May 21 2012 10:10 AM
Listen, if you’re a Pirate, and your name rhymes neither with touchin’ or clutchin’, my friend, you are having an awful offensive year.
The Pirates management has been arguing that they are, in fact, committed to turning this team around, and investing in it, but that their investment is on the scouting and development end, so whereas in prior years, they might look over the free agent pile at the end of the season and grab Kenny Lofton or Reggie Sanders at a lower-priced, one-year deal, you know, just to keep the floods at bay while the talent is ripening on the farm, nowadays, it’s all farm baby. And the guys at the big league level are either going to be the studs that are going places, or the really sad sack players left holding the bag.
Or so it may be argued. Sometimes, when the failure has been this epidemic, you start wondering who’s who. Neil Walker, gilded local boy of prior years, and honoree of a tee shirt giveaway on Lunchie’s birthday last year, is mailing in a flaccid year this year. Should we now just forget he was invested in with both resources and hope, and pretend he and his like are just placeholders until the real talent comes around?
And so the cycle continues. But the Pirates do have some pitching talent coming around. Maybe they’ll be the sort of Doug Drabek/John Smiley anchors to become a thorn in the side of the Mets for years, and maybe they’ll be the sort of Ian Snell/Tom Gorzelanny malicious tease (or Kris Benson/Oliver Perez, for you more provincial baseball followers). But they still have their heads above water (even if they're not swimming) at 19-22, and that’s a credit to Clint Hurdle, so you need to ask yourself what you believe. Do you think that this pitching can’t stay this solid, and this team will collapse as the season progresses? Or do you think the hitting can’t stay this bad, and the team will assert itself as the season progresses.
For now, they’re looking like the latter to me, and veteran Pirate fans I’ve spoken to can’t help but agree. Maybe they look like the Torre-era Mets — solid, if unspectacular at the top of the rotation and an offense led by a dynamic centerfielder and a bunch of guy’s going nowhere.
That said, these are the same Pirates guaranteed to take the wind out of the Mets with one cockpunch loss every year. So take them seriously as the grave right up to the last out. It’s almost a blessing that the Mets aren’t coming into town with much wind to speak of.
Hey, let’s meet the Pirates.
Catcher: Cap’n’ Crunch
OK, the team will still bring in an occasional veteran, and this one, Rod Barajas, you don’t need me to tell you about — low batting average, puncher’s power, prone to eight-week slumps. He’s at .220 with four homers right now. Feed him curves away, but keep your guard up.
First Base: Blackbeard Baldy
In a year of firstbasemen — Ike Davis, Gaby Sanchez, Albert Pujols, Adam Lind — hitting like backup shortstops, ex-Brewer Casey McGehee has fit right in. He’s one for his last 22 and sits at a disheartening .198 / .288 / .264 / .552. (Didn’t this guy hurt us when he was on the Beermakers?) He’s righthanded, plays a little second and third, and after having a solid rookie year at 26 with the Brewers in 2009, has gotten worse every season since. Garret Jones, underwhelming lefty starting outfielder from the last few years that the team had been starting to marginalize, is now starting to steal some starts from McGehee. That’s no solution, but it may help patch the leaky tub.
Second Base: Pirate of the Monagahela
The aforementioned Neil Walker resides a second, a switch-hitting native of Gibsonia, PA and proud wearer of Andy Van Slyke’s 18. Walker’s making his adjustments. He got some singles and walks in April, but only two extra-base hits. In May, he’s gotten more aggressive, managing three doubles and two homers (including a drought-ender in the recent series against the Tigers), but his OBP is down. He’s still kinda struggling. Maybe you need to stay one step ahead and make him chase.
Walker’s squeaky clean. Up until spring training 2011, he still lived with his parents, and he organizes Mass for Catholic Pirates (and doesn’t that sound like a terrifying ship to be boarded by) and visiting players of the faith before Sunday games.
While he hasn’t broken through in his three years as a starter, he neither has stunk (until now, kinda). His homeboyness and his clean-living-eligible-singleness have kept him on the fan favorites list, and when you replace Akinori Iwamura, the fans give you a lot of slack. He hits over ten homers a year, may yet be a player, make a few All-Star teams, and have a Kinsler-like breakthrough. More likely, he’s Ronnie Belliard.
Third Base: Droopy Pete
Pedro Alvarez will give you decent power and a lot of strikeouts. Ten years ago, he’d have roided up and given you a terrifying amount of power to go with a metric ton of strikeouts. For now, with seven homers and a .269 on-base percentage, he’s pretty bad.
Pedro’s Dominican-born but took a far different path to the bigs than his cousins, attending the elite and private Horace Mann School in the Bronx, and going on to Vanderbilt.
He’s 25, so he’s no lost cause either.
