Pirates have some redundancy in the left-handed corner outfielder department with Gregory Polanco and Andrew Lambo. If there is a trade, I’d rather hold off on judgment until we’re sure who’s in it.
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0 comments by Pat Lackey
Josh Harrison is why we watch sports. In June of 2013, I saw him playing in a Triple-A game in Durham. He played well enough that I came back from the game thinking to myself, “Yeah, I think he’s probably ready to take Brandon Inge’s spot as a utility player.” In early July of 2014, […]
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 […]
