Seasons end, blogs go on

First off, I want to thank everyone that has helped me make WHYGAVS what it is this summer. Things always get dicey at the end of the season when the Pirates get eliminated, school starts, and my moving to North Carolina hasn't helped at all. I'm not here to talk to you about my traffic or anything like that, but I will say that despite me splitting my time between WHYGAVS and FanHouse all summer, WHYGAVS saw more page views and visitors in the summer of '07 than it did in the summer of '06, and that's entirely because of you guys. I've only been writing this for two and a half years, but knowing that there are other Pirate fans out there that are just as passionate, dedicated, and neurotic as I am is a comfort that I can barely even begin to explain. Thank you.

If you haven't been around these parts before, the off-season doesn't mean that WHYGAVS will stop. I watch a lot of playoff baseball and while a lot of that coverage will go to FanHouse this year (hey, they pay me), I'll still have stuff to say here. On top of that, I'll be doing my customary season review where I'll break down what the players did compared to what was expected and what we might be able to look forward too. I'll certainly be keeping a close eye on Neal Huntington and everything he does (and I know that sounds creepy). On Wednesdays, I'm bringing back the "Where Have You Gone..." feature that was so popular in the summer, but got left by the wayside for a number reasons (none of them were good reasons, either). I think it's better suited for this time of year anyways. I've also got something a little more on the fun and goofy side of things in mind, though I don't know if I'm going to be able to pull it together. I'll do my best, though.

What I'm saying is that as the winter wears on and you feel like you're the only person in the world still thinking about the Pirates, don't worry. You most certainly are not, and I'll be here to prove it.

Game 162: Cardinals 6 Pirates 4

In a strange bit of symmetry, the Pirates opened 2007 at PNC Park (and I know they had already played a weeks worth of games by then, but bear with me) by losing a game to the Cardinals started by a career reliever and they ended it in exactly the same way today. Of course they lost that home opener to Braden Looper, who the Cards were legitimately (OK, that's up for debate) using as a starter this year and they lost the season ender to Troy Percival throwing one inning while Tony La Russa had his "I'm Keith Hernandez" moment in what's probably going down as his last game in the Cardinals' dugout.

Because of La Russa's fiddling with the pitchers, the Pirates and Cardinals actually set a major league record for pitchers used today. La Russa ended up using ten, which tied a record for one team, and Tracy used eight because, well, he had the Pirates' bullpen to work with. When the Orioles gave up 30 runs in one game, they only used four.

Anyways, today was loss #94 for the Pirates on the year. It was five more than I expected, but when I guessed 73-89 before the season started, I would've told you they'd go five games in this direction much easier than five games in the other direction. Year #15 in the canyon is officially complete. Congratulations on making it this far, guys. In one year, MLB history will be ours.

The end

So with four teams fighting over three playoff spots, football, and every other Sunday thing going on, Troy Percival (?) and Brian Bullington finish things off for their moribund teams and their seasons.

The penultimate game

Wainwright and Gorzo, already underway.

Good news

This is as big as Littlefield being fired- Ed Creech is expected to be removed from his job as scouting director. I hope that means "fired," though there's no word if he'll be reassigned within. Whatever, he's done ruining our drafts and that's good enough for me for now. I love this write-up:

Two team sources said that, although general manager Neal Huntington has just begun his new job, the evaluations of Creech's work from upper management -- including ownership -- are negative enough that he is a virtual lock to be replaced.

That will come as little surprise, given his record.

Creech's six drafts have produced two players who experienced above-average success with the Pirates -- starter Tom Gorzelanny (second round, 2003), and closer Matt Capps (seventh round, 2002). Otherwise, the drafts have lacked impact-type players, have been shallow and have included glaring errors. Foremost was drafting starter Brad Lincoln in the first round last year when other teams saw clear signs that injury was likely. Lincoln had elbow surgery after pitching for just a month professionally.

It takes Neal Huntington A WEEK to see what Littlefield couldn't in six years.

Game 160: Cardinals 6 Pirates 1

New rule: no one is allowed to say Zach Duke "finished 2007 strong" because of last night's start. Just sayin'.

Seriously though, it was nice to see him look competent for once, even if it's only one start against a hobbled St. Louis team that is every bit as much eliminated as we are. Of course, immediately after he departed, John Grablow lived up to his old nickname and turned the game from "feel good end of the year story" to loss #92. The Cardinals beat the Pirates at PNC. It's how the season (kind of) started, and it's how it's ending. Ahh, symmetry.

The merciful end

There are eight games being played in the National League tonight. Six of them will have direct playoff ramifications. The Pirates and Cardinals are not playing one of those games. Zach Duke and Todd Wellenmeyer are pitching in a vacuum. I mean I guess there's some pride on the line, or something, but it's not like people besides Cardinal fans and Pirate fans (of the diehard variety) are paying attention.

The evolution of Neal Huntington

So I was watching The Office tonight when something suddenly struck me.

This is Neal Huntington now (photo grabbed from the PG):And this is Neal Huntington after five years on the job in Pittsburgh:

Game 159: D'Backs 8 Pirates 0

And if I had to boil 2007 down to one game, I think it might be the one in which Bob Melvin decides that even though he's in the heat of a pennant race, it would be OK to start Micah Owings (ERA+ of 105) instead of Brandon Webb (defending Cy Young winner, ERA+ 156) and the end result is still a shutout of the Pirates. Making average pitchers look like Brandon Webb; that's what we do and we do it well.

Last weekday afternoon game of the year

One more time we'll play one of these 12:35 games that barely anyone seems to pay attention to. JVB and Brandon Webb. A win helps out the chances of an awesome five-way tie, so I'm all for that.

Game 158: Pirates 5 D'Backs 1

The Pirates hate the Diamondbacks. This is the only logical explanation. We tanked for the Padres. We tanked for the Cubs. We literally were handing wins out left and right for almost two weeks. Then the D'Backs roll into town and BAM! competency strikes the Pirates right in the face. I credit the steady hand of Neal Huntington, who has a winning percentage of 1.000 on his career.

Meanwhile, remember when I said yesterday that the D'Backs' offense was worse than the Pirates? Who does this sound like: a middling veteran well past his prime pitched seven innings, gave up one run on six hits, and struck out seven with no walks. Why, I do believe we've all seen a baseball team that has mastered that this year, only tonight that was what Matt Morris did to the Diamondbacks! I want to say "just remember this when Littlefield is telling you how strongly Morris finished the season" but guess what, Littlefield is fired!

One final note: did you know Adam LaRoche has 40 doubles this year after hitting two tonight? That's a career high. Now if we could find those missing 11 homers, we'd be in business.

Down to the stretch

There's a bunch of exciting pennant races here in the last week, so I forgive you if you don't think that Livian Hernandez and Matt Morris is a terribly exciting game (except for its effect on said pennant races, though the D'Backs are going to have to try hard to miss the playoffs this year). The Braves and Phillies are on ESPN tonight and if you've got MLB.tv you've got a bunch of other games at your disposal as well. Later September and October baseball is a nice reminder of what baseball can look like when the Pirates aren't involved.

Tracy's job security, part deux

Though this isn't the most important topic in Pirate baseball right now (how Huntington reorganizes the front office is), Jim Tracy's job status is certain to be the most talked about over the course of the next two weeks. Everyone assumes that the nine game losing streak is Tracy's death warrant, but I'm not so sure. This team is beat up and the firing of Littlefield signified the end of the season to the players; I'm not sure what even the best of managers would be doing in this situation.

Still, Tracy isn't making friends with the whole "you owe it to the pennant race to not be with your wives who just gave birth" thing, and it's pretty clear that the front office didn't agree with him on that front because Brian Graham went over Tracy's head and gave both Jack Wilson and Salomon Torres extended leaves. And Tracy acting like that makes me feel like he's trying to get fired because that is some seriously unreasonable behavior and you have to assume that the best way for Tracy to keep his job would be the players to intercede on his behalf with Huntington. I don't think Jack Wilson or Salomon Torres will be lining up outside of Huntington's office to do so at this point. Still, Tracy isn't quitting and he says as much in the PG this morning.

So what will Huntington do? The gut reaction is to say he'll can Tracy and put his own guy in place, and that's always a good bet, but there's a couple reasons why I think that might not happen. First off, people don't like to start their administration with a firing. It seems pretty obvious (at least to me) that Coonelly had Nutting fire DL before he took over as team president. Call me crazy, but I think Huntington has known about this job for longer than we've been lead to believe. We know that Nutting (and perhaps Coonelly) talked to someone that thinks highly of Brian Graham. We know Huntington has worked with Graham in the past.
We assume that Graham will be named Huntington's assistant GM in very short order. So, if he wants Tracy immediately gone, why wouldn't he just ask the management/ownership to can Tracy before he took over? My own guess is this: as scary as it sounds, I think the Pirates have to get worse before they can get better (I'll talk more about this later). Huntington would much rather have Tracy take the Allan Trammel fall than the guy he wants to manage the team.

