Where have you gone, Andy Van Slyke?

This interview with Nyjer Morgan has me laughing out loud, though I'm not sure that's the intended effect. Don Wakamatsu was hired by the Mariners to be their next manager. He's the first Asian-American manager in big league history. I fail to understand why a good player on a non-playoff team can't be valuable . Without Pujols, the Cardinals win like 75 games this year. You can argue that the Phillies wouldn't have made the playoffs without Ryan Howard, but they also wouldn't have made it without Jimmy Rollins, Chase Utley, Pat Burrell, Shane Victorino, or Jayson Werth, who were either more or comparably valuable to Howard. Picking the guys with the most RBIs on a playoff team isn't the best way to decide who's the most valuable; it's lazy. All hail Albert Pujols, the best hitter on the face of the planet and therefore, the most valuable.

I'm excited, I think I get to break out the way-too-rarely-used "rant" tag on this one. There's not really any one incident that's prompting this post, but rather a full winter of rage building inside of me that I finally have to vent. Every time someone that hasn't worked for the Pirates for more than five months talks about needing to "change the culture of losing" in Pittsburgh, I want to vomit. It is a wonderful idea. It is something that needs to happen on Federal Street. At the same time, it's not something that you can do by talking about it and it's not something that people that haven't experienced soul crushing losing can quantify. Sean Casey pledged to change the culture of losing in Pittsburgh. Jim Tracy promise to bring winning ways with him from Los Angeles. Lloyd McClendon's entire tenure was all about trying to do that. I think Dave Littlefield or Kevin McClatchy mentioned it at least once an off-season every year from...

So I'm patrolling the Pirate internet looking for some Pirate news to talk about because it's painfully scarce right now and the fact that I've barely been writing makes me feel really bad because there are still lots of people reading and commenting (incidentally, we're only 98 comments away from the 10,000th comment in WHYGAVS history, I'll be monitoring the situation). So I click on over to the team page and what do I read? First, I get the following headline: Morgan speeding through Bucs system Now there is a statement which is technically true and intentionally misleading. Remember that a lot of you were surprised when I mentioned that Nyjer Morgan was 26-years old. Now, I can't speak for everyone, but I tend to assume that anyone that spends their day reading Pirate blogs and leaving comments in October (which was when I did the post about Morgan and McLouth and Duffy and talked about their performances relative to age, etc.) is a pretty freaking hardcore...

Yep, the "C" word. Clutch. Dejan's got a long article in the PG today on clutch . I've talked about clutch and it's existence and stuff at length before, so you can search the archives if you really want that because I don't feel like going into it today. Charlie has also done a great post about the article which I think you should read. There's one part that he talks about in his post that I especially want to emphasize here. It's mostly reiteration at this point, but bear with me. From Dejan's article: When his team wins, Jim Tracy invariably points to "big" hits that were delivered. When the team loses, he points to the lack of same. Even after the Pirates were blanked on three measly hits in their home opener April 9, Tracy lamented, "We had chances." Tracy's view is reflected in how he forms his lineup, bucking the modern thinking that the highest on-base percentage players should be stacked at the top. Instead, he f...

How can you tell when the baseball team you play for has absolutely no respect for you? When they decide to retire the number of a player that hasn't suited up for them in 67 years, despite the fact that you're currently wearing the number . Welcome to Humberto Cota's world. The Pirates are going to announce tonight that they're going to retire Paul Waner's #11 . Tonight happens to be the all-important 81st anniversary of Waner's debut with the Pirates. I'm not debating the worthiness of retiring Waner's number (I suspect if I did, Bob Smizik would hunt me down and kill me in cold blood), it just seems kind of strange that they're doing it right now with a player already wearing #11 on the roster. And it's not a rookie who's just been given the number, it's a guy that's been here for some time. I mean I know Cota sucks and he's just the backup catcher, but would it kill the team to wait until he's not around, say, next year? T...

I need to click the little "Save As Draft" button at the bottom of this stupid blogging program more often. I was 2/3rds of the way through a Season Preview post when my Firefox crashed, as it has been wont to do lately. I am unsure why it's doing this, though I suspect it has something to do with having very little free memory on my computer, though I'm too lazy at the moment to find out. Anyways, I'll rewrite the season preview post because I really liked it and felt like it was getting somewhere, but can't do it tonight because I'm a bit worn out after a full weekend of celebrating St. Patty's Day and the NCAA Tournament. Still, I hate leaving a full day without a post when there's no exceedingly good reason for me to do so, so instead I'm going to rip into some Paul Meyer drivel. Why? Because it's easy and because crap like this freaking drives me up the wall. And maybe because I'm tired and just a little ill-tempered after losing ...