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OT: Pirates Talk: Lets Play Ball

cookthebooks said:
cruz goes to a good team and probably becomes a more responsible player. truly i think its a case of who cares about playing for the pirates
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I think you're almost definitely right.

I just don't even know what you can do at this point. The entire organization needs to be purged from the top down. The entire culture of the organization needs to be reset. If getting Paul Skenes does nothing to change your organization, there is something seriously wrong with your organization.
 
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cookthebooks said:
cruz goes to a good team and probably becomes a more responsible player. truly i think its a case of who cares about playing for the pirates
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Pirates season is over 4 games in. The days of the "Battlin" Buccos are long, long gone and Pirates fans need to just accept it. Paul Skenes despises pitching in Pittsburgh.
 
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I legitimately started laughing when Bednar spiked that ball and the Marlins player scored on the wild pitch.

This team needs a complete reboot, from the owner, management, coaches and players. Paul Skenes is the only guy that should survive the purges, but frankly you might as well just trade him to an actual team so he's not wasting years here.
 
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Empoleon8771 said:
Again, this gives too much of a pass on the player. Plenty of other teams have not had issues swapping players like that. Jackson Merrill nearly won ROY after moving from SS to CF last year for the Padres, while finishing with a +11 OAA according to statcast. Cruz not being able to catch a basic fly ball or regularly making stupid decisions with his throws is an issue of a lack of focus and a lack of development. That's not only on the management/coaching, that's also on Cruz.

Cruz got moved out from SS to CF because he couldn't play SS defense, and is now showing he can't play CF defense. This team can't develop for shit, but the players aren't innocent here either.

I actually think IKF is a good example of how you can't just hand-wave the responsibility away from the players. Back in 2023, the Yankees randomly decided that IKF would move from SS/3B to being their new CF despite never playing the OF in the majors. He finished with a +1 OAA and -1 DRS at CF, which isn't anything amazing but is totally passable defense. You can't just hand-wave away Cruz's constant throwing miscues or being unable to catch a routine fly out because "he came up as a shortstop", plenty of other players have been able to make those kind of changes without botching routine plays.

This all comes from the top, where Nutting cares about not losing money more than he cares about winning, but there is a massive issue with a lack of accountability that makes both the players and management sloppy as hell. The players don't give a damn because they view the Pirates as "I don't have any other options", as Jarrod Dyson appropriately said a few years ago.
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That's fine. Blame Cruz all you want but this is not a single player problem. The entire organization is a joke and they can't develop anyone. There's a pretty decent chance that had Cruz come up with an organization that knows how to develop players then he would be a much better player right now. Instead he's trash, like every other player that comes out of the Pirates minor league system. I think that system and the people running it are the real problem, not the individual players.
 
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MrBrightside said:
I mean, I know it’s easy to be alarmist today but this team really could lose 90+ games. Other than Skenes this roster is just so pedestrian and they refuse to do anything at all to upgrade it.
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It's hard not to draw the conclusion that ownership and the front office are fine cashing the checks on the nights Skenes pitches and otherwise hoping for enough luck to be vaguely relevant in the warmer months.

Usually I dislike strong reactions early in a season, and there are probably ways that anyone can talk themselves into these games being bad luck. If the bullpen wasn't a total disaster, then maybe this series is a sweep. It's hard to just hand wave that away though, especially since as we all can see, this is the exact same team as the post-ASB team last year.

Maybe it's a little worse without Jones, but it's a total unknown when he'll be back. Unless somebody can will themselves into blind faith of Bednar or Holderman (especially the latter imo), the bullpen options are basically Santana and an infinite number of middling LHP. The one upside RP option who might have been able to take over a backend role and somewhat stabilized it is starting tomorrow.

I think 90+ losses is firmly in the cards. There are some nitpicks with individual players if people really want to have them, but this series showed that the bullpen is a massive issue that will prevent any kind of sustained success. One of the only counterbalances, also true for the last several years, is that the whole division is completely mediocre at best.

