Let's start with a poll

Let's starting the off-season off with a poll. How did the Pirates fare this year in relation to your pre-season expectations? Not to pat myself on the back or anything, but if you remember my piece in The Hardball Times Season Preview, I wrote this back in December (it was published in March):
Barring a late fire sale before the season, the 2008 Pirates will be a lot like the 2007 Pirates: flashes of potential and some exciting baseball eventually outweighed by their lack of talent and a final result of 67-72 wins.
So, I'm picking the third result. Keep your preseason expectations in mind, not what you expected in early June or anything like that.

Popular posts from this blog

82 wins

  This is how it starts: in 1989 in a living room in front of an old cathode-ray tube TV, the kind with the power button that pulls out into a little knob to adjust the volume and the individual buttons for channels running down the side, with a four-year old asking his dad a non-stop stream of questions about the Pirates/Phillies game on the TV. Or maybe this is how it starts: in a parking lot at Three Rivers Stadium where the same little boy is tailgating before his first-ever Pirate game, eating food out of the back of a car, then watching the Pirates dismantle the Expos 6-1 with his favorite player hitting a home run.  Or maybe it starts in the second floor hallway on the morning of October 15th, 1992. That's where he finds out that the Pirates blew the 1-0 lead they when he went to bed the night before in the most painful way possible and that, for the third season in a row they will not go to the World Series. The worst is yet to come, though, and no one has any i...
Read more

80 wins

  Good morning. It is September 3rd  2013. With last night's win, the Pirates are 80-57 Since 1992, the Pirates failed to win 80 games in the following seasons*: 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997 , 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012 . There is another way to write that list up. It could be written like this: 1993-2012. It's fitting that the final years on the countdown are 1997 and 2012, because there are not two more memorable years that the Pirates have had during their 20 year losing streak. The 1997 season was, of course, The Freak Show. As previously discussed , the Pirates jettisoned their entire post-Bonds core of talent over the end of the 1996 season and the following winter. The 1997 Pirates were supposed to be a lousy baseball team that would lose a bunch of games in the interest of laying a foundation for the 2001 Pirates, who would usher in a new era of Pirate baseb...
Read more

Pirates, Alvarez agree to new contract

Holy crap. On Sunday nights between about 10 PM and 2 AM, I get tied up in making my weekly rewinds for FanHouse and I don't venture to many websites beyond Getty Images or Creative Commons, unless I'm bouncing out to write up an incredibly overdue recap of the Sunday afternoon Pirate game. That means that I missed the Post-Gazette refreshing it's stories at midnight. Which means I missed this : In a stunning reversal of a summer-long drama, the Pirates and top draft pick Pedro Alvarez last night agreed to terms on a revised four-year, major league contract worth a guaranteed $6,355,000, according to three sources intimately familiar with the talks. Dejan has many more details in the article, so I'd recommend that you check that out. Without knowing who initiated these talks and who got this deal done, I'd say that this is great news for the Pirates that is going to make other teams very, very unhappy. The Pittsburgh Pirates' #1 concern has to be the Pittsburgh ...
Read more