Ugh

I need to click the little "Save As Draft" button at the bottom of this stupid blogging program more often. I was 2/3rds of the way through a Season Preview post when my Firefox crashed, as it has been wont to do lately. I am unsure why it's doing this, though I suspect it has something to do with having very little free memory on my computer, though I'm too lazy at the moment to find out. Anyways, I'll rewrite the season preview post because I really liked it and felt like it was getting somewhere, but can't do it tonight because I'm a bit worn out after a full weekend of celebrating St. Patty's Day and the NCAA Tournament. Still, I hate leaving a full day without a post when there's no exceedingly good reason for me to do so, so instead I'm going to rip into some Paul Meyer drivel. Why? Because it's easy and because crap like this freaking drives me up the wall. And maybe because I'm tired and just a little ill-tempered after losing a post in the manner that I did ten minutes ago.

The premise of the offending article is that the Pirates will win this year because potentially 14 of the 25 men on the active roster will have played together in the minors. Read these three paragraphs:

The fact so many players came up relatively together through Bradenton in the Gulf Coast Rookie League and the New York-Penn League and the South Atlantic League and the Carolina League and the Eastern League and the International League has produced a bond that will foster winning.

That sharing dorm rooms and bus rides and, uh, reasonably priced motel rooms and trials and tribulations will have forged special alliances that will triumph over all other National League teams.

And that winning some championships together in the minor leagues ultimately will bring home a National League Central Division title to PNC Park.

They're written not as a theory, but as a foregone conclusion. This is a load of crap and it is so for several reasons. Minor league success does not translate into major league success. Adam Hyzdu may be the Mayor of Altoona, but he'll never be more than a middling major leaguer. Perhaps he just didn't have enough people he'd shared McDonalds and Comfort Inn rooms with to cut it in the bigs, but I'd imagine it cuts deeper than that. Second off, everyone knows that the Pirates system is NOTORIOUS for stacking teams with career minor leaguers to pump up team numbers. Behind Tom Gorzelanny and Sean Burnett, the playoff bound Indiapolis Indians trotted out guys like Marty McLeary, Britt Rheames, Brandon Duckworth, Ryan Vogelsong, Jason Roach, and Nerio Rodriguez in the rotation last year. Yurendell DeCaster and someone named Raul Gonzalez lead the team in at-bats. Altoona went to the playoffs, too. Only one of the top ten players in PAs on the team was under 24 (Javier Guzman was a victim of VISAgate, leaving only Bixler).

You get the point. Everyone knows that both Altoona and Indiapolis were older than the freaking Marlins last year. This isn't a recent occurance. Josh effing Bonifay played on the Curve for three years, from the ages of 25-27. This is a minor league system so thin that when we traded Brent Lillibridge away most informed Pirate fans were up in arms because he was one of our best prospects. Not to rain on Lillibridge's parade, but Cal Ripken Jr. he is not.

Perhaps I'm belaboring an obvious point too much, but I hate articles like this that misinform casual fans that read them. I understand that none of the Pirates were here when the losing streak started 14 years ago, but then again almost none of them were here for the 100 loss team of 2001. It's not the culture of losing that dooms this team, it's crappy baseball players and poor management. There's no correlation between number of minor leaguers that come through the system and how good the major league team is, because if the system is shit than the players that come through the system are probably going to be shit, too. The goal isn't to win in the minors, it's to produce good players for the major league team, even if it comes at the expense of wins in the minor league system. The offensive producers on the Pirates, Jason Bay, Freddy Sanchez, Adam LaRoche, even Xavier Nady if you count him, are all from other systems. Without those guys, we would have one awful baseball team.

Whew. I'm done. I feel better. I'm going to create a new label just for this post.