The first cuts and other spring miscellanea

Steve Lerud and Milver Reyes are the first two players to head back to minor league camp.

Awesome story about Steve Pearce in the PG today. This quote from Trent Jewett brings tears of joy to my eyes:
"He has bad intentions with every swing," Jewett said. "He wants to punish the ball."
It will be a Dusty Baker-esque mistake to keep Pearce in AAA to start this season.

Update on Zach Duke's outing from yesterday: he got ZERO swings and misses. That's even worse than giving up two homers in one inning.

Current team issues and my level of interest in them this spring:
  1. Ryan Doumit's quest to supplant Ronny Paulino as the starting catcher.
  2. Finding Steve Pearce a place to play in Pittsburgh
  3. Whether Zach Duke is anything more than a batting practice pitcher.
Beyond this, there's some other stuff (McLouth vs. Morgan, how guys like Kim and Mientkiewicz look in camp, etc.) that's kind of important, but not really grabbing my interest at the moment.

Popular posts from this blog

WHYGAVS has moved

It's official. WHYGAVS now has a new official home. It's actually at WHYGAVS.com , which means that it's the same as the old home, but I'm off Blogger now, which means that this old link won't redirect. You'll have to subscribe to a new feed if that's how you read WHYGAVS, but beyond that things are going to be mostly the same.
Read more

Links

For reasons that will become shortly apparent, I've been working on cleaning/updating the sidebar links. That means that I've got some new links to add to the sidebar, as well as some other things for your general perusal. Cory Humes, Geeves, and Alan from Bucco Wire are all blogging again at MVN under the header Pirate Revolution . There's also The Green Weenie and The 'Burgh Blues , two blogs I should've added some time ago. Meanwhile, Dejan's series about the Pirates' presence in the Dominican is awesome. I'm sure most of you have been checking it out as it's been published, but if you haven't I can't recommend parts one , two , and three , Renee Gayo's list of the top 5 prospects yet to play in America , and everything else that DK's put on his blog on the subject enough. It's an awesome look in to the Bucs' international operation and how things have changed since Bob Nutting took the lack of Pirate presence in the reg
Read more

The Pirates are talking to Mark Loretta

There are a couple of possible reactions when reading that the Pirates are talking to Mark Loretta . The easy reaction is, "Well, so long as he's replacing Chris Gomez, I'm fine with that." That's true. Loretta's a useful utility infielder that can still handle a bat fairly well and can play just about every position in the infield in a short-term capacity. In fact, he's probably a better hitter than Gomez and he can't really be a worse fielder. That may make him more the successor to Doug Mientkiewicz, which is fine by me as well. But then I started thinking. Aren't we trying to trade our shortstop away? Isn't "successor to Jack Wilson" a position that needs filled on the depth chart at the moment? I mean, I know Huntington's not looking at Loretta as a starting shortstop next year ... but what if he is? This is how the offseason drives people crazy. You can go months and months without hearing any rumors, then as soon as rumor
Read more