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
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 1/9/2015
pirates, kang move close to a deal. expected to be for 4 years. http://t.co/emkkgVTgGa — Jon Heyman (@JonHeyman) January 9, 2015
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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0 comments by Pat Lackey on 1/8/2015
One of the big problems of the non-stop news cycle that we tend to allow to consume ourselves is that it becomes literally impossible to give ourselves enough distance to allow for some context. The wild card game bleeds into the early off-season and that bleeds into the winter meetings and suddenly we’re in January, […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 1/6/2015
I don’t really have much time at all for Hall of Fame outrage these days and I don’t want to spend much time spilling digital ink over whether or not PED users belong in the Hall of Fame or not, because I feel like I’ve done that a million times and I’m as tired of […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 12/22/2014
About halfway in between North Carolina and Hermitage today, I started seeing some tweets come through that the Pirates won the bidding for Jung-ho Kang, a shortstop from the Korean Baseball Organization. I’ve sort of kept one eye on the whole story of his posting process through the Twitter account of Dan at MyKBO, but it […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 12/19/2014
The Pirates announced this afternoon that they signed Corey Hart to a one year/$2.5 million deal and DFA’d Preston Guilmet, who I can tell you with 70% certainty was a guy that they claimed from, I think, the Orioles at some point since the season ended. I suppose the assumption here is that he’ll be […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 12/18/2014
The Royals announced this afternoon that they’ve signed Kris Medlen to a two-year deal worth $8.5 million with a mutual third-year option for $10 million. That’s such a reasonable deal and Medlen is such a good bounce back candidate that I’m finding myself pretty disappointed that the Pirates were seemingly not interested in Medlen at […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 12/17/2014
Ray Searage helped make Edinson Volquez a rich man:
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 12/13/2014
We've announced our NEW camouflage alternate jersey which will be worn on Thurs home games in 2015 #PirateFest pic.twitter.com/erWMxDKm3o — Pirates (@Pirates) December 13, 2014
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 12/12/2014
I will admit to knowing almost nothing about Buddy Borden, other than that he was a 2013 draft pick of the Pirates. Borden was, in fact, the Pirates seventh round pick out of UNLV in 2013, and so the first thing that I noticed about him is that even though he was a college player […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey
The winter meetings ended in an insane flurry starting at or around the time Pirates finished the Antonio Bastardo trade on Wednesday. The Dodgers and Marlins both went completely nuts remaking their rosters, the Reds traded away 40% of their rotation (on the bright side they kept Mike Leake, but on the bad side they also […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey on 12/10/2014
The final detail of the Pirates trade with the Phillies for Antonio Bastardo is in place, as
0 comments by Pat Lackey
Obviously we don’t know much else; I’ll update when a deal is official. I will say that Bastardo is only a year away from free agency, so I’d be pretty shocked to see the Pirates give much up for him. There were some “Travis Snider for Brian Matusz” rumblings earlier today, but Snider feels like […]
0 comments by Pat Lackey
I did not think that Francisco Liriano was going to be a Pirate in 2015. I’ve written this and said this a few times, but I’ll reiterate it one more time in my mea culpa: Liriano is a good pitcher. He’s got his flaws, sure, but in two years with the Pirates he’s given them […]
I’ve been grading for like six hours now and my brain feels like chewed bubblegum, so I’m going to save the analysis for after dinner, but the Pirates re-signed Francisco Liriano to a three-year deal with $39 million this afternoon (first report here, MLB Trade Rumors round-up here).
Such is the eternal state of the Pittsburgh Pirates that I can tell you that a 3-year/$39 million deal is the largest free-agent deal in team history without even having to check (I’m sure I’m not the first or only person to make that observation today), but hey, every bar has to be raised from somewhere.
Anyway, like I said, more later.
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0 comments by Pat Lackey on 12/9/2014
Here is a full and complete list of things the Pirates did at the Winter Meetings today (THAT WE KNOW ABOUT): Claimed Josh Lindblom and ditched some guy that you and I both forgot they had claimed at some point in the last five months. My Josh Lindblom scouting report: he is a human being. […]