Maybe I'm reading way too far into things. If that's the case, Tracy will probably be submitting resumes around the league in a week.

New Poll

Keeping the WHYGAVS poll fresh and relevant for over... 1 week now!!! The results of the Frank Coonelly poll can be seen here. Only six votes out of 263 gave him an outright thumbs down, which I think is an impressive total. Of course 135 of the same 263 (51%) are postponing their verdict until later. You're on notice, Frank. We're watching you.

Game 157: Pirates 6 D'Backs 5

Bucs win! Bucs win!

No, seriously, it's been a while. Sadly, the thing everyone remembers from this one is no one on the Pirates bothering to argue a ball that was called foul, even though it dropped in fair territory. They even mentioned it on ESPN. Also, Nyjer Morgan officially hit one more home run than I ever thought he'd hit in his career by leading off the game with a solo shot. But the Pirates did win tonight to play a mild spoiler role and it's nice to see a pulse. Tonight's win is #67, which equals last year and the year before. One more win and 2007 is all about progress, baby!

Tomorrow we discuss Jim Tracy's future and Neal Huntington.

The light is getting closer...

Six games. That's all that's left of this wretched season. Can we lose fifteen in a row to end things? Wow, that would be depressing.

Anyways, Doug Davis and Ian Snell tonight. The D'Backs magic number is 4. I don't really know how. Lookout Landing amusingly describes the D'Backs as the Pirates with Brandon Webb and a good bullpen (via Bucs Dugout). Note to Neal Huntington: get Brandon Webb. All kidding aside, the D'Backs really are playing way over their heads this year. They've actually scored 14 less runs than we have. And they're 20 games over .500. Ugh.

We Will... haze the crap out of our rookies

Pictures at Gaslamp Ball of the Pirates' rookie hazing. Be warned, some are not for the faint of heart. Anyone care to guess who's who? Some of the players are tougher to figure out, but I'm pretty sure that's Steve Pearce with the peace sign on his head and Nyjer Morgan in the Apollo Creed getup. Beyond that... man, I didn't even know we had that many rookies.

Neal Huntington is official

Read all about it at Pirates.com. Snap judgment: did we just hire Ron Howard's brother? Bigger post coming later, probably this evening or tomorrow morning.

Some thoughts about Huntington

Since it looks pretty certain that tomorrow is going to be the day that Huntington is introduced as our GM, let's take a look at some pros and cons of the guy, at least from what I can tell thus far.

Pros

• If I were to pick an organization for the Pirates to model themselves after, it would probably be the Indians. I mean, you could pick the A's or the Twins or maybe even the Padres or D'Backs, but the Indians are certainly one of the top choices as far as I can see it. Besides Mark Shapiro, I'd assume the guy that's been there for 12 years knows how it's run.
  
• The Pirates interviewed some good people for this position and this is who Coonelly and Nutting picked. Neither of them is stupid.
  
• A huge chunk of Coonelly's past job dealt with dealing with GMs. If he doesn't know what makes a good GM, well, either he's stupid or no one does. Like I said, he's not stupid.
  
• I think his youth is a good thing. Maybe it's just that I'd rather see a 37-year old new face as our GM than, say, Ed Wade.

Cons

• Man, that demotion within the Indians organization this year from Assistant GM to Special Assistant to the GM/Advanced Scout sure is suspicious, isn't it?
  
• He really is an unknown and when his name came up, everyone everywhere seemed genuinely surprised. If he really is such a great candidate, why didn't anyone think of him before he got the job?
• The guys we passed over for the job, La Cava, Zduriencik, Bernarzard, Heyer, etc. seemed to be pretty good candidates and we know a lot more about them.

Unknowns

• Nutting and Coonelly aren't stupid, but what is their motivation here? To build a winning baseball team or to keep the pockets of ownership lined? Certainly, it's fair to question that at this point.
  
• Why was Huntington demoted? Maybe Shapiro wanted to give someone a better job to keep them in the organization and Huntington agreed to help him out. Maybe something a lot more ugly happened. We just don't know.
  
• What did our interest in Antonetti have to do with us ending up with Huntington? Was Coonelly's goal from day 1 to model his Pirates after the Indians? Did we ask about Antonetti and get referred to Huntington?
  

As with anything along these lines, it's pretty impossible to judge how this hire is going to turn out right now. It certainly good be a good hire and there is some evidence to support that. It could be a bad hire, and there's evidence to support that, too. The good news is that Huntington has a lot of work to do this off-season and I think we're going to get a good idea of what kind of GM he's going to make pretty fast.

Nothing is easy for the Pirates

If you've been paying attention, the whole GM search has gotten maddeningly complex over the weekend. On Friday we were told that Neal Huntington was the man, but Frank Coonelly quickly denied that. Today John Perrotto, who broke the story, backtracked like hell on it, saying the Pirates had reconsidered because other people in baseball thought it was a bad hire and the Pirates had decided to look in to why Huntington had been seemingly demoted within the Indians' organization this year. He originally wrote this (posted at FanHouse here):

Multiple baseball sources said Sunday morning that Huntington, a special assistant to the GM with the Cleveland Indians, may no longer get the job. The Pirates, who have had a blanket policy of not commenting directly about the GM search, are said to be very upset that the matter became public.

Furthermore, there are indications Coonelly has received negative feedback from various officials within the game for his decision to hire Huntington, who has lost much of his power in the Cleveland system in recent years and now primarily does advance scouting work for the Indians.

That article was up for most of the afternoon before Perrotto changed the story, which now reads as you'll find it at this link. The second paragraph in the above quote is now gone and this quote from Coonelly was inserted:

"As I stated earlier this week, in fairness to the process and each of the candidates, I would not respond to speculation and rumor regarding any specific candidates who are being considered for our general manager position. We are not changing direction or rethinking our position. Instead, we are moving forward with our search process in an extremely thorough and deliberate manner. This is a critical hire. It is important that we find the right person for the general manager position who can move our baseball operations forward. I am extremely confident we will accomplish that goal."

Both Perrotto and Paul Meyer consider this proof enough that Huntington is getting the job and I suppose it is, if you believed Huntington was getting the job in the first place. The only reason any of us believed that was that was what Perrotto, and later Meyer, told us. So what should we believe now?

Game 155: Cubs 8 Pirates 0

Great, so not only did 2007 force us to deal with the Pirates' 15th consecutive losing season, Jason Bay's decline, Zach Duke's dropping off the face of the earth, and Matt Freaking Morris, now the Pirates have facilitated the Cubs' making of the playoffs. Just brilliant.

Tracy ran another Gorzo out for another 117 pitches today and he got hit pretty hard. He did have 7 K's in less than six innings, but 12 hits and six runs isn't all that agreeable to me. His 15th win isn't that important. Really. Meanwhile Zambrano held us to three singles (Morgan, Nady, LaRoche) and I'm wondering why the Pirates have even bothered putting their uniforms on the last ten days or so. Seriously. They were on WGN this weekend so I saw more of them than I have been watching recently, and they look like the Kennedy Catholic Golden Eagles circa 2002, when we managed to go 0-14. You don't know why it's called "the mercy rule" until you play on a team like that, let me tell you what. The Pirates need a mercy rule. Thanks to us, the Cubs have the lowest magic number in the NL.

Only a week left

You know, if the Pirates aren't going to be bothered with playing hard, I'm not really going to bother myself to try and recap all of these damn games. They are combining forces with Ned Yost to hand the Cubs the NL Central this weekend, and that probably pisses me off more than an 8 game losing streak for a couple reasons:

1. I picked the Brewers to win the NL Central before the season and would've looked like a genius if they would've pulled it off.
2. I really don't want the Cubs to make the playoffs.
   
3. I always hoped that by 2007 Aramis Ramirez and Jason Kendall would be in the playoffs together. Just not like this.

Anyways, Tom Gorzelanny will be pitching about 3 innings and throwing 90 pitches against the Big Z today as Ned Yost is insanely choosing to send Chris Capuano to the mound against the Braves. That means that around the time the Steelers are done, the Cubs will have a 3.5 game lead in the Central and this thing will be over.

The Pirates are playing already?

Wow, early start today for the Buccos. They're in Chicago, and yet the game started at 1:00. I'm sure Cubs' fans are pleased about that. Zach Duke makes his return to the mound and guess what, he's gave up four hits and two runs in the first inning! But he did strike two batters out, which matched his total for May, I think (I'll have to look that up). Getting into an early 2-run deficit against a team in a playoff hunt is not a good way to break a losing streak.

Game 154: Cubs 13 Pirates 8

Just a couple things from yesterday's game that I thought were important. First up, I loaded the game up on MLB.tv and we had the bases loaded and only one out in the first. Within like 30 seconds, the inning was over and we only had one run. Then the Cubs came to bat and Soriano whacked the first pitch out of the park. Within just about two minutes, we had gone from a very promising situation, back to a tie game. It's Pirate baseball at it's finest.

