Why the Pirates are so frustrating right now
Right now my frustration with the Pirates is about as high as it's been all year. I know I said a couple weeks back that if we brought the rookies up and they played regularly and we lost, I wouldn't be upset because we're giving the young guys a chance to learn. It's not the losses that are driving me nuts, it's the fact that I wasn't kidding when I said that a team full of 12-year-olds from Hawaii had a better grasp of fundamental baseball than the Pittsburgh Pirates. Yesterday's game and the run-up to it was a great microcosm for everything that's wrong right now (get your reading glasses out, this is a long one).
- Pregame, Duffy goes on the DL to make room for Craig Wilson. I won't debate the validity of Duffy's injury. It definitely looks like it was more serious than I initially thought (for my initial reaction, go here, towards the bottom of the post) since the MRI showed a partial tear in his hamstring. The problem is that the actions of the team caused me to have that reaction. Earlier in the year we state that Freddy Sanchez is out starting third baseman. Wigginton is sent down just to prove how serious we are about Freddy. You can debate all you want about how good Freddy is at third, that's not what this is about. Once every other week or so after Freddy became the starting third baseman he'd come up with a "tweak" or a "pull" or something similar that shelved him for three days, putting Mackowiak at third and putting Tike in center. When Duffy came up, the same thing happened. He tweaked a hammy and got a little dehydrated. We benched him for a week. Then Zach Duke came up. He was lights out, but suddenly we talked about limiting his innings to within a certain number of last year's innings, but we honestly didn't know how many innings he threw in the instructional league last winter so we didn't have anything to base a number off of anyways. Duke said he felt fine, we ignored him and started drawing up a plan to bring him down slowly till the end of the year. Then he twisted his ankle. It looked pretty bad, but within two days he said he felt fine and was putting normal pressure on it and was ready to throw again. We put him on the DL. The management tells the public that these guys are the future, but they don't trust them at all. We already saw the team screw with Craig Wilson from 2001-2003 and we saw how that affected him. We're still doing it.
- Then there's Wigginton's "defensive" play at third base. The man is simply more inept at third base than a seal. Even the routine plays were an adventure. When Aramis Ramirez was here he was crucified for his play at third base, but the truth was you knew if he concentrated he'd be fine there (like Castillo at second now). There's no potential for Wigginton at third base. A choice between him hitting .280 with 25 homers and 80 RBIs but playing with his defense or Freddy Sanchez hitting .285 with 5 homers and 55 RBIs but playing great D at third (which he does, for some reason there's a smear tactic sent out by the team to defame Freddy's abilities at third, in reality he's got a great glove and arm from the hot corner and it doesn't take long to see it) there's just no choice. You can argue we need more pop at third, and that's fine by me. But if it comes from Wigginton, the price of him in the field is too great to pay. It's entirely possible the same thing applies to Restovich in right field. He was so slow getting to the ball hit by Aurellia on Friday night that the tying run scored easily from first base on a play where it should've at least been close at the plate.
- Now we can go to the Freddy Sanchez play. The PG described it as some ridiculous situation where Freddy misread a sign going from Lloyd to Russell as the green light. Lloyd said it was his own fault, Freddy more or less agreed, figuring they knew something about the pitch that was coming and was trying to get a jump (see, sign stealing happens a lot more often than Tony LaRussa and Yadier Molina would like you to think it does). So let's consider situations.
- The Bucs are expected to look to Lloyd to the bench, to give signals that override the third base coach. Well, that's just stupid and needlessly complicated.
- The Pirates take sign (or a similar one) looks just like the greenlight. We ran into that problem once in Little League when our bunt and steal signal were similar. Our coaches (a couple of insurance agents and a guy that I'm pretty sure didn't even have a job) figured things out within a half inning and changed them.
- They actually gave Freddy the greenlight, then when realizing how stupid it was backtracked and made up a ridiculous story about similar signs and such. So where am I going here? Signs are a fundamental part of baseball. From the firsttime you play a game with a pitcher on the mound you have signs. This is a fundamental part of baseball. This situation wasn't a missed take sign in the 3rd inning, this was a play that very well could have cost us a baseball game. This was a ridiculous and inexcusible situation from any perspective. Why would a sign like the greenlight for a runner and a sign for (what I'm assuming was ) the batter to take a pitch so similar? Why would Freddy be compelled to look to Lloyd for signs? It's all so stupid it makes my head spin. There's no excuse for anything like that to happen this late in the year.
- Let's talk about basic baserunning, not just yesterday's game. Part of the reason I love to see the rookies called up is to learn. I don't think anyone is teaching Ryan Doumit to run the bases. He constantly makes gaffes that would embarass a 10-year-old. Rob Mackowiak does the same thing. The media of course bemoans the fact that Lloyd isn't given players that know the fundamentals of the game, but what exactly does the manager do then? If someone on the team is a poor baserunner, you try to make them a better baserunner. I don't expect everyone to be Jason Kendall or even Jason Bay, but on one team we have Daryle Ward, Ty Wigginton, Mackowiak, and now Doumit. Somehow, I'm not blaming fate that we somehow ended up with 20 of the most fundamentally deficient players out of the 750 major leaguers in America. Some things can be fixed. This is one of them, but it seems to me there's rarely any progress made. I still remember the time we ended up with two runners on third base and got them both tagged out twice within the same year. This isn't a one time problem, it's an epidemic. We might be extremely unlucky, but I don't think it's unreasonable to think that the coaches should be able to teach people how to run the bases.
- It certainly looks to me like Nate McLouth has been in the majors for over a week now and no one has spent time going over how to play right field with the big wall in PNC Park. Watching trial by error with that goofy chain-link fence in right is no fun. I'm pretty sure McLouth is a better right-fielder than Matt Lawton, but he's not showing it. If he's not taught and he's not playing every day, he'll never learn.
- I say this over and over again, but JOSE MESA. There's no excuse for him to be on our mound now, much less to even be considering putting him on it next year. I can't trust the baseball common sense of anyone that even entertains thoughts like this. Same goes for Rick White.
- I haven't run the numbers, but I bet you'd be hard pressed to find a worse pitcher than Mark Redman since early June. With Bullington, Maholm, Snell, etc. I'm not sure why we're entertaining the illusion of him as a starter right now. Probably because he was part of the return from the Kendall trade, and we'll be damned if we're going to look bad on that one (though our return was an awful starter who gave us two good months and a reliever that we turned into a mentally handicapped rightfielder that we turned into a gimp). It's time to cut our losses and get Mark Redman the hell away from a pitcher's mound. I'd rather see Ryan Vogelsong back in a starter's role than him.
- Daryle Ward still gets semi-regular starts. I've said this again and again, from April till June Ward was impressive. He's clearly dropped off since then. He's clearly not the answer at first base. Brad Eldred hits righties better than lefties. We shouldn't see Ward starting at first base, EVER.
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