Where have you gone, Andy Van Slyke?

If you've been a reader here for a long time, you've probably noticed that I don't spend a whole lot of time criticizing the local media for the things they write about the Pirates (unless you count gentle pot-shots at Pirates.com), even when they're incredibly bone-headed. The reason for that is pretty simple- I'm not trying to do their job and I don't particularly want their job. You probably notice that I link to the Post-Gazette a lot and the Trib hardly ever. There's a reason for that, and you probably even know what that reason is and we don't need to spend a whole lot of time wallowing in stuff like that. There are rare occasions however, when someone actually writes something that offends me. Mike Seate's (who?) c olumn about how lame Pirate fans are is one of those rare occasions. Charlie has already ripped the column apart in wonderful fashion for its lame reasoning and I don't want to step on his toes (I strongly recommend you read h...

I like to think at most points I'm a pretty self-aware kind of guy. I've got a pretty good idea of what being a Pirate fan to the extent of writing like 1000 pages on a blog about them says about me. And yet despite that self-awareness, I still manage to surprise myself from time to time. Yesterday was one of the days I managed to do that. I came home Saturday afternoon for Spring Break. I don't have any elaborate plans for this break: I spent several weekends this semester traveling to grad school visits already and I've got some other time booked for traveling to conferences and other things, so a week at home on the couch sounds pretty good to me right now. Yesterday afternoon my dad, one of my brothers, and I decided to go see Ghost Rider . This is pretty much an annual thing at my house. Every year around this time Marvel puts out a crappy comic book movie about some fringe character that my dad, being a comic geek, gets psyched about, which in turn gets me and my ...

If there's one topic I've purposely avoided in the past month or so, it's the Mark McGwire Hall of Fame topic. Why have I avoided it? Because in all honesty, it's an incredibly in depth ethical question that most people don't give the thought to it that they should and I get sick of reading half assed columns fired off about why if Mac might've used steroids he shouldn't get into the Hall when we all know too well that these very same people will vote for Barry Bonds in seven years or whenever he becomes eligible. But I'm finally reading some decent and interesting stuff on it (among that is the Bill Simmons article I'll talk about later, some stuff in SI I'll talk about later, and this article by Gwen Knapp in the SF Chronicle sent to me by reader Eric like a month ago which I won't talk about later, but it's a good read and a well reasoned point so you should check it out if you've got the chance anyways), so I'm finally goi...

Doing some browsing on the internet looking for something Pirate-related to talk about has finally brought me some inspiration today. While browsing the BBTF blog I found a link to this interesting post by the Baseball Crank. Using the new toys at Baseball Reference , BC compared a bunch of pitchers across generations to see how they pitched in their wins compared to their losses (just read the whole post, it's worth it). He found that as much as people bitch about wins and losses as a useful stat, things evened themselves out over time and in general even great pitchers pitch very well in their wins and poorly in their losses. This is incredibly intriguing to me, though I suppose maybe I shouldn't be that surprised. Still, career-wise, Shawn Chacon has a better ERA in games that he's won than Chris Carpenter , it's just that he pitches well enough to win on a much less consistent basis than Carp does. Anyways, I've decided to have some fun with these splits and...