The other thing that's been bugging the crap out of me is how we've been handling Maholm, Gorzelanny, and Snell down the stretch. Maholm is clearly still bothered by something, Snell pulled himself out of a game after seven easy innings the other night, and Gorzo is also struggling a bit of late. I understand the value of having these guys increase their innings and getting to the point where they can pitch a full season, but there's no point in getting them hurt or pushing them beyond what they're capable of. If one of the three of them gets hurt down the stretch, I'm going to be seriously pissed.

Coonelly denies hiring Huntington

From the wires:

"It is too early to comment on possible candidates for our general manager position," Coonelly said. "We have had numerous interviews with multiple candidates, all of which would make for an excellent choice.

"As I have stated in the past, this is an extremely critical hire. It is important that we find the right person for the general manager position who can move our baseball operations forward."

Nutting said basically same thing about Coonelly, though. I find it hard to believe that both the PG and the BCT would greenlight their stories on bad information, but since this is about as big as Pirate news gets in September, maybe Meyer and Perrotto are jumping the gun. Just take this all for what it's worth. I doubt we'll know anything official until Monday.

Bucs and Cubs

Jason Marquis and Paul Maholm, starting nowish. Big series for the Cubs as if we continue to roll over the Brewers are all but done. Currently, though, my eyes are on the GM situation (see post below).

Neal Huntington may be our next GM

Did we just hire a new GM? John Perrotto says we did and that Indians' special assistant Neal Huntington is the man. It's not anywhere that isn't using Perrotto as a source yet, so I'm not 100% certain of this. Then again, it's not like it's in the Trib or something. Keep your eyes peeled...

UPDATE (3:53): PG confirms it. This looks for real.

Links

Sorry posting has been so slow lately. It will pick up sometime soon, I promise.

The new Astros GM is Ed Wade. So much for being worried the Astros were after someone we wanted. If we would've hired Wade, I think I would've closed down this blog for good.

Great Pirate Notebook today. First up, Chacon, Armas, and Izturis are going to be peacing out after the season; awesome. Then Tracy's jackassosity is illustrated by the use of the word "order" which kind of tells you how Jack Wilson and Sully must feel about having to cut their paternity leaves short to play out the last few games of a miserable season. Sully didn't come back on Tracy's orders. Good for him. THEN, Carlos Guillen rips into Jack Wilson, saying he'd rather lose his job to Cesar Izturis.

On Page 2, the four-letter had a bunch of their writer types bitch about their favorite baseball teams. DJ Gallo took the Pirates. An excerpt:

Shut up. The Pittsburgh Pirates have not had a winning season in 15 YEARS! Fifteen years. Not one winning season. Not one lousy 82-80 season. Not even 81-81. Heck, their best season since 1992 was a 79-83 record … and that came 10 YEARS AGO! So, please, kindly shut up. Fifteen years, people. Fifteen years. Every year being virtually eliminated by the end of May. Fifteen years. One more is an all-time record.

Seriously, if I have to deal with one more Red Sox fan complaining about how they're going to blow their lead to the Yankees (and STILL MAKE THE F%$&*!@ PLAYOFFS), something might snap.

Ouch:

"Hopefully it's not as bad as it feels," Griffey said. "The best way I can describe it is that it feels like someone bungee jumped off my right (testicle)."

Comments contest: what word did Junior actually use? I'd guess "ball" or quite possibly "nut." Why did they edit that out? Who would be offended by that?(via FanHouse)

Game 153: Padres 6 Pirates 3

So between last night's walkoff homer by Scott Hairston this afternoon's Matt Morris implosion, we end our last trip to the west coast of the year with a four game sweep at the hands of the Padres. Today's game was a super fun one in which we made Brett Tomko look like a world beater, we wasted the rare Carlos Maldanado home run, and Matt Morris gave up three runs in back to back innings, again making everyone go, "And we're paying him how much?" The Padres announcers were downright giddy about how good Tomko looked today. Apparently no one thought to tell them just who he was up against.

Mid-afternoon game

Crap crap crap, a West Coast afternoon game! Matt Morris and Brett Tomko in the battle of the retreads on the mound, not surprisingly, it's 3-3 already. How did we score three runs with Kata and Izturis starting?

Talk Like a Pirate Day

What better day to break a losing streak than Talk Like a Pirate Day? Ian Snell and Chris Young go at it on the mound tonight. Talk like a Pirate? Snell doesn't do that. Chris Young almost no-hit us twice last year. I would say he's due to finish us off this year, but I don't think no-nos work like that. Instead, I'll just sit back and wonder what our rotation would be like with him in it. Good, I'd assume.

GM Candidates

It's hard to comment on GM candidates from the standpoint of a blogger. I don't really know a whole lot more about these guys than you do. I only know who they work under and what the teams they work for play like. But just as it's difficult to assign blame in the Pirates' organization for all of the things that have gone wrong, it's just as hard to give credit in the good ones for who does what.

The toughest part to judge right now is what exactly the Pirates are thinking. Coonelly more or less came out of left field after a bunch of other names were bandied about, so I don't know if there's a reason to write a ton of words about Tony La Cava or Jack Zduriencik or Tony Bernazard right now. They all seem like decent candidates to me (remember that I only said that I didn't think La Cava was a good fit for the CEO position, even then I said I thought he'd be worth interviewing for the GM job should it open, which it obviously has). What was interesting to me was that most of the names we heard in conjunction with the CEO job, La Cava, Duquette, etc., were more GM types than President/CEO types. Does that mean that maybe Nutting was actually considering them for the GM's job? Duquette's name hasn't come up since Coonelly's hiring, so maybe that's not the case. I was shocked to read that the Pirates might make a choice by Monday. What's the hurry, guys? I know their's value to having a GM in place when the season ends, but I'd much rather take a few extra days and do this right than to hurry it along and screw it up.

Game 151: Padres 5 Pirates 3

I'm afraid Gorzo might be running out of gas. Last night he needed 107 pitches to get through five innings and he walked four batters in the same span. Yeah, he threw 70 of those pitches for strikes, but that many walks kind of has me worried about him. I hope Tracy's careful with him from here on out.

We did manage to get seven hits in the heart of the lineup last night (2 for Sanchez and LaRoche, 3 for Nady), but they didn't really do much hitting beyond that (only ten hits total) and so, three runs it was for the Pirates against Maddux and a host of Padre relievers. That makes four losses in a row for the Buccos and drops them back to 19 games under .500.

Let's talk about tanking

Tom Gorzelanny goes for win #15 tonight against Greg Maddux, which makes for a kind of fun pitcher's match up. Apparently, though, some Pirate fans think that Gorzo doesn't stand a chance because they think Jim Tracy is tanking this series to make sure the Dodgers don't make the playoffs. I dunno if I buy that for a couple reasons.

1. That assumes Jim Tracy is smart enough to tank baseball games.
2. Tracy's quotes when Graham and Coonelly pulled Armas out of the rotation made it seem like he was mildly perturbed that he had to put JVB back in the rotation.
   
3. Wasn't Tracy babbling on about the integrity of the game like a week ago?
4. Bad teams get their young players playing time in September all the time. This is not unusual.
5. Tracy's main beef in LA was with DePodesta.
   
6. So you're telling me that the Pirates actually have to try to lose now?

Seriously, there's no September shenanigans going on here. Games like these are just what happens when a team with something left to play for plays a team that's starting over at the end of the season. Good luck getting to #15, Tommy.

Game 150: Padres 3 Pirates 0

Did you know we just got shut out by the Patriots back-up quarterback's brother (and some other dudes with less interesting back stories... and Trevor Hoffman)? That sucks. John Van Benschoten had his best start in recent memory for the Bucs tonight, 5 innings, three runs, 5 hits, two strikeouts, one walk. That's still not very good. Thinking about next year's rotation gives me the chills. Clearly, the Bucs are just playing out the string right now. Once that 82nd loss fell, things haven't really looked up since.

A non-NL Central team!

For the first time since August 23rd, we get to play a team from out of the division! We travel out to the West Coast for the 1,000th time this year so that John Van Benschoten and some guy named Jack Cassel can face off on the mound. I know you're excited to stay up late for this one.

Will he keep his job: Brian Graham

Kevin McClatchy has stepped down. Dave Littlefield has been fired. Clearly, changes are taking place at the top of the Pirates organization. For the next few days, I'm going to look at some other prominent members of the Pirates' organization and whether or not I think they'll get to keep their jobs in 2008. The first post was about the current head of scouting, Ed Creech. Then we took on manager Jim Tracy. Today, director of player development, Brian Graham.

Graham is definitely the toughest person to write this post for. If we take as fact that Ed Creech is a terrible evaluator of talent, then we also have to assume that Creech makes Graham's job incredibly difficult. On top of that, from what I can see, it's very hard to know how much of the things that hurt our prospects, like the very slow promotions that held guys like Steven Pearce back, are Dave Littlefield's fault and how much of them are Graham's fault.

