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OT: Raise the Jolly Roger: Congrats to the Houston Cheaters on their win

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Cruz is getting worse every game. Another two strikeouts and throwing error. Likely pressing but it’s tough when you don’t have much talent around you and zero coaching.
 
Well, Shelty is back and the staff probably follows.

I'm sure this will change many minds on posters whose continued enthusiastic support was predicated on his dismissal.
 
I wouldn't be too surprised if Haines still gets the axe. The team is going to lose 100 games in all likelihood, so there's probably at least someone who will be served up, and if Shelton is guaranteed back, maybe they'll punt on Haines for someone younger. The Marin+Haddad combo seems safer.

One nice sign of late is that both Marcano and especially Castro are looking like they've figured things out. I think it's hard to overstate how bad the situation is with Cruz right now, and I can only assume it's going to continue until he does something different in his approach. I've said it before but he doesn't look at all like he did throughout them minors. Passivity and waiting to get deeper into counts isn't his game.
 
DocEmrickSkitters said:


Eek!
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“Cherington inherited a team that had tumbled out of contention for a division championship or wild card postseason appearance with a disastrous, 7–20 record during September 2011”

Doesnt tell the full story. Dude inherited a bad team that was loaded with bad contracts. They won a World Series with the players he brought in.

BC doesn’t walk on water but I’m taking more of a wait and see approach. They absolutely cannot have another off-season like the last one.
 
It is very on-brand for the Pirates that they are a bad-but-young team but at the same time they don't improve as the season goes on and none of the young guys look like they can be impact players.

The organization is rotten to the core. The team will range from 60-75 wins until the sun swallows the earth in a massive fireball.

They really make me hate baseball.
 
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sovietsanta87 said:
“Cherington inherited a team that had tumbled out of contention for a division championship or wild card postseason appearance with a disastrous, 7–20 record during September 2011”

Doesnt tell the full story. Dude inherited a bad team that was loaded with bad contracts. They won a World Series with the players he brought in.

BC doesn’t walk on water but I’m taking more of a wait and see approach. They absolutely cannot have another off-season like the last one.
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I'm giving him 2 more years either way. There isn't a better idea.

But to act like his track record or job performance here shouldn't lead to questions is crazy. Dude has lost. A lot. And team BC's struggles to find replacement-level play, even with his meager budget, doesn't portend well to how he chooses players or developmental people. Shrug.
 
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One can feel good about where the Pirates' minor league system is and then look at the Braves who have not drafted particularly high and have never sold off players for prospects and watch Acuna and Harris and Albies and Grissom and Riley and Wright and Strider that are all 25 and younger and get really depressed how far away we are from that.
 
Pretty encouraging from Contreras tonight. I missed the first two and it looks like he saw some traffic, but navigating 6 IP + 2 R vs this lineup is nice work.
 
The Braves really show what it takes to build a winner.

Riley, Contreras, Harris, Acuna, Albies and Swanson all developed by the Braves and all good to great major league contributors.
 
MrBrightside said:
One can feel good about where the Pirates' minor league system is and then look at the Braves who have not drafted particularly high and have never sold off players for prospects and watch Acuna and Harris and Albies and Grissom and Riley and Wright and Strider that are all 25 and younger and get really depressed how far away we are from that.
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One difference is a culture of winning vs a culture of losing. No one gets excited to play for the pirates because of their long torturous history of underdeveloping players. The fans and the media know the owner is t interested in winning. Does anyone think the players are naive to the thought?
 
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sovietsanta87 said:
One difference is a culture of winning vs a culture of losing. No one gets excited to play for the pirates because of their long torturous history of underdeveloping players. The fans and the media know the owner is t interested in winning. Does anyone think the players are naive to the thought?
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I think there's a lot to that. Sort of the same way teams of other fans get annoyed by the Mark Donks of the Penguins that come up from WBS and make an impact right away...culture matters. That said, all the culture in the world doesn't, for example, turn a 4th round draft choice 3 years ago into a dominant starter as Strider has become, and culture doesn't develop international free agents like Acuna and Albies and Contreras. The Pirates' complete inability to produce Latin players is a major hindrance that doesn't really show signs of changing.
 
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I'm nowhere near the level of "hopes up", but I am excited to see how Brubaker comes out and pitches tonight against a very good lineup after his excellent start last time, and more generally how he does the rest of the season.

There's not really a great comparison since Brubaker started his MLB career later even though they are about the same age (Musgrove is a year older), but there might be something to looking at the overall 2018 and especially 2019 Musgrove seasons at a glance. Musgrove was essentially building up as a mid-rotation anchor who gave you some consistency but occasionally at the cost of bad games, where he would give up 4-5+ runs in <5 IP.

Musgrove threw 8 or 9 of those kinds of games in 2019, mixing in a lot of fairly fine, 5-6 IP type games that give a decent team a chance to win, and occasionally having an excellent 6+/7+ game where he flashed more. If you fast-forward to 2021, that was essentially Musgrove's baseline, except the highs were higher and he really cut the lows out, with maybe only 3 or 4 bad ones, and nothing too disastrous. He's been even better in 2022, with bad or so-so games at Coors and vs. a good offense in the Mets, but they weren't even that bad of starts and it's otherwise smooth sailing.

Looking at Brubaker, he had that kind of 2018 and 2019 Musgrove look to him last year, where he was relatively dependable, sometimes flashing more, and sometimes looking like he'd be better as a multi-inning reliever (which people thought about Musgrove, and also which I thought about Brubaker in general). Then he obviously really hit a wall in terms of consistency and arm strength, as he pretty much made clear in his interview the other day.