Shorstop: The Wandering Corsair
Clint Barmes is what he is. But he once looked liked something far better. On his way to a ROY-type season as a Rockies shortstop, he fell down the stairs carrying a slab of deer meat, and the next shortstop down the Rockies depth chart was a kid named Tulowitski. He teamed for five years as Tulo’s secondbaseman, but never found that level again, and after hitting the free agency stage of his career, has begun the bounce-around-the-league thing that players of his skills invariably reach. Here an Astro, there a Pirate, here a keystoner, there a shortstop. Always a National Leaguer.
Barmes is married to a chick named Summer, so you probably think he’s nice, scruffy, affable, All-American type, but in fact looks like the guy who plays Lex Luthor on Smallville, and therefore should be suspected of crimes against humanity.
Third Base: The Pirate King
Alex Presley killed it in an audition last year, going .298 / .339 / .465 // .804. in 54 games and winning the left field job. But 50,000,000 Alex Presley fans turned out to be wrong — dead wrong — and Alex has absolutely left the building, to the tune of a .220 / .246 / .305 // .551 line in 2012. It’s the baseball equivalent of Harum Scarum.
You look for a common thread to all these bombshells in the Pirates lineup, and I think they’re falling prey to Old Rookie Disease. A guy comes up, and shows some life over a third of a season, and you give him a job, but you overlook the fact that he’s 26, and the league just needed get the scouting report around, and he has no tricks left in the bag, and if he did, he would have been up four years earlier.
Black Bart, Greatest of All Pirates
Andrew McCutcheon is redemption incarnate for this squad. He’s seventh in the league in batting average, has seven homers, is perhaps the hottest player of the month (all his homers are in May), and looks good in clothes that you could never pull off. He’s got these long braids and when he’s not hitting, he can win a game for the Bucs with his defense.
The Buccaroonies signed him to a six-year- $51.5 million deal before the start of this season. He’s the child the broken down old-before-his-time fella looks at and says, “At least I did one thing right in my lousy, pathetic life.”
Dumbest Pirate on the High Seas
Jose Tabata is a high-average, low-power prospect guy who isn’t hitting for average any more and — in his third season — isn’t really a prospect anymore. But he’s younger than most of these Bucs, so who knows. Or maybe he’s not…
Tabata was a top-rated Yankee prospect who came over in the package for Xavier Nady and Dámaso Marte, so I might otherwise root for him, except this week, you know. But Tabata is a sketchy character and perhaps a dope. In 2010, the Pirates admitted that he may a few years older than reported (he’s now officially 23) and he hit the news in an ugly way in 2009 when a girlfriend 26 years his senior (!!) tried to get some leverage on the relationship by kidnapping a child in an attempt to pass it off as hers and his. She was fortunately caught and sentenced to gold-digger’s prison.
But what prison does a dope like Tabata find himself in? The statistical prison of a .614 OPS as the Pirate rightfielder, I guess.
Rusted Hooks
Lefty Eric Bedard faces Johan Santana today. Bedard (2-5, 3.07) has perhaps gotten worse support than Santana, if that’s possible. The Mets are currently lefty heavy, so look for the likes of Scott Hairston, Rob Johnson, and Vinny Rottino to be getting some cuts in.
Bedard’s a good pitcher, maybe even this good. He hasn’t faced the Mets since 2006, when the Mets were much better and he was much worse, but he still beat their asses.
Tomorrow, R.A. Dickey (5-1) takes on James McDonald. Here’s where you’ve got to be ready for a demoralizing confrontation. Mickey Dee (3-2, 3.49 ERA) is in the midst of the a breakthrough season, he’s got that big, lanky-guy 12-6 curve that falls off the table and makes you look stoopit as you swing a ball that bounces at your toes, and has flirted with no-hitters twice this month. This is a guy that can be a real challenge for the deepy-county Mets. Can they keep battling against this guys’ shit? Can the Bucs battle against Dickey’s?
He’s 27, but he’s got one of those lanky guy sinewy necks that makes him look 20 years older when he’s pitching.
Wenesday we send Jonathon Niese against a sinkerballer in Charlie Morton. He’s alternated good with bad this season, but was bad against the Tigers, so I fear good may follow. The Tigers, though, are a good team, so giving up four runs in six innings ain’t so bad.
Question: do you think a contact-hitting team like the Mets should do better than average against sinkerballers? Do they hurt sluggers more or high-average guys? I dunno
Anyhow, that’s the Pirates. And I thank you for indulging me. Oh, wait, the closer…
Their closer is former Nat Joel Hanrahan, who gets the job done mostly. He came up as a starter, but these days, he seems like sort of a synthesis of all closers somehow genetically fused together in a government lab. He’s got the belly of the Dominican guys, the bare-armed machismo of the Kenny Powers southern-boy types, he’s got the mullet of the Eckersly brand of sinckerballers, and the douchenest on his chin seems like, not Eric Gagne, but a loving tribute to Eric Gagne. Does he point at the Almighty after his saves? Do you have to ask?
Ex-Pirates on the Mets include Ronny Cedeño and… I think that's it. Old sexy friends on the Pirate ship include red-hot Rod Barajas and manager Clint Hurdle. Ray Searage is his pitching coach.
Enjoy the series, but watch out.