Afternoon links and musings

Shawn Chacon is headed to the bullpen for now. I don't know how a six-man rotation works with him in the pen. Sadly for Chacon, Victor Santos is better than him, so this is a good move for the Pirates. Apparently Jim Colborn wants to work on his mechanics or something, and the pen is the best way to do it. Sure, we all believe that.

Also, from the same notebook, John Van Benschoten is going to Indianapolis to make his next start, which will come today.

Andrew McCutchen is off to a fast start in Altoona.

In the past week both Charlie and Sam have pointed out the flawed reasoning that the Pirates will be the "next Tigers" or the "next Reds" at the Bucs Dugout. Here's the thing about the 2007 Pirates, they're currently the same as the March 2006 Pirates. Coming into this year everyone assumed that we had some young pitching that was probably good and if they held their own, we would be a decent baseball team. We've seen some good things from those young pitchers this year, especially Snell and Gorzellany, but they haven't been Justin Verlander or Francisco Liriano or Jered Weaver. Not even close. Duke and Maholm have stepped back. I'd love to see a staff anchored by twin aces Gorzelanny and Snell with Duke and Maholm as solid backing guys. It's certainly possible (and it's probably our only hope to be a good baseball team in the next ten years), but it's by no means a foregone conclusion at this point. We still have no semblance of power to back Jason Bay in the lineup. We're still paying Jack Wilson a ton of money to not get on base from the 2 spot in the order. We're still waiting on Jose Castillo. There are a lot of things that have to fall into place for us to be the next Tigers (because as Charlie points out, being the next Reds wouldn't even really be that great of a thing) and they aren't going to happen with the front office that we have.