Admittedly, on the day DL was fired, I would've immediately lumped Graham into the "not long for this world" category with Creech and probably Tracy. Then, Nutting elevated him to interim GM and said a ton of flattering things about Graham. That made me reconsider Graham a bit. I know that sounds crazy, but hear my reasoning out here. First off, Nutting didn't pick an assistant GM to fill the role, which is pretty customary in this situation, I think. If I had to guess, I would say he wants to distance himself from the DL regime and wanted to promote someone that would immediately start that process. On top of that, as I said when DL was fired, Coonelly was probably already in position when DL was fired, so this is probably who Coonelly wanted in the job. That means that it's not so cut and dried with Graham. Nutting doesn't know much about baseball and he's been talking to baseball people about his CEO position and how to run his team probably since January when he took over. That's why he said he fired DL; that the people he's talked to indicated to him that it had to happen for the team to move on. He also said that the people he talked to indicated Graham was an asset to the franchise.

Now I don't know who Bob Nutting has talked to since January and I'm not ready to hand him the "best owner on the planet" award after ten months. I'm not going to implicitly trust what he says. At the same time, a lot of good things have happened since he took over as primary owner in January and it's pretty clear that whoever he's been talking to has been giving him good advice. Thus, Nutting's endorsement of Graham has to mean something. The question is what, exactly that something is.

We can look at the flaws in the Pirates system first and try and decide if they're Graham's fault. You can say that a high number of pitchers get injured, but that's honestly probably not true. The high profile pitching prospects get injured, but they actually make up a small percentage of
total pitchers in the system and not many pitchers besides the high profile ones get hurt. Given that Creech and Littlefield had a tendency for drafting a certain type of pitcher with their first round pick, is it Graham's fault they got hurt? What about the slow promotions? Pearce started in Lynchburg this year despite a good half year there last year and his age (24).
But we know that it's been more or less Littlefield's MO to overstock the minors with players too old for their level to build up the record of the system and make it seem like there's hope. Or is it Graham that does that? It sure seems like more of the organizational philosophy than something the director of player development would focus on.

Still, Graham can't be blameless. Don't forget this story from earlier in the summer when JVB basically said that no one in the minors coached him. That's Graham's territory. And the fact that every single hitter that comes through the minors seems to have no plate discipline? Well, some of that's Creech's fault for drafting, but if you're going to teach people stuff like that, it happens in the minors. I don't see any evidence Graham is trying. Still, there are some success stories in Graham's tenure. Guys like Snell, Gorzelanny, and Pearce have grown a lot in the minors and succeeded expectations (at least I think they are, I've tried to dig up when he started on the job but I can't find it, so I'm assuming it approximately coincides with when DL took over).

Thus, the Graham situation is one colored with shades of gray. There must be a good reason that Coonelly and Nutting trust him, but even if we don't blame him for the things we can pass off on Littlefield and Creech (two guys we can mostly prove were incompetent), there's things that make him pretty hard to like. If it were up to me, I'd be starting all over from scratch with everyone. As bad as Creech and Littlefield were at evaluating talent, I think it's impossible to find Graham blameless. It's not up to me though, and I would say that early indications are that if anyone in the org is keeping their job when Coonelly's done remaking the front office, it's going to be Brian Graham.

Game 149: Astros 15 Pirates 3

So maybe Maholm coming back wasn't such a great idea. For the second straight day our started couldn't make it four innings (hell, Maholm couldn't make it three today) and our parade of relievers was mostly useless, save three nice innings from Brian Bullington. At least our starters are sputtering out with a bullpen full of fresh arms in mid-September and not during a part of the season where we were working with a normal roster.

As for the flip side of things, we only mustered four hits, but three of them were solo homers (Jack Wilson again, Jason Bay, and the first of Carlos Maldanado's career), so at least we scored some runs in our 83rd loss of the year. Twelve more solo homers would've been nice though.

The end of the 'Stros

I know you're sad this is our last game of the year against the Astros. Today Paul Maholm makes his return to the mound against Brandon Backe, who's also recently back from injury. As usual, the Pirates playing on Sunday afternoon is kind of like a tree falling in a forest with no one around. Meanwhile, since the Panthers are playing the Texans today, I get the pleasure of seeing both Houston teams in action. I consider myself quite lucky.

15 Years of Losing

Over at FanHouse, I put together a photo gallery of the last 15 years of dismal Pirate history to go with my post there about them chalking up year #15 in the canyon. It's a bit depressing, but I had quite a lot of fun doing it and if you've got some time I really think you should check it out. It has to be posted at FanHouse because that's the only place my Getty Images license applies to, but it's mostly for Pirate fans.

This reminds me of the "Where Have You Gone..." feature that I tried to start up over the summer before not doing it every week, and I think I'm going to give it another go in the off-season, which is a much better time for something like that. In fact, I think I'm going to do a lot of things differently this off-season, but we'll talk about that when we get there.

Game 148: Astros 9 Pirates 7

Anyways, if you had "September 15th" or "148 games" in your tragic number poll for the date the Pirates would lose their 82nd game, you're a big winner! This was a great game for the Pirates to have to clinch the 2nd losing franchise losing streak in baseball history. Some high lowlights:

• You knew Matt Morris had to start this one. It's only fitting.
  
• Pirates race out to a 5-0 lead, then blow it.
• Ronny Paulino homered, but we wasted it.
• Jack Wilson homered twice, but we wasted it.
  
• Pirate cast-off Ty Wigginton, who was acquired in lieu of Ryan Howard, then flat out cut a year and a half later, homered twice for the Astros.
  
• The loss came to the last place Astros.

Welcome to The Canyon, Mr. Coonelly. We hope you can find a way to lead us out. Please.

How many more Matt Morris starts?

Sorry to miss the start of this one with the thread, it's another central time zone game that's starting early. You'd think I'd have figured out by now that this happens all the time on Saturdays. Anyways, Matt Morris and Wandy Rodriguez take the mound. Morris is already in trouble in the first in a game the 'Stros more or less need if they're going to catch the Pirates for fifth place in the Central before the year ends.

Game 146: Pirates 4 Astros 3

Snell pitched decent, Bautista hit a homer, Morgan took a bad route to a ball and made an amazing catch. Holding on to the tragic number of one...

Damn, just realized my numbering was off by a game again. I would go back and change these, but that would change all the permalinks. Oh well, they're really just guidelines anyways.

Would you believe an NL Central team?

Can you believe that we're playing yet another NL Central team this weekend? Today we get the fun experience of having two short, hard throwing righties go at each other in Minute Maid Park when Roy Oswalt and Ian Snell go at it at 8:05 tonight. The Pirates have seemed to enjoy playing spoiler, but there's nothing for them to spoil in Houston. In fact, this series is pretty meaningless unless someone declares that the winner of the series gets to hire Terry Ryan as their new GM. That would make me tune in, that's for sure.

A Coonelly Poll!

Holy cow, the WHYGAVS poll is back! And on top of that, it's going to stay back for a while, because the off-season is the best time of year to do these things. The first question is about Frank Coonelly. What do you think thus far? Vote in the sidebar, talk in the comments.

First impressions of Coonelly

I know it's early and that Frank Coonelly has done absolutely nothing as the new Pirates' president, but it's hard not to like the first impression he's making.

From his letter to the fans:

Our immediate priority will be to find the right general manager who will work hard to build on the baseball foundation by broadening our talent base, improving our player development systems and making the international market a true priority. We must develop a system that regularly feeds premier talent to the Major League level, while at the same time putting our current group of young players in the best possible position to succeed.

From another Pirates.com article:

"From my judgment, resources haven't been allocated effectively or efficiently," Coonelly said. "There has been too much spending in areas that were not effective and not enough spending in areas that are effective. Moving forward, we're going to allocate those resources in a manner that I believe is far more effective."

From agent Jay Reisinger (quoted in the PG):

"This is a tremendous hire for the Pirates," Reisinger said. "He's an extremely bright and driven person. He takes great pride in winning. He works very, very hard and cares a great deal about his work.

"I can honestly say Frank and I have never agreed on one single thing, but I know he'll be a tremendous help to the Pirates. I have the utmost respect for him. I think he'll be a tremendous asset."

Clearly, it's hard to judge anything until he actually does something on the job (like, say, hire a GM), but the more I've been reading about Coonelly, the more I've been liking. The fact that he gets an endorsement from an agent is a huge thing, I think, because his job before was basically to squash agents in their tracks. If they've got respect for him, I think it indicates that he was more than just a lapdog for Selig who will take the commissioner's office agenda to Federal Street. At least that's what I hope it means.

Some links

No game tonight, but there is some interesting news.