This year, his results have been a bit better, as he's had a bad game every month, but also pretty regularly hit 6 IP, lots of clean sheets, and tossing out early April, a floor where he's pitched into the 5th inning at least -- all told, he's looking like the 2019 version of Musgrove to me from a very general glance, i.e., a decent #3/4 type starter who you can depend on, who might also have room to grow into more. Again, they are about the same age, so the comparison isn't perfect by any stretch, but this is only Brubaker's third season, and that's counting 2020. You can sort of fudge things and say that Musgrove was about at the same level of experience in 2019 as Brubaker is now, as he had pitched 2+ seasons prior to 2019, with some regular work in the bullpen being the main difference.

Now, answering the innings bell is obviously a major piece of the puzzle, and if my memory is not mistaken, another thing that makes them less comparable is that Brubaker has had some injury issues throughout his career, which besides talent/role is one other reason people pointed to a bullpen role for him. Musgrove went from 118 in 2018 to 170 in 2019, and Brubaker had 124 last year with 120 so far this year and with the possibility of 8 more starts to go, including tonight. At 5-6 IP per start, he could finish with 165 IP or so, which is a more than respectable total for a #2 or #3 guy in today's MLB.

I don't really think Brubaker has the "full" extra gear in him in the sense of stepping forward even further with the innings to really get into that 180-190 range while also improving the performance some, but I also don't want to undersell him or undercut his performance. He's been a big piece of the puzzle, together with Keller, and so if he's further improving, he might be able to put up something like a 3.5 ERA over 170 innings next year, which is more than a mid-rotation starter IMO.
 
The tldr; version of that is with a significant amount of injury luck, the rotation will continue to be passable or better in 2022, as long as Keller and Brubaker are holding things down and Roansy continues to progress. That's not the best starting point, but it's not a terrible one, and is even better if we go after Quintana again as we should, as well as with Burrows potentially filling the same kind of role Roansy did this year.

It's really the offense that's the catastrophic problem, between Hayes alternating between injury and a slap hitter, Cruz not settling in, and the more glaring problem of half the lineup on any given night. I don't even believe it's possible, but the biggest step in the right direction would be going out and paying for Haniger or Mancini as a starting point, and perhaps one more from there. Then, together with internal improvements, there's at least some projection to more relevantly hang around in the division mix if nothing else.

That's about as optimistic as I can get. Despite his struggles, it's encouraging that Cruz had still hit for impressive power, even though it should be emphasized that the current profile isn't really sustainable. But it's not really out of the ordinary for him to have a pretty severe struggle to adjust -- it's worse than I expected and I do think the Pirates have and are making it worse, but his comments about choosing pitches and what he can and can't work with in MLB suggest that there's more going on with him than I think most people assume.

Otherwise, we'll see if Castro's success can be sustained, as that would certainly be an enormous boost. I'm less sold on Marcano, but he should still be playing, and above all else, I think it's pathetic that we haven't seen Swaggerty at all yet. He profiles to be a similar type of player to what you see in Marcano, except he also has the ability to play a premium position, even if we aren't going to move Reynolds. There's still just no reason not to maximize his at-bats for the remainder of the year. Allen might be an ok fallback #4 OF option, so I stop short of dispensing with him, and Gamel can certainly step up and make some things happen, but he's gone and/or if we are going to sign somebody, we should sign somebody significantly better. There's just no equation where it makes sense not to see Swaggerty starting two or three weeks ago. I can only assume he'll get the call in September for somewhat regular playing time, but that's an opportunity lost.
 
DJ Spinoza said:
The tldr; version of that is with a significant amount of injury luck, the rotation will continue to be passable or better in 2022, as long as Keller and Brubaker are holding things down and Roansy continues to progress. That's not the best starting point, but it's not a terrible one, and is even better if we go after Quintana again as we should, as well as with Burrows potentially filling the same kind of role Roansy did this year.

It's really the offense that's the catastrophic problem, between Hayes alternating between injury and a slap hitter, Cruz not settling in, and the more glaring problem of half the lineup on any given night. I don't even believe it's possible, but the biggest step in the right direction would be going out and paying for Haniger or Mancini as a starting point, and perhaps one more from there. Then, together with internal improvements, there's at least some projection to more relevantly hang around in the division mix if nothing else.

That's about as optimistic as I can get. Despite his struggles, it's encouraging that Cruz had still hit for impressive power, even though it should be emphasized that the current profile isn't really sustainable. But it's not really out of the ordinary for him to have a pretty severe struggle to adjust -- it's worse than I expected and I do think the Pirates have and are making it worse, but his comments about choosing pitches and what he can and can't work with in MLB suggest that there's more going on with him than I think most people assume.

Otherwise, we'll see if Castro's success can be sustained, as that would certainly be an enormous boost. I'm less sold on Marcano, but he should still be playing, and above all else, I think it's pathetic that we haven't seen Swaggerty at all yet. He profiles to be a similar type of player to what you see in Marcano, except he also has the ability to play a premium position, even if we aren't going to move Reynolds. There's still just no reason not to maximize his at-bats for the remainder of the year. Allen might be an ok fallback #4 OF option, so I stop short of dispensing with him, and Gamel can certainly step up and make some things happen, but he's gone and/or if we are going to sign somebody, we should sign somebody significantly better. There's just no equation where it makes sense not to see Swaggerty starting two or three weeks ago. I can only assume he'll get the call in September for somewhat regular playing time, but that's an opportunity lost.
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The TLDR version to both posts is “take the over on the braves runs and probably take an Acuna homer”
 
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