Where have you gone, Andy Van Slyke?

So we've talked a whole lot about various minutiae that may or may not help the Pirates in 2007, but none of that matters any more because the season is finally upon us. Being the writer of a Pirates blog, I feel encumbered to write some kind of season preview because, well, that's what this thing is for, right? Let's see what I can come up with. As a fan, I refuse to get myself excited about this team. Yes, it's true that they should probably be better than last year. Maybe that's because of Adam LaRoche. Maybe that's because they were 30-60 before the All-Star break last year and it's really hard to be much worse than that. So why do I refuse to get excited? It's probably a defense mechanism. I used to get excited every year and they're bad every year so I'm giving up on being excited this year. The problem can be summed up in one word for the Pirates this year: depth. That was all that I meant by the John Wasdin/Don Kelly comment the other day...

NL East Phillies Mets (WC) Braves Marlins Nationals So why the Phillies this year? Because the Mets have an awful starting rotation, that's why. I still think the Mets potent offense wins them the Wild Card. The Marlins are still a year away and might step back with injuries to their young rotation. The Nationals might be the worst team ever. NL Central Brewers Cardinals Cubs Astros Reds Pirates I'm feeling like a healthy Ben Sheets is the difference in the division this year. The Cards will come back a bit to the division, but the Cubs didn't get enough better to pass them and challenge for the Wild Card. The Pirates, well, are the Pirates (see John Wasdin and Don Kelly comment below ). NL West Dodgers Padres D'Backs Rockies Giants Another division that I don't know much about. The Giants are still geriatric and Zito isn't that good, the other four teams are very close. I think the two teams that finished above the pack last season will again. Umm, that's a...

AL East Yankees Red Sox (Wild Card) Blue Jays Devil Rays Orioles Let's be original with the finishing order in this division, eh? They're picked in this order assuming Clemens doesn't pitch for the Red Sox. If he does they'll probably have the best rotation of all time ever and I think they could win the division. Meanwhile, the Yankees have an awesome offense. I hate hearing about the Sox and Yankees, but this should be a hell of a division race. The other teams? They're just in the wrong division AL Central Twins Indians Tigers White Sox Royals One of the best divisions in baseball is probably the hardest to predict. The Twins are going to suffer with Silva and Ponson in the rotation and Garza in AAA, but I can't imagine that will last long. They still have Santana, Mauer, and Morneau. The Indians finished 11 games under their pythagorean record last year. The Tigers are young and good. The White Sox are still good but getting older. Really the top four might ...

Freddy Sanchez must equal or at least approximate his 2006 season. This is the eighth part of a running season preview in which I look at things that I think have to happen in order for the Pirates to be a decent baseball team in 2007 and decide how likely I think they are to happen. Part 1 can be found here , Part 2 here , Part 3 here , Part 4 here , Part 5 here , Part 6 here , and Part 7 here . Freddy Sanchez had what most people would probably call a career year in 2006, winning the NL Batting Title and hitting .344/.378/.473. Unfortunately, the Pirates' offense this year isn't good enough for Freddy's 2006 to be a career year. He's going to bat third and chances are pretty damn good that for at least a month or so he's going to be the only person in front of Adam LaRoche and Jason Bay that can get on base with any kind of regularity at all, so he's going to have to do it. I've looked at Freddy's 2006 in the context of his minor league numbers before ...

One of the Joses must be a useful baseball player. This is the fourth part of a running season preview in which I look at things that I think have to happen in order for the Pirates to be a decent baseball team in 2007 and decide how likely I think they are to happen. Part 1 can be found here , Part 2 here , Part 3 here , Part 4 here , Part 5 here , and Part 6 here . I think this one is pretty self-explanatory. One of the spots in the Pirates line-up will be filled by a player named Jose. Both of them could be good and actually were good at various points last year. Both of them could also be bad and were quite bad at most points last year. The Pirates need one of them to step up and be some kind of consistent offensive performer if they're hoping to have some kind of offense that approaches average this year. The question is, is it possible? Let's look at 2006 first. Jose Castillo was literally one of the worst regular players in all of baseball from June through the end of t...

Today's thesis statement: For the love of God, could we just be average on defense? This is the fourth part of a running season preview in which I look at things that I think have to happen in order for the Pirates to be a decent baseball team in 2007 and decide how likely I think they are to happen. Part 1 can be found here , Part 2 here , Part 3 here , Part 4 here , and Part 5 here . We all know the Pirates defense was bad last year. Perhaps the best way to quantify it is to remember that the three Pirate starters who pitched all year (Snell, Duke, and Maholm) all among the ten worst BABIP rates in the majors last year. According to BP 2007 (which I finally got my hands on, it should've come last Friday but the mail at Duquesne is always a day slow and I left for break before it got delivered, but I have it now so it's all good), the Pirates were the first team to do that since the 1995 Astros. So let's continue with the BP 2007 thought process and look at the startin...