The Pirates officially anointed Frank Coonelly as the new CEO. He wrote an open letter to the fans on the team's home page

Tops on the list is the resignation of Terry Ryan as GM of the Twins. Supposedly he's doing it to take a scouting job within the organization, but it seems kind of fishy to me for a highly successful 52-year old general manager to scale things back for a lesser job within the org. I've got task #1 for Frank Coonelly already.

And you thought Pittsburgh was a sad baseball town...

Will he keep his job: Jim Tracy

Kevin McClatchy has stepped down. Dave Littlefield has been fired. Clearly, changes are taking place at the top of the Pirates organization. For the next few days, I'm going to look at some other prominent members of the Pirates' organization and whether or not I think they'll get to keep their jobs in 2008. The first post was about the current head of scouting, Ed Creech. Today we move on to manager Jim Tracy.

I fully realize that what I'm about to say is going to be vehemently disagreed with by almost everyone that reads it. Just take it with an open mind, that's all I'm asking.

I'm not convinced that Jim Tracy is an awful manager. The worst things that managers do in terms of game strategy is, in my mind, think they can affect the outcome of the game. Sacrifice bunts are always a bad idea. Stealing bases is almost always a bad idea, unless the person running can be safe about 75% of the time. Hitting and running? Almost as bad as sac bunts. All these things serve to do is take the bats out of the hitters' hands. As bad as the Pirates are at the plate, it's still never a good idea to do that. I could go into the math and statistics here, but I'm a bit too tired for that and other people can do it better than me, so you'll have to take my word for it. Last year, Tracy ranked near the bottom of the NL in steal attempts and bunt attempts (according to BP 2007). I don't have the numbers for this year and I know we all bitched about the bunting at the beginning of the year, but if my memory serves me, it hasn't been that bad since April or May. If pressed about it, I would actually say he's done a good job handling Snell, Gorzelanny, and Maholm and their workloads over the past two years. I don't agree with everything he's done in terms of pulling pitchers and leaving pitchers in, but he doesn't exist to make me happy. He pulled the plug on Salomon Torres early this year and that was a good move. You can complain about his handling of the bullpen if you want, but the bullpen is pretty awful and that's not really his fault.

I'm not really saying Tracy's a good manager or that he doesn't have his faults. But the truth of the matter is that most managers in the major leagues are pretty much the same. They all have the same vices, Jim Leyland loves veteranosity (Sean Casey starts for him!) and game calling catchers as much as Tracy does. Most managers have a preconceived notion of a lineup that they will never deviate very far from. I think a lot of managers would try to play Nyjer Morgan or Rajai Davis or Chris Duffy over Nate McLouth because of what a centerfielder "should play like." I'm not saying it's right, I'm just saying that Tracy isn't that different. Most managers love to think they're a lot more important than they really are.

Personally, I don't like Tracy very much. That honestly doesn't have a lot to do with how he manages though, it has more to do with the fact that he just seems stupid. His interviews are always rambling and self-important. He just doesn't come across as a bright guy to me, and that bugs me because there really seems to be little else he brings to the table. Terry Francona and Grady Little aren't rocket scientists by any means, but they're both popular with the players. As crazy and unstable and tactically poor as Ozzie Guillen is, he'd take a bullet for his players and they all know it. Jim Leyland and Tony La Russa command this deep respect from their players because they've seen and done it all as managers. Tracy is just kind of... there. I don't think the players hate him, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they like him either. Maybe it doesn't make much of a difference, but I dunno, I'd like a manager to be more than just "there."

With everything being said, I think that whoever our new GM is could do much, much worse than Jim Tracy as manager of the Pirates. And I think it would be a huge mistake to retain him for next year. The thing with Tracy is that to certain people, he's loyal to a fault. He hated Paul DePodesta for trading Paul Lo Duca and from everything I read about him, he did almost anything he could to sabotage Lo Duca's time as GM in LA, which more or less resulted in both of them losing their jobs. We never saw that side of Tracy here because he and Littlefield got a long. But when asked about Littlefield's firing, Tracy's quote was (and this is from memory so it's not perfect), "I think if you look at where this team is now and where this team was last year, you'd be hard pressed to say it's not moving in the right direction." Clearly, he's pissed that Littlefield got the axe. Accordingly, that could make life very difficult for whoever moves into DL's position, especially if he and Tracy aren't as ideologically aligned as Littlefield and Tracy were.

Bottom line: Tracy has to go, but not because he's necessarily a terrible manager. Mostly, I think he has to go because I think this organization needs to start over. Every remnant of the Littlefied era needs to be cleaned out. One of the biggest problems with Littlefield was that despite the fact that he took over from outside the organization, he kept a lot of things the same. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Oh, and Tracy hired Jeff Manto. That's a fireable offense in my book.

Game 145: Pirates 7 Brewers 4

I think we can call this, "delaying the inevitable." It looked like the Pirates were going to piss away a lead for their 82nd loss in 2007, but then we destroyed Derek Turnbow and took home yet another win against the, erm, cream of the NL Central crop. Not much else to say about this one, Steven Pearce had a couple of hits and a couple of RBI and the callup to Pittsburgh certainly hasn't seemed to stem his hitting at all. I think that first big league dinger is coming any day now. Also, including his game-breaking 2-run triple off of Turnbow in the eighth, Josh Phelps now has two triples as a Pirate. I dunno, I think that's one of the more unlikely stats of the year.

A day game

Tom Gorzelanny and Dave Bush at 12:35 with either first place or dignity on the line, depending on which side you're cheering for. The Pirates tragic number for their fifteenth losing season is down to one.

Game 144: Brewers 6 Pirates 1

To continue a theme from the gamethread:

Yovani Gallardo: 6 IP, 6 H, 7 K, 3 BB, 0R
Brian Bullington: 5 IP, 7 H, 2 K, 1 BB, 3 R, 3 ER

Granted, this was a much better outing for Bullington than his last one. He's just not going to be a dynamic starter like a guy like Gallardo is. No one ever said he should be, but this is the guy that Ed Creech and Dave Littlefield decided was worthy of the first pick in the draft. That was the problem under the old regime. Hopefully we'll see a change.

Not much else to say about this one. LaRoche was the only Pirate with two hits and it's actually possible he'll finish the year up at .280. That would be impressive. The Brewers win ensures vaults them back into first place (the Cubs just lost in 11 to Houston). That means the Pirates can beat a first place team again tomorrow.

The difference

Maybe the Pirates are playing really well right now. And maybe they'll do something to keep the Brewers out of the playoffs this week. But that doesn't mean that the Brewers are moving in the wrong direction and the Pirates are moving in the right one. Just look at the pitching matchup tonight. The Brewers will send out Yovani Gallardo, who started the year as one of their top pitching prospects. We'll send out Brian Bullington, who started the year as one of our top pitching prospects. Who would you rather have?

Will he keep his job: Ed Creech

Kevin McClatchy has stepped down. Dave Littlefield has been fired. Clearly, changes are taking place at the top of the Pirates organization. For the next few days, I'm going to look at some other prominent members of the Pirates' organization and whether or not I think they'll get to keep their jobs in 2008. Today we look at the head of scouting, Ed Creech.

Ed Creech and director of player development create an interesting "chicken or the egg?" scenario in the Pirates' organization. Who's fault is it that the Pirates almost always seem to have no talent in the minor leagues? Is it Creech's fault for drafting poorly or is it Graham's fault for not developing Creech's picks well in the minor leagues? Today, we'll look at what Creech has done and attempt to answer that question, as well as the question of whether or not Creech should keep his job.

Creech became scouting director when DL took over the team in 2001, meaning he missed the 2001 draft. Because Baseball-Reference is the greatest site in the history of the world, we can take a look at every single pick Creech has made prior to the 2007 draft, which we can't really judge (fairly) yet.

• 2002 draft
• 2003 draft
• 2004 draft
• 2005 draft
• 2006 draft

The following jumps out: only Brian Bullington, Brad Eldred, Matt Capps, Chris Demaria, Nyjer Morgan, Paul Maholm, Tom Gorzelanny, Josh Sharpless, and Steve Pearce have reached the majors, with Pearce being the only player picked after the 2003 draft to make it up. Not only is that a really low number of players, it's an even smaller number of impact players. From the 2004 and 2005 drafts, only Walker and McCutchen have given the impression that they could change that based on minor league appearances. It's not really fair to judge the 2006 draft yet, but Lincoln has already lost a year and none of the other higher-round picks have really distinguished themselves at all, as far as I can tell (admittedly, I am not the most well-versed in the Pirates' minor league system).

