2006 in Review

2006 sucked.

It sucked a lot. It wasn't the losses that made it suck because hell, we lost 95 games last year just like we did this year and 2001's 100 losses aren't all that far away. Jim Tracy didn't do it either, I bitched about him a ton early in the season, but it would be hard to argue with the way he handled the young players in the second half of the season. What was so bad about this season? Let's start at the beginning.

As I typically do, I got overly optimistic during spring training. You can look at how my preseason predictions for each of the players compares to what they actually did. Three days before the season started, I wrote a fairly optimistic outlook for the season in which lots of ifs and buts were involved, but I said I felt like the Pirates might not suck if things fell the right way. The season did not start out the right way and 8 days later we were wondering if the Pirates would ever win again. They did win eventually, but not often. They went 7-19 in April, 12-15 in May, and 8-20 in June. That miserable June included a 13 game losing streak and a sweep at the hand of the Royals. They stood at 27-54 when the sun came up on July 1st and kept their .333 pace into the All-Star break, limping in at 30-60. Freddy Sanchez and Jason Bay pretty much accounted for the only bright spots of the year to that point.

Still, things were turning around. Randa had already been benched and Burnitz was hot on his heels. As July progressed, the young guys took over the team. By August Sean Casey and Craig Wilson were gone. The Pirates finished their post-All Star Break season over .500 (37-35) and I've taken a lot of crap for spending a lot of time debunking that, so let's clarify: there were things that took place in the second half of 2006 that were very encouraging. The young pitchers looked much more comfortable. On some nights, Chris Duffy, Jack Wilson, Freddy Sanchez, and Jason Bay did an entirely reasonable impersonation of the top 4 hitters in a good lineup. Tracy stopped blaming the team for everything. The bullpen was mostly lights out. We won baseball games. These are all good things. This, in fact, was the team I was looking for when I wrote my season outlook. The reason I spent so much time and energy on trying to prove they weren't that good is because people (mostly the Pirates' spin team) were going full force pretending like the first 90 games didn't count. Should the Pirates (or anyone) pretend like this is a .500 team based on their second half performance? Most certainly not. Had the second half Pirates played the full season, would they have won 82 games? Hell no. What would've happened is we would've learned a lot of things about a lot of different people. Think of the questions we all had coming into 2006. Sure, we answered some of them, but we had a good idea about the answers of these questions before the season started.

• Is the 2004 Jack Wilson coming back? No, but his career OPS and each of his other full-season OPS's should've been big enough clues.
  
• Is Freddy Sanchez good enough to be an acceptable starting third baseman? Hell freaking yes, but his numbers last September and through all of the minors (while healthy) could've told us the same thing.
  
• Can Ian Snell be a major league starter? Snell is insulted we ever asked this. Again, his minor league numbers told the story.
  

Now think about what wasn't answered. We had little clue before the year started and we still don't know now.

• Chris Duffy, as good as he ended 2005 or not? Probably not. But maybe. But probably not. But again, maybe. Duffy is a puzzle. He made our offense go at the end of the season, but it's doubtful he can maintain that same rate of performance. And oh yeah, he tried to quit in May.
  
• Is 2005 Minor League Player of the Year Jose Bautista good enough to play every day? Well, maybe. The problem is that some windmill named Jose Hernandez spent the better part of early 2006 as the Bucs' go-to utility guy instead of Bautista, so we're still left with a small sample size and lots of questions because of his high K rate and rather poor second half play.
• Tom Gorzelanny... someone to be excited about? Victor Santos and Kip Wells kept Gorzo from starting in Pittsburgh until almost July. He then got hurt and ended up making only 11 starts, not nearly enough to form an opinion on
  
• Can Oliver Perez be fixed? We gave up instead of trying to answer this one.
  
• Can Jose Castillo get serious about baseball? Jose actually did get serious, way back in late May. He won player of the week and then sucked for the rest of the summer. I still have no clue what to make of him. I'd say trade him, but I can't deny that he's still got the potential to be the most powerful second baseman in the league, and it scares me to trade that away.
  
• Can Ryan Doumit be a regular? This question might be answered for some people, but I refuse to write off a player based on 178 plate appearences in a year in which he suffered 2 hamstring injuries and tried to learn a new position. We had our chances to find out. He was healthy in April and mostly split time with Humberto Cota. When he came back in May, we had a chance to let him be an every day first baseman with Casey out. Instead we vacillated and made him our back-up catcher, leading to him catching 3 times in four games shortly after coming back and blowing his hammy out again, in a much more serious manner.
  

So at this point, we end 2006 right where 2005 ended. We think we know some things about a lot of these guys, except now they're all a year older and the questions are still unanswered. We have some amorphous needs we have to fill this offseason. We need a powerful, young, left-handed bat for first base or right field, or maybe both (Nady looked pretty bad power-wise at PNC and it's foolish to trust Doumit with his injury history). We might need a centerfielder (or we could wait for McCutchen, or Duffy really is a cross between Dave Roberts and Andy Van Slyke). We may or may not need a middle infielder or third baseman (depending on two guys named Jose). We need at least one more starter. We can't address all these needs.

The thing that was so damn frustrating about 2006 was that yes, there was a flash of something in the second half. There is some real baseball talent on this team. Still, it was painfully obvious that what we saw in the second half wasn't a winning baseball team. It might become the basis of a winning baseball team somewhere down the road (I'm talking 2008, like I said, too many questions for 2007) but as a Pirate fan, I feel like I just keep pushing the stone up the hill only to watch it roll back down. We ended 2005 with many of the same questions we had going in. Now we're ending 2006 with the same questions yet again. Just because the names have changed doesn't mean the questions are answered. This isn't a new feeling. The problem with this team is that Jose Bautista is better than Rob Mackowiak, Chris Duffy is better than Tike Redman, the four headed monster of Duke/Maholm/Snell/Gorzo is better than most of the young pitching we've trotted through in the past, Jason Bay is a helluva baseball player, and Freddy Sanchez just did a season-long Tony Gwynn impression. There is something here, but it can only blossom if someone on the team addresses the right questions and answers them relevantly, and I have no faith in the current management to do anything like that. They say different, but I still feel like they think the answer to isn't Yes, he is or No he's not, let's trade for Troy Glaus (the only two acceptable answers last offseason), but rather Maybe he is and maybe he isn't, but if we find out on the field we're risking that he might suck, let's sign Joe Randa instead, I hear people like him. It feels like in some respects a winning team is closer than ever, but in reality I'm afraid it might be getting pushed even further away.

That's why 2006 sucked.