The Fifth Starter and Beyond Once upon a time I started writing a drawn out season preview. This is the fifth part of it and hopefully more will be coming in a timely fashion . Part 1 can be found here , Part 2 here , Part 3 here , Part 4 here . The Pittsburgh Pirates had rotation problems in 2006. This is not a shocking statement by any means at all. The biggest rotation problem did not arise from having Victor Santos or Shawn Chacon as the fifth starter for most of the season, because almost everyone has a Santos or Chacon filling that role for the better part of the season. The problem came in that for the better part of the season the fourth starter was Oliver Perez, Kip Wells, Santos, or someone of the same ilk. There was only a short part of the season in which the Pirates could trot out Zach Duke, Paul Maholm , Ian Snell, and Tom Gorzelanny as their top four starters, as they hope to do this year. If they are successful in that endeavor, it doesn't much matter who the fi...

The bullpen must find a way to replace Mike Gonzalez and the Salomon Torres innings we potentially lose with him at closer. This is the fourth part of a running season preview in which I look at things that I think have to happen in order for the Pirates to be a decent baseball team in 2007 and decide how likely I think they are to happen. Part 1 can be found here and Part 2 here and Part 3 here . I hadn't planned on doing one of these this week because I've got a ton of stuff to do, but snow days can considerably lighten the load of a college student's life and so here we go... The one aspect of the LaRoche trade that tends to get glossed over is the innings in the bullpen. Between Torres and Gonzo last year, they covered 147 and 1/3 innings. Since Gonzo only threw 54 of them, the lowest number by any regular in our bullpen, it would seem pretty easy to replace those innings with Torres as closer. The problem is that Torres probably isn't going to throw 93 innings th...

The four pitchers at the top of our rotation must not get hurt. This is the second third part of a running season preview in which I look at things that I think have to happen in order for the Pirates to be a decent baseball team in 2007 and decide how likely I think they are to happen. Part 1 can be found here and Part 2 here. I really like the Stats Geek's characterization of the top of the Pirates rotation as a "Jeff Suppan by committee" rotation. You don't necessarily need a defined ace, #2 guy, #3 guy, etc. if you have a bunch of guys that don't suck (Cory did a nice break down based on Jeff Sackmann's work here , with Sackmann's original article here ). Among Duke, Snell, Gorzelanny, and Maholm there might not be one stand out ace, but there also isn't a Shawn Chacon. If the four of them can stay healthy, they're going to result in a very good top four of the rotation. Of course, health is the major question. It's pretty hard to predic...

Jason Bay must continue to produce at a high level. This is the second part of a running season preview in which I look at things that I think have to happen in order for the Pirates to be a decent baseball team in 2007 and decide how likely I think they are to happen. Part 1 can be found here. This one kind of seems like a no-brainer. I mean, Jason Bay has been head and shoulders above every other Pirate player at the plate the past three years and he's only 28 years old, so why shouldn't we expect him to produce at a high level? To put it simply, Bay's numbers dropped last year in every single important offensive statistic except for home runs and RBIs (and RBIs are certainly debatable in terms of their value when measuring an offensive player's worth). So will it happen again? Bay has to keep up a high level of production for the LaRoche trade to be significant because the reason the LaRoche trade was significant in the first place was that it gave us two mashers at ...

Chris Duffy must be a consistent offensive contributor for the Pirates to win. This is the first part of a running season preview in which I look at things that I think have to happen in order for the Pirates to be a decent baseball team in 2007 and decide how likely I think they are to happen. Before I get into whether or not Chris Duffy can be a consistent offensive contributor, I think it's important to talk about why the Pirates need him to be one. Simply put, they need to put people on base in front of Adam LaRoche and Jason Bay. Freddy Sanchez will likely do his share, though Jack Wilson likely will not. Duffy is the wild card. He's also the only real speed threat on the team, which isn't a huge deal but it's at least something to think about. People like to compare Duffy to Tike Redman a lot because they seem to be players of a similar make and they both had scintillating quarter seasons that excited the hell out of Pirate fans at similar ages (25 for Duff and 2...

I think it's about time to stop complaining about red uniforms and everything Jack Wilson says and kick into some serious baseball talk. Specifically it's time to start thinking about 2007. Last year I did a post for each player and did predictions, but those turned out poorly, were mostly just guesses, and aren't nearly as good or fun as Charlie's community projections. Accordingly, I'm going to try something different this year. Accordingly, I'm going to do something different this year. I probably will preview the individual players at some point, likely much closer to the season. Until then, I'm going to look at what needs to happen for the Pirates to be good in 2007. It's not very likely that they'll be good, but it does seem to be at least a little more plausible this year than in the past. I'm going to try and look at all of the puzzle pieces that need to fall into place and just how likely those pieces are to end up where they need to be...