So the question is whether or not this is Creech's fault. After all, guys like Pearce are often brought along too slowly (he was started at Lynchburg this year despite playing 90 games their last year with an OPS of .830 and the fact that he was 24-years old) and don't even see AAA until they're like 26, at which point they're not really young enough to be a prospect. But you only have to look at Creech's first round picks to see that he's no draft wizard. With the first pick in 2002, he took Bullington with the first pick and either he or DL (I don't remember which) immediately proclaimed him to be a solid #3 starter. Among the next ten choices were BJ Upton, Prince Fielder, Jeremy Hermida, and Zach Greinke (also in that first round: Scott Kazmir, Cole Hamels, Nick Swisher, James Loney, Joe Blanton, Matt Cain, and Jeremy Guthrie). In 2003, Creech took Maholm, who projected out to just about what we're seeing today; a middle of the rotation lefty. This draft doesn't appear to be as deep as the awesome 2002 draft that we whiffed on, but Lastings Milledge, Conor Jackson and Chad Cordero all went in the first round. In 2004 we picked Neil Walker, who wasn't a bad pick, but was picked for the hometown PR value. Jered Weaver went with the next pick and Steven Drew, Josh Fields, and Billy Butler all went soon afterwards. In 2005 we picked McCutchen first and it's hard to nitpick that one yet. In 2006 we picked Lincoln, who was ranked as the second best pitching prospect in the draft, but we passed on Andrew Miller (who was ranked as the first best in the draft) as well as Tim Lincecum and Brandon Morrow.

Now I know that it's hard to nitpick all of these drafts. There were certainly some people not taken for signability reasons and there were some people that have surprised everyone with their rise through the minors. Still, if the Pirates can't afford to compete in the first round you'd think they'd be mining the later rounds for talent. As we know from Dejan's DL post-mortem, they barely even scout the most talent laden regions of the country. That's gotta fall on the scouting director as much as it does on the GM. And this isn't a new pattern for Creech. A year ago at OBN, WTM detailed Creech's career in baseball; he drafted poorly in Montreal, St. Louis, and Los Angeles all through the 1990s before coming here. My favorite part of the story is the 1997 draft in which Creech had EIGHT picks in Montreal and picked Donnie Bridges, Chris Stowe, Scott Hodges, Brian Hebson (who actually reached the majors), Thomas Pittman, TJ Tucker (also reached the majors), Shane Arthurs, and Tootie Meyers (though it is true that it doesn't appear that 1997 was a terribly deep draft).

So, we know Creech has drafted poorly in Pittsburgh and we know he drafted poorly before he got here. Instead of working around the purported financial restraints, the Pirates more or less just seemed to throw their hands up in the air and say "What are we supposed to do?" in most of the drafts run by Creech and Littlefield. Oh yeah, and he had a hand in the drafting of a reliever with the fourth overall pick this year.

So does Ed Creech keep his job? There's absolutely not logical evidence to suggest that he should. No GM in their right mind would want this guy running their scouting department, from what I can tell.

Game 143: PIrates 9 Brewers 0

For the second straight day, the Pirates knocked a team out of first place in the NL Central. Well, I guess they kind of knocked the Brewers into a tie for first, but I think that's kind of impressive. That's not something that many teams ever have chance to do, I wouldn't think. Somebody call Elias.

Think about this one: Tony Armas, Franquellis Osoria, and Romulo! Sanchez combined on a four-hit shutout tonight. Did your head explode out of surprise? If it didn't, nothing will ever surprise you ever, I promise. Because of that unlikely trio, the Pirates didn't need a lot of offense tonight. Still, they got a lot of offense with five guys chipping in two or more hits, including a Nate McLouth homer that somehow found its way to water. I do not understand the 2007 Pittsburgh Pirates. I suppose I never will.

Another first place team

After knocking the Cubs out of first place yesterday, the Pirates will now play the team that's taken their spot atop the division, the Brewers. Carlos Villaneuva and Tony Armas (who is still in the freaking rotation, I don't know why, but I'm surprised every time he starts) face off tonight at PNC as the Pirates try to stay hot (or maybe just lukewarm) while the Brewers try to stay atop the division. It's funny how things balance out. After years of getting killed by the division, the Pirates are almost .500 in the Central this year and yet they're still going to finish with the same old record.

Two links for you:
First up, the Biz of Baseball takes a look at Coonelly, and it's not a positive one (link via BBTF).

Next up, The Dugout is going over to the darkside (aka, joining myself and others at FanHouse), but before they drop the swear words and such, they're going out on top with a farewell extravaganza. If you're not reading, well, you should be.

Thinking about Coonelly

I've been reading about Frank Coonelly a lot over the past day or so. I've been trying to figure out who he is, what he does for Major League Baseball, and what that means for the future of the Pirates. Of course, my resources are a bit limited at the present- if you google him one of the first hits that comes up is the FanHouse post I did about him this afternoon.

The first thing I did after reading the requisite links on the first Google page (the only one I haven't linked yet that you should check out if you haven't is a Tim Marchman article in the New York Sun that he allowed Bronx Banter to reprint on their blog) was type his name into the search engine on MLB.com. Basically I just wanted to read a bio and see what this guy looked like (because yes, I'm shallow and like to judge people by looks). I found neither (though there are some pics of him here and here if you're interested). In fact, there's only one hit on all of MLB.com for Coonelly and it was an article that detailed one of Jason Giambi's many meetings with MLB officials this season (emphasis mine, of course):

Published reports said that Giambi was accompanied to his meeting at 245 Park Avenue in Manhattan by his agent, Arn Tellem, along with lawyer Brian O'Neill and Michael Weiner, a top lawyer for the MLB Players Association. Major League Baseball was represented by Rob Manfred, baseball's executive vice president for labor relations; Frank Coonelly, a senior vice president; and Howard Ganz, an outside counsel.

Seems like interesting company for him to be mixed in with, though it's mainly just a lot of lawyers (which is what Coonelly is, based on his position as labor relations counsel).

I filed that one away, possibly for future reference, and kept on reading. I moved on to the Baseball Primer thread about the move, because, as I'm sure a lot of you know, there's a ton of smart baseball people there that look at things in different ways. So, from what I can tell, Coonelly's position with baseball dealt mostly arbitration hearings, trying to keep the teams to comply with what the league wants to see in draft bonus money (the much ballyhooed "slot money) and free agent contracts. His name and the word "collusion" get tossed around in conjunction a lot. Knowing what Bud Selig thinks about those things, clearly, this is a scary prospect for Pirate fans.

Still, I'm not going to immediately rip this hire and that's for a couple reasons. One is because of something Keith Law wrote in the Primer thread that I was thinking even before I read it:

Coonelly was doing his job by working to improve compliance with MLB recommendations. I don't know why everyone is assuming that that was his personal philosophy, or that he would continue to follow Bud Selig's policies rather than whatever policies his owner wants him to follow.

Clearly, he'll be doing his job in Pittsburgh by doing whatever Nutting asks him to do, but just because he enforces the slot money for Selig doesn't mean he'll adhere to it when he leaves his post with baseball.

Secondly, how could it possibly hurt the Pirates to have a guy that knows the ins and outs of the baseball labor scene running the team? Remember that the PG reported earlier in the summer that the Pirates had more grievances filed against them than any other MLB team. If you didn't read Dejan's analysis of the DL era, this was one quote that stood out to me:

One agent said yesterday, "You never had the feeling that Dave cared about the players, and people in our business knew that. I'm glad to have his number out of my Rolodex."

Now you'll tell me that Coonelly was the one that had DL's back in all of those grievances, but again, that's because it was his job. Someone has to defend the guilty, too. At the very least, Coonelly knows the system inside and out and will keep messy situations like the Salomon Torres saga from taking place and that's a very good thing for the Pirates.

Finally, even if he is a guy that will sit on salaries the way Bud Selig wants them sat on, I don't necessarily see that as a bad thing. Remember, the Pirates' aren't bad because they're cheap. They're bad because under Littlefield and McClatchy, they spent the little money that they did have poorly. They traded Aramis Ramirez and draft poorly because of financial restraints, but they spent $10 million on Jeromy Burnitz and Joe Randa one winter, then traded for Matt Morris and his ginormous contract at the next season's trade deadline.

So what's the bottom line right now? Well, we wanted a baseball guy and we certainly got one. I thought it was strange to see so many GM-type names (Duquette, Garagiola, LaCava) being tossed around in conjunction with the CEO/President position, and Coonelly is clearly not in their mold at all. Every thing I read about him indicates that he's a very, very bright guy and he's got intricate knowledge of the things that you want your CEO to have intricate knowledge of if he's running the baseball operations. Still, I think it's a mistake to give anyone a free pass just because they're not Kevin McClatchy. The potential for this to be a move that just perpetuates the mentality that we're so used to and tired of certainly exists. Early indications are that the Pirates' GM job is a job that a lot of good baseball people would want and thusly, the first proving ground for Coonelly will be who he hires to fill Littlefield's position. Until the cogs in the machine start moving, all we can really do is speculate.

Ryan Doumit is the most fraglie man alive

If you've been reading for long enough, you know that I'm a big Ryan Doumit fan. It seems like every single year of Doumit's career follows the same pattern. Doumit comes up, kills the ball, has me ready to say, "I told you so," and then Doumit gets hurt and misses huge chunks of the season. This year he missed a bunch of time with an injured wrist, came back, and sprained his ankle badly in his first game back, an injury that will likely cause him to miss the rest of the year. Last year I joked that Doumit had glass hamstrings, this year I think we should just start calling him "Mr. Glass."

