Pirates Should Improve, But How Much

Your 2011 Pittsburgh Baseball Club got off to a nice start, winning two out of three games in Chicago over the weekend. Of course, winning two of your first three is nothing to write home about but for a team that won a total of 17 games on the road last year, winning two out of your first three away from PNC Park can be taken as a positive sign.

We all know about the young power pitchers down on the farm, the fantastic draft the Pirates had last year, the Pirates’ future catcher in Tony Sanchez and all of the positive steps towards the future that the organization peppers us with about building a winner long term, but let’s forget about that for today and focus on this year’s team. How do we expect this year’s team to do and should we expect any improvement on the dreadful season the Pirates put together last year?

Thursday on the blog you probably noticed that I picked the Buccos to win 70 games this year. That is probably a little optimistic, but with the Vegas line being at 67 wins I do not think 70 wins is overly optimistic or out of the realm of possibility. Sure, improving 13 games over the previous season is no easy task but improvement from last year is almost inevitable. It is very hard for a professional baseball team to lose 100 games in a season; to lose 105 is downright embarrassing. Even if the Pirates had not improved their talent level at all, I would have still expected a 5-7 game improvement by pure statistical reasoning. The Pirates did, however, make some meaningful improvements to the line-up and their pitching can’t possibly be any worse than it was a year ago. Let’s take a little closer look at the ballclub now and why I think 70 wins is a real possibility.

The Pirates opening day line-up looked like this:

LF Jose Tabata
2B Neil Walker
CF Andrew McCutchen
1B Lyle Overbay
3B Pedro Alvarez
C Ryan Doumit
RF Garrett Jones
SS Ronny Cedeno

I am not going to dive into the advanced metrics of this line-up (email me if you would like to see some of the numbers), but believe me when I tell you that this line-up has the potential to be a middle of the pack run producer in the National League, especially against right-handed pitching. Against left-handers, the Pirates will sub Matt Diaz in right field for the lefty Jones and will play catcher Chris Snyder over Doumit when he gets healthy. That line-up is not as good as the one running out there against righties but it is still strong enough for the Pirates to have a league average offense. That is a far cry from last year when the team was stuck with Aki Iwamura, Jeff Clement and Lastings Milledge taking meaningful at-bats for half the season.

One key for this Pirates line-up is for Manager Clint Hurdle to stick to the platoon system. It gives the Pirates the strongest possibility to out-produce the individual parts they have. Too often managers stray from their original platoon systems because one guy gets hot, one guy gets cold, etc. but for the Pirates to maximize their players’ abilities, it is on Hurdle to put them in the right positions to succeed and that means sticking to the platoons.

Defensively, the Pirates were the worst team in the majors last year. The bad news is that the Pirates will have much of the same team in the field this year that it finished last year with. The good news is that most of the Pirates are young and defense has shown to dramatically improve with experience. McCutchen should be much improved in center with another year of experience, ditto for Tabata. Neil Walker can only get better and being that last year was his first season playing second base and he is a great athlete, I think a big improvement is in store. Lyle Overbay is a marked improvement over the myriad of guys the Pirates ran out there last year at first and Ronny Cedeno should improve with another year under his belt as well. At catcher, Doumit is still a liability but Snyder is known for his defensive ability and should bring a little stability when he’s behind the plate. Nobody will mistake Pedro for Brooks Robinson or the right-field platoon situation of Jones/Diaz for Roberto Clemente, but if the Pirates can be solid at the other positions there should at least be a noticeable improvement in the defense.

That was most of the good news surrounding the 2011 Pirates but now we get to the pitching. I guess the silver lining with the Buccos’ pitching is that it cannot possibly be any worse than it was last year when the staff allowed the most runs in the major leagues. The other good news, I guess, is that Ross Ohlendorf, James McDonald and Charlie Morton appear to at least have the raw stuff to become legitimate major league starters and Kevin Correia and Paul Maholm would make most teams’ staffs as 4th or 5th starters. The problem for the Pirates pitching staff is that they have no legitimate ace, or really even a #2 or #3 starter for that matter. All five starters look like they could be legitimate major league starters but no more than a 4th or 5th starter on a good team. I do see improvement coming from Ohlendorf and McDonald and the diehard fans are sure to hold on to hope that Charlie Morton and his “electric stuff” develop, so the possibility of at least an OK starting rotation is possible. If the Pirates can get pitching on par with at least the bottom half of the league and not have clearly the worst staff in baseball, they can win their share of games with an improved line-up.

All together I see a year of improvement for the Pirates and at least the beginning of a basis to compete a few years down the line. If nothing else, this year provides an opportunity to see how Pedro Alvarez, Jose Tabata, Neil Walker, Andrew McCutchen and the young starters continue to develop. If the proper steps are really being taken by Pirates management to build a contender in a few years, the biggest key will be the development of the players currently on the roster. I expect improvement, but how much is the question.