Predicting what's coming feels entirely too easy. I think we'd all love to be wrong, but we saw this show over and over. If the bullpen has some stability out of nowhere sometime soon, then the bad offense will truly show itself and put up goose eggs. Maybe things will click for a day and we'll get some blowup SP starts tossed in at that point.

We're not deep enough or talented enough to overcome that, and even though it's the strategy of many teams to just embrace being mediocre and hoping for a post-ASB/deadline push, we just aren't there. It comes back to exactly how you put it: this is a pedestrian team and nothing was done. Without checking the specifics, I remember several games which Chapman basically singlehandedly saved last year. He's gone, nobody replaced him. Spencer Horowitz being another average bat in the lineup isn't moving the needle. Hayes being healthy and making good defensive plays with some singles is nice, but also not moving the needle.

The pitcher making league minimum who was already awarded Cy Young votes and still likes to invent new pitches on the fly is something that gives us a decisive x-factor in basically every aspect of MLB: as the foundation of the most important part of any team, as what can help you win a do-or-die during a key moment in the season, and as what can almost singlehandedly help you win a playoff series. Cherington and Nutting got it handed to them and have done nothing.
 
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Sitting at 1-3 with the next two games being spot starts/bullpen games is particularly troubling. Well, it would be if you took this season seriously.

Wondering if this sort of 6-man rotation is just for the first week of the season or if it's a longer term plan for the season.
 
So far, the baseball season has been a game of inches like football..

.. Save for a couple more hits or a few defensive plays, the record is flipped 180

The team is bad, but should have come away with at least two wins vs MIA who is terrible

At least my MLB The Show Pirates have won the world series three times in a row. Cherington+Nutting makes it look hard...don't worry about Rodolfo Castro just mashing 70HR "last year" lol
 
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MrBrightside said:
Sitting at 1-3 with the next two games being spot starts/bullpen games is particularly troubling. Well, it would be if you took this season seriously.

Wondering if this sort of 6-man rotation is just for the first week of the season or if it's a longer term plan for the season.
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It's doubly weird because I can't imagine Mlodzinski goes more than 5 innings tonight, and even that might be being aggressive. I guess you can pencil Skenes in for 7ish innings Wednesday but with the bullpen already being in the state it is, seems like we're tempting fate to head into the home opener 1-6 or maybe 2-5 if Skenes can singlehandedly win his game.

I expect Shelton to just stick to his guns, but at this point Holderman should not see another leverage situation for a month and Bednar should be demoted in the pecking order until he proves he can throw a clean inning. The obvious trouble is that there's not really anyone who can be slotted into the role and counted on. Chapman was a headache to watch almost all the time but he's sorely missed this year.
 
The fact that they had no back up plan for Bednar despite his bad year makes you wonder what is prioritized. Chapman leaving is one thing, but what other pitcher was used in high leverage situations? It definitely feels they were just hoping someone would step up because for the most part, the Pirates have been able to find useful relievers, but hoping is a pretty bad strategy.
 
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DJ Spinoza said:
It's doubly weird because I can't imagine Mlodzinski goes more than 5 innings tonight, and even that might be being aggressive. I guess you can pencil Skenes in for 7ish innings Wednesday but with the bullpen already being in the state it is, seems like we're tempting fate to head into the home opener 1-6 or maybe 2-5 if Skenes can singlehandedly win his game.

I expect Shelton to just stick to his guns, but at this point Holderman should not see another leverage situation for a month and Bednar should be demoted in the pecking order until he proves he can throw a clean inning. The obvious trouble is that there's not really anyone who can be slotted into the role and counted on. Chapman was a headache to watch almost all the time but he's sorely missed this year.
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Mlodzinski didn't pitch more than 3 innings at any point this spring and never pitched more than 2 innings in any outing last season, so this is truly going to be a bullpen game. If they are serious about doing this shit and going 5 starts between outings for the main 4 starters and using both Mlodzinski and a bullpen game, they can't have them back-to-back. That's comically poor management.
 
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