From the same update, Jason Bay is finally going to get his gimpy right knee MRI'd. Obviously I hope he's OK, but maybe the severity of the problem in his knee will go a ways towards explaining his lackluster hitting this year. Unfortunately, things are rarely that easy.

Game 142: Pirates 10 Cubs 5

Playing spoiler is only fun when you knock a team out of the playoffs that you don't like. Like, say, the only team in the division that finished worse than you last year, then went out and spent a third of a billion dollars to try and correct that. Today, the Pirates knocked the Cubs out of first place with a 10-5 win. They got to Steve Trachsel early and Matt Morris did his Matt Morris thing and that's enough to win on days when we score 10 runs. More interesting stuff coming soon.

The game that no one will watch

Pirates and Cubs at 1:35 today with what will probably be a rather sparse crowd. Steve Trachsel makes his second start as a Cub against Matt Morris. I suppose we could call this "the battle of veteran pitchers acquired for suspect reasons." The game isn't even on in Pittsburgh because FSP knows everyone will be watching this football game that's happening today. I do have a Coonelly post mostly done, but I'll post it this evening because no one is going to read it now anyways.

Game 141: Cubs 5 Pirates 1

It's funny to me that in a game where the Pirates actually manage to walk eight times, they only get two hits and only score once. I'll be honest, the Pirates' actual games aren't terribly interesting to me at the moment. One hand, it's nice to be able to unambiguously cheer for them to win, but on the other hand there are some other things happening within the organization that are much, much more important towards the goal of seeing the Pirates have a winning record before I finish grad school.

Littlefield's firing has certainly reinvigorated me from a blogger's perspective. I know that my writing here was getting stale and boring because well, I was the one writing it. I'm happy Littlefield is gone, but this team could win their last 21 games or lose their last 21 games and I don't think I'd feel appreciably different about either outcome. I'm much more interested in the moves this team is making with an eye towards the future. For the past couple years, I've felt like the Pirates were the Nicole Ritchie of the MLB superhighway. That is to say that while most other teams were moving in one direction, the Pirates were drunk and high behind the wheel, driving in the wrong lane, and moving the wrong direction. I now feel like there is a distinct chance that that could change, and accordingly, I'm a bit more interested in that than I am in the games. I won't stop recapping because that's one of the things I really like about writing WHYGAVS, but I hope you'll forgive me if the recaps aren't terribly detailed.

The Big Z and little Snell

Interesting pitching matchup tonight with Zambrano and Snell going at it. Emma mentioned in the comments that Snell will be miked up, so if you can watch, I'd do it just to see that. I'm still doing some digging on Coonelly, and I'll have a post up about him tomorrow.

Frank Coonelly is the Pirates next CEO

As per Ken Rosenthal, MLB's chief labor relations counsel will take over the Pirates CEO position. Cory's got a bunch of links up about him, I am trying to find out more and will have more later.

Reaction links and such

The reverberations from Dave Littlefield's firing are felt around the internet:

• Bucs Dugout
• Honest Wagner
• Pittsburgh Lumber Co. (and here and here)
  
• Be Like Tike
• The Parrot

Dejan also does some excellent analysis of the DL Era in the PG today.

Meanwhile Bugs and Cranks is breaking down the CEO search by interviewing a lot of people about Dan Duquette. I've got a gut feeling (and this is based on absolutely no actual knowledge) that Duquette is going to get the job.

Kevin Goldstein at BP talks about the Pirates newly available GM position:

Jim (Providence): The Pirates fired Littlefield, does it even matter?

Kevin Goldstein: It does, very much. Of the two jobs out there (PIT and HOU) and others expected (BAL, maybe), Pittsburgh is the one everyone wants.

I think he's right. This would be a great job for a good GM to prove his abilities, but the expectations are a bit low (link via Bucs Dugout).

Game 140: Pirates 6 Cubs 1

In a game that will merely be a footnote on one of the better days in recent Pirate history, the Pirates did manage to win the game on "The Day Littlefield Was Fired." If I recall correctly, they also won big the day Bonifay was fired, but I suppose that's neither here nor there. Another strong outing from Tom Gorzelanny, another big game from Jack Wilson, and another Pirates' win to avoid loss #80. The win also pulls them even with the Astros for fifth place in the division and now that Littlefield is gone, I'd love to see us not finish in last. Even better about last night's win? The Brewers are back even with the Cubs for first place in the Central. And the sun is shining today and I swear it's a little brighter than it was yesterday.

So there's a game tonight

Despite the high levels of joy and mass hysteria among Pirate fans tonight, their scheduled game hasn't been canceled. Tom Gorzelanny and Rich Hill will take the mound at PNC tonight and as Charlie points out, it's OK to cheer for the Pirates and not feel bad about yourself for once. Oh, and this one guy that used to play catcher for us and kind of used to be lots of people's favorite player on the Pirates is going to be wearing Cubs colors at PNC Park for the first time.

Dave Littlefield's tenure, 2001-2007

If you're looking for an over joyous reaction piece to Littlefield's firing, that just went up at FanHouse. But I think a lot of you already know the stuff that's written there, so let's dig a little deeper into this. First, let's hit up the key thoughts from this firing

1. Awesome.
   
2. About. Damn. Time.
3. Seriously, why is this happening now? Why wait all second half to tell us his job would be reevaluated at the end of the year, let him stay for the deadline and make the Morris deal, and then fire him now with 3 weeks left in the year?

My dad's explanation for this was simple; Nutting already has a CEO. No new executive wants to start with heads rolling. He doesn't want his name to be the one that Dave Littlefield will put with the day he lost his job. And besides, why waste even ten minutes on a guy who's future is a foregone conclusion. Fire him now, and the first thing that will happen under the new CEO will be a move towards building up instead of tearing down.

I think that's as good a guess as any, honestly. This wasn't a decision Nutting was ever going to make on his own, it was one he was planning on leaving up to the baseball people. But as we've all speculated for months, a new CEO means a new GM and a new GM likely means a new manager. There's only so much time to take care of that kind of stuff in the off-season. Tracy was hired almost immediately after he was let out of his contract in LA, which happened almost immediately after the World Series. If the new CEO is going to be immediately announced after the season ends, he's still going to have to move quickly to hire a GM and if that GM wants a new manager, he's going to have to move even faster. So why not cut out all of the unnecessary fat between now and then to move this process along?

Whatever happens, the Pirates can only take a lateral move from here. Littlefield's lack of vision (or at the very most, poor vision) in assembling his team has been one of the Pirates' biggest obstacles (depending on how much you blame ownership for certain things, I guess). Six years after he took over, the major league talent on the field is no better than it was when he got here and the cupboard in the minors is even emptier than it was before. We can moan about him getting six years before anyone recognized he was a bad GM, but that's over now. All we can do, and all the Pirates can do, is move on and hopefully move forward. It shouldn't be hard though, because I doubt we can go much further backwards.

HALLE FREAKING LUJAH

DAVE LITTLEFIELD IS FIRED.

I'll write more later because I'm at work now. But if you didn't know already, I just thought you should know.

Game 139: Cardinals 16 Pirates 4

I only saw a bit of the game this afternoon. I tuned in in the first inning with Steven Pearce at the plate and the bases loaded with two outs. I was mildly intrigued and somewhat excited. After taking a ball, Mike Maroth threw what appeared to be a hanging super-slow ball. Pearce took a huge cut and missed. Maroth, knowing a good deal when he saw one, followed that right up with a hanging super-slower ball. Pearce took a huger cut and missed. Maroth may be bad, but he's not stupid. He followed up with what appeared to be a hanging super-duper-slow ball. Pearce watched it into the catcher's glove. To say that I was disheartened by that sequence of events would be to say that the Hindenburg was a minor, fire related aviation mishap.

On an unrelated note, a spider that could kick David Eckstein's ass just wandered across the floor of my apartment before meeting Mr. Nike. I don't usually mind spiders and this thing freaked me out. Living alone is fun sometimes.

Anyways, I didn't see much of Bullington. I saw he was hitting 89 on the gun in the first inning, but he still managed to give up two runs in the inning even after Freddy tried to bail him out after an awesome double play. From his line, calling him "hittable" would be an understatement. I didn't really expect more from him, so I'm not terribly upset about this. I do wish people would stop referring to this game as his "major league debut" though. He got an appearance in back in '05 before his arm exploded. This was his first start.

As for the other side of things, Rick Ankiel is probably the only Cardinal I will ever root for ever. Seriously, how cool is the Ankiel story?

UPDATE: Never mind. Go f&$% yourself, Rick Ankiel.

