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I missed this yesterday, but there was an interesting Stats Geek chat to go along with his column. The talk continued on with the young pitchers and I found this passage the Geek dug up to be interesting:

Crunching some numbers from Baseball Prospectus, using their Value Over Replacement Player system, Duke is rated the 29th best starter among the 64 with at least 100 innings in the NL, and all but the Washington Nationals have at least one better pitcher. But Snell and Maholm are ranked 34th and 35th and Gorzelanny, who doesn't have the innings, has been better than all three so far. So it's deceptively good staff by being more or less average across the board. A lot of teams have two pitchers better, but the Pirates are deeper at three and four. If they could add a fifth pitcher, they might do something in this weak division next year.

That goes along with an earlier comment from the chat:

Many in the blogosphere think the Pirates are still pretty far from even a .500 team. I disagree.

Guilty as charged. I won't go all into this again, but having Duke, Snell, and Maholm 29, 34, and 35 in the NL in VORP is surprsing, I wouldn't have put any of them that high this year. I certainly do think they're going to be better next year (my questions lie in how good they can be and of course the offense) and apparently, they've been a little better than I've given them credit for.

I also missed Dejan's good story about the young pitchers yesterday. A lot of the focus is on improving their stamina next year, and if they cut their walks down like they have in the second half they'll have no problem with that. Maholm's recent shoulder problems aside (which don't seem to be major), I've been impressed with the durability that Snell, Duke, and Maholm have showed and yes, I've also been impressed with how Tracy and co. have handled them this year.
This quote also jumped out at me:

"For our starters to go from 180 innings to 210 innings next season shouldn't be a problem," Tracy said. "I don't think Duke has any problem now.

"His delivery is so clean. It's a delivery that's just very conducive to a very long tenure as a major-league pitcher. There's just not a whole lot that can go wrong with it."

The reason it jumped out at me is because there was much clamoring among Pirate fans that Colborn had ruined Duke by trying to iron out some "inconsistencies" in his delivery this spring, and it appears that he may be settling in to it now, with the changes having been made for the better.

Even Deadspin is noticing the Pirates good play of late:

Pittsburgh did to LA what they had done to the Mets last week: inexplicably cease to suck.

And finally, the PG has up a much more complete obituary for Syd Thrift.