Pirates Preview (Part I)

Warm weather, fielding ground balls, taking batting practice, playing long toss…must mean Spring Training is here. The 2010 Pittsburgh Pirates began full team workouts Tuesday in Bradenton, FL in hopes of ending their streak of 17 consecutive losing seasons. The Pirates will pin their hopes on a group of young guys in the field, a bunch of old guys in the bullpen, and a sprinkle of veterans in the middle of the rotation. Add these altogether and unfortunately for Pirates fans, the recipe adds up to an 18th consecutive losing season.

I have broken up my initial preview to the season into two parts. Part I today will focus on pitching and Part II tomorrow will focus on the line-up and overall forecast for the season.

Baseball begins and ends with pitching and the guys that are going to throw the most innings are the starting rotation. The Pirates have four starters locked into their rotation with Paul Maholm, Zach Duke, Ross Ohlendorf and Charlie Morton. The 5th rotation spot looks to be a battle between Kevin Hart and Daniel McCutchen and possibly a dose of Brad Lincoln, the former first round draft choice who could be a mid-season call-up. I fully expect to see the 5th rotation spot taken by Kevin Hart out of spring as the Pirates want to see what they have in the 27-year-old hard throwing righty. The Pirates (as most people around baseball feel) believe that Hart could thrive in a bullpen role but first want to find out what they have in him as a starter and rightfully so. Most teams need 7-10 starters to go through a full season however, so no matter who wins the fifth spot out of spring we can expect to see plenty of the seven aforementioned names and probably a few spot starts from Jeff Karstens and possibly even prospects Donnie Veal and/or Tim Alderson.

The good news is that the Pirates have much more depth in their starting pitching than in years past when they ran bums such as John Van Benschoten, Bryan Bullington, Phil Dumatrait and Yoslan Herrera out there for numerous starts. The bad news is that Pirates still do not have a top of the line starter. They have no bona fide number one and not even a good number two. Sure, Duke, Maholm and Ohlendorf are decent pitchers and many teams would take them on their staff, but nobody is mistaking these guys for Roy Halladay or Cliff Lee. These guys would fill out the back-end of most rotations around the majors. Brad Lincoln may have the raw stuff, but he has yet to put together a dominating minor league season and is probably a year or two away from even being a meaningful major league pitcher. Charlie Morton and Kevin Hart have yet to put it all together on the Major League level, and even if they are able to they project no better than a #3 or #4 guy.

According to fangraphs.com (a great website for individual player statistics and it is free!) and Bill James’ 2010 player projections, Maholm, Duke, Ohlendorf, Morton, Hart and McCutchen are projected to start 142 games this season. Their projected statistics combined together produce a record of 40-59, a 4.47 ERA, and 608 strikeouts in 899 innings, a measly 6.1K/9 innings rate. These projected statistics are not the be-all, end-all, and players can deviate from the projections both positively and negatively, but they usually do a pretty solid job of averaging out. At the very least, they are a great baseline for projecting a team’s upcoming season. This does not bode well for the Pirates or their starters. Their 4.47 ERA is slightly better than last year’s starters’ 4.59 ERA and would have ranked 9th in the National League, not bad but not good enough unless you have the 1927 Yankees line-up. The 6.1 strikeouts per 9 innings rate shows the glaring weakness of the starting pitching and the true absence of a frontline starter. The number would actually be an improvement over the 5.25 Ks per 9 last year that the Pirates staff put together, but would still rank a dismal 15th in the National League. The name of the game is getting guys out and the easiest way to do that is a strikeout. The Pirates are simply not able to do this consistently enough to give their team a competitive advantage. Combine that with the average at best defense that will be behind them, and the Pirate starters could be in for a long year.

General Manager Neal Huntington did a nice job of putting together a bullpen with the additions of veterans Octavio Dotel, Brendan Donnelly and D.J. Carrasco. Add to the mix Evan Meek and Joel Hanrahan (if he returns healthy from an early spring elbow problem) and the bullpen should be somewhere between adequate and above-average. I still do not understand the move of non-tendering Matt Capps as he was still an asset that could have been traded for something at the very least, but the overall performance of the 2010 bullpen should not suffer from his absence. In reality, the performance of the bullpen often comes down to a matter of luck. With such small sample sizes and limited opportunities, the performance of most bullpen pitchers fluctuates from year to year but for a select few. Neal Huntington recognizes this fact, has talked about it, and has approached his bullpen building strategy with this focus in mind. Dotel, Donnelly, Hanrahan and Meek have all put up strong strikeout numbers and should provide a steady influence on the back-end of games. The lack of a lefty does concern me, but the more important aspect is having good pitchers. If, and it is a major if, the Pirates are able to turn leads over to this bullpen, I think they will be in more than capable hands.

Click here to read Part II of my Pirates Preview.