Afternoon game

Brian Bullington makes his, erm, much anticipated (?) return to the bigs at 2:10 today vs. the pretty awful Mike Maroth. Logic dictates this will be a shootout, so in all likelihood, we're looking at a 2-1 Pirates loss.

Game 138: Pirates 8 Cardinals 2

You know, as much as I thought we'd help Mark Mulder make a triumphant return to the mound tonight, it would've been really disappointing to lose a game to a guy that hasn't pitched in a year, then had to sit through a rain delay before the game started. And apparently the rain delay made Tony Armas better (which is only because it couldn't have conceivably made him worse). Tonight's game sparked a ten minute conversation between me and my dad about David Eckstein's throwing motion. I'm not sure the man has a rotator cuff. Either that, or he's got a really small one. Good thing he's so damn gritty. Also, Jack Wilson is batting .282. WTF? His OPS+ is nearing "average" territory. LaRoche is on fire and hit another home run. But please, before you announce that his line is near where we expected it to be, please remember that his slugging percentage is still 100 points lower than it was last year. What he's done is damn impressive in light of his awful start, but his stat line isn't going to completely recover from that April. We can only hope that it doesn't happen again.

Mark Mulder is back

Mark Mulder will take the mound against us tonight, which is bad news because Mark Mulder owns us. Sure he's taken a year off to have shoulder surgery and all, but we haven't changed in that year, that's for sure. His mound opponent tonight will be Tony Armas, who is STILL IN THE F%&$*$% ROTATION despite the presence of Brian Bullington, Jon Van Benschoten, Matt Morris, Tom Gorzelanny, Ian Snell, and Shane Youman on the Pirates' current active roster. Seriously, this pisses me off. The only motivation to tune into tonight is to see if anyone makes any revealingly nerdy X-File jokes about the return of "Agent Mulder" to the Cardinals rotation during the broadcast.

Fun with comparisons

From today's Pirates page at the PG, I give you the following two headlines:

Tracy Wants Young Starters to Go the Distance

and

Buchholz in Bullpen After Historic No-Hitter

Now one of these articles is about a highly successful franchise and how they're preserving the arm of one of their top prospects. The other is about a dismal organization mired in losing and how they want their pitchers to "realize the season is six months long." Admittedly, arm injuries are a nice reminder of that.

Game 137: Cardinals 6 Pirates 2

I honestly can't even watch games that Matt Morris starts. I just get really, really angry at the fact that he's even on the team, and that's before he starts giving up a ton of runs. Then he gives up a ton of runs and I want to throw my computer at something. But that would be a bad idea because this thing wasn't particularly cheap and hell, I'm just a grad student/blogger. That's a great pickup line and all, but it doesn't exactly make me Bob Nutting, if you know what I mean.

Oh, right, the game. Morris pitched and we lost. Joel Piniero pitched pretty badly, but we couldn't score on him. I don't understand how Franquellis Osoria gives up runs in every game he pitches, but his ERA is under 4.00. David Eckstein had three hits and scored two runs. I don't like him at all. He's like a less talented Jack Wilson that people love because he's short. Speaking of whom, Jack Wilson had two more hits and is batting .278 now. You know it's a bad sign when people are wondering if Jack's "regained his form" and he's not even slugging .400 on the season.

Matt Morris grudgmatch part deux

Somehow within his first five weeks as a Pirate, Matt Morris gets to make a start against each of his old teams. This kind of feels like when the Steelers cut someone on Monday and their opponent for the weekend picks the guy up and adds him to the practice squad on Tuesday or something like that. Except that Morris is making eight figures and not going anywhere next Monday. Tonight he faces another one of the Cardinals reclamation projects of 2007, Joel Piniero who's been decidedly not bad with St. Louis this year. You may recall Piniero was on the Pirates' radar this year. Hindsight's 20/20 and all, but let's watch him tonight and compare him to the Tony Armas experience. I've got a feeling I know how this will turn out...

Call-ups galore

Despite my posting negligence, apparently Pittsburgh Pirates news does still occur. They called up Bullington, Van Benschoten, and Dave Davidson today/yesterday. Bullington becomes feel good, "I can't believe this guy is taking the mound again after all those horrific arm injuries" story #2 of the year.

It doesn't look like anything is certain yet, but Bullington will probably be getting a start this week between Ian Snell getting pushed up a day for Paul Maholm's stiff back and Zach Duke's not readiness (also mentioned in the above linked notebook). Bullington's numbers at AAA this year were very, very similar to John Van Benschoten's numbers in AAA this year. That probably doesn't bode well for him because Van Benschoten got wrecked in his few major league starts. Sadly, I find myself thinking, "but he can't be worse than Zach Duke, can he?"

Game 136: Pirates 11 Cardinals 0

You know, it was funny having the St. Louis TV feed for this game. The whole first three innings, their announcers talked on and on about how bad Kip Wells has been this year. Like, non-stop. Worse than Pirate fans. You would've thought that Kip Wells was singlehandedly responsible for all the bad stuff that's happened to the Cards this year and that without him in the rotation, the Cards would be running away from the rest of the National League as the best team by far. The thing is, as I noted earlier, Wells hasn't even been that bad the past two months.

He was that bad today, though. He wasn't the usual "I can barely find the strike zone" Kip Wells sucky, he was just getting hit all over the park by just about everyone in the Pirates lineup. Of course, things didn't stop there. Andy Cavazos came in and the Pirates rocked him almost as hard, which made for a pretty boring Labor Day laugher. The interesting part was Snell today. He didn't pitch well, didn't strike a lot of people out, threw a lot of balls and walked a lot of batters, and put seven donuts up on the board. After all those games this year when he's had seemingly great stuff, only to give up an ill-timed homer and have five runs hung on him, he has a game like today. I guess everything balances itself out eventually.

The Kipper!

Ahh, Kip Wells. The former "Most Frustrating Pirate of All-Time" (TM) will take the mound this afternoon (it's a 2:15 PM Labor Day start) against the man who's looking to take his title, Ian Snell. I'm not here to discuss the merits of 2003 Wells vs. 2007 Snell, but Snell is quickly becoming the king of, "Well, he pitched well ... except for that three run homer that he gave up to (insert a lefty here) in the second." That's in direct contrast to his awesome first half in which he shut lefties down and kept the ball in the park (that's a post for later, though). As for Kip, he's actually got a sub-4.00 ERA since mid-June. He's still frustratingly walking a million people, which isn't something that will help the Pirates out at all and will probably lead to 11 strikeouts today. Don't forget that the Cards are still only 2 games behind the Cubs despite a bad-luck ridden championship defense year that makes what the Steelers went through in the NFL last year look like nothing.

Game 136: Brewers 7 Pirates 4

The big story from this one is that Gorzelanny really, really struggled out on the mound today. He only made through four innings and he needed 105 pitches to get that far. His overall ball/strike numbers weren't too bad (105 pitches, 66 strikes), but he walked three batters and gave up six hits and really just didn't have it today. Unfortunately, neither did Franquellis Osoria and every time the Pirates got close, he let more Brewers cross the plate and that was that for this one. "17-10 in August" quickly turned into a five game losing streak and more general malaise. It's amazing how fast the Pirates can pull something like that off.

One more Brewers game

Today we get to see first hand why signing Jeff Suppan this offseason would've been a bad move for us. Of course, since we're the Pirates he'll probably dominated us and hang a tough loss on Tom Gorzelanny's shoulders. Gorzo is gunning for his 14th win of the year, but he'll do it with an outfield that has both Nyjer Morgan and Nate McLouth in it. I don't know who decided that it was a better idea to play Morgan than Steve Pearce, but that person is wrong. This is probably Rajai Davis fallout, so expect to see Morgan get a ton of playing time this last month.

Game 135: Brewers 12 Pirates 3

It would appear to me that the only thing remotely worthwhile about this one was the fact that Steven Pearce played. According to everything I've read about the game, Pearce did what he's done all year: hit. He had two singles and drove a pitch into the right center gap that Bill Hall made a diving catch on.

Beyond that there wasn't much to write home about. Youman got pounded, no one but Pearce and Freddy hit the ball, Juan Perez came back and looked just like he did before he left, and so on and so on. I can't believe that the team that played most of August up until Tuesday's double-header is the same team that's on the field right now.

Early gamethread

Shane Youman and Dave Bush go at it in one of those goofy 7 PM Saturday starts, even though we're in the Central Time Zone tonight. You'll probably be watching college football (I will be, UNC isn't known for it's football team but they have permanent stands here!). If you aren't you can read the famous Potato Toss story, which is just awesome.

Game 134: Brewers 3 Pirates 2

I think that Yovani Gallardo dominating the Pirates is probably we should get used to. Maybe not him homering against us, but definitely him pitching well against us. With three straight losses, I have to assume that the Pirates improbably hot streak is over just as quickly as it started. No slow decline or floating back to earth, just over for everyone not named Adam LaRoche (who had three of our six hits last night and is now hitting almost .270, I was one of his biggest defenders and I didn't see that coming).