Opening Day lineup comparison

Spring Training has officially begun and Opening Day is just 36 days away. Pirates fans are finally putting away their resentment about last year's collapse and they're getting ready for another summer of Pirates baseball. The roster has a lot of potential this year. I personally feel pretty good about the potential of the players that will be on the 25-man roster come Opening Day. But how does it compare to years past? Let's take a look.


This year's roster looks better, at least it does to me. Obviously it's not really fair to look back in hindsight, because a year ago we didn't know that Jose Tabata was going to become nearly irrelevant, in fact a lot of still thought he was going to develop into a pretty good player. Same goes with Clint Barmes and Rod Barajas, at the time of their signing we were all expecting better things than what they gave us. A year from today we could easily be saying the same things about Russell Martin, Travis Snider, and Starling Marte (and who knows what a guy like Pedro Alvarez is going to do in a given year).

I compiled the preseason ZiPS projections for the last two years and compared them together, you can download that whole spreadsheet here. I just used the projected starting eight position players and the starting rotation that you see above and averaged out all of their ZiPS. The end result was this:

Hitting:

	Age	BA	OBP	SLG	HR	SB
2013	28	.254	.320	.421	17	10
2012	28	.261	.324	.425	15	12

Pitching:

	Age	ERA	WHIP	K/9	BB/9
2013	31	3.94	1.307	7.35	3.09
2012	31	4.39	1.379	6.86	3.19

So the Pirates are expected to be a better (starting) pitching team in 2013 than they were expected to be in 2012. Keep in mind that the 2012 numbers were preseason projections, not what actually happened. The pitching staff outperformed those numbers. It's the opposite on the offensive side, the Pirates are expected to perform worse than they were expected to perform in 2012. ZiPS was actually rougher than I expected on the Pirates. They have McCutchen hitting .283/.369/.480 after a season where he hit .327/.400/.553. I mean, sure, you shouldn't absolutely expect him to be have another MVP like season, but I think he deserves to be projected better than he is. I also think the numbers for Alvarez and Marte are low too, but I'm terrible at predicting the future anyway.

The numbers don't give us too much hope that this is the Pirates team that will take us past .500, but there is a lot of potential that these numbers don't account for, and I think that's enough of a reason to get ready for baseball again.

Kyle McPherson is cool, right?

So Fangraphs did a little ZiPS study and found out that the Pirates own Kyle McPherson is the second best (potential) rookie pitcher for 2013, behind only Cardinals über prospect Shelby Miller.

To me that sounds pretty ridiculous, since McPherson isn't even very highly regarded in the Pirates own system. I mean the guy has put up good numbers in his career, but he's never received any big time attention. Although that may have something to do with the presence of Jameson Taillon and Gerrit Cole. The list was based on highest expected WAR, which has a ton to do with how much major league playing time these guys are projected to get. Team X could have the next Randy Johnson coming up, but if he only pitches for half of the season he isn't going to accrue many wins for his team. McPherson has pitched in the big leagues already, so that definitely helped his case here.

Last year McPherson pitched 26.1 innings in the majors and gave up 24 hits, 8 (earned) runs, 3 home runs, walked 7 batters and struck out 21. That's a small sample, but 8.2 H/9, 2.4 BB/9, and 7.2 K/9. He made 3 starts and didn't make it out of the 5th inning in two of those three starts. Let's talk about his minor league numbers, which mean a lot more in this case.

For his career at the AA level, McPherson is 11-10. lol I'm just messing with you guys. In 138 innings he has posted a 3.39 ERA, he's allowed 8.4 H/9, 0.8 HR/9, 1.7 BB/9, and struck out 8.3 per 9. In his very short time at AAA he pitched 18.1 innings, gave up 5.4 H/9, walked 2 per 9, struck out 8.3 per 9, and had a 0.98 ERA. Very solid numbers across the board.

But will it translate into the big leagues? Let's kick it 2012 style and hit you with some pitch f/x!

Pitch	Selection%	Velocity	Vertical	Horizontal
FF	62.6%	93.0	8.45	-5.79
CU	26.0%	77.0	-10.06	8.13
CH	8.0%	83.3	7.69	-7.74

Your boy McPherson has some solid stuff. It's not ace caliber (check it out caliber doesn't have a 'u' in it) stuff, but it's definitely good enough to make a name for himself in the big leagues. His minor league numbers give major signs for optimism and his stuff looks good enough to be successful, so why aren't people more excited to see what McPherson can do?

This now begs the question if he will even make the rotation out of camp. I'm certainly going to be rooting for him to beat out Jeff Locke, but for now Locke's the probable front runner. Locke has more experience in the big leagues and McPherson only has those 18.1 innings in AAA. To me that shouldn't really matter though, McPherson experienced the big leagues and he's a better pitcher than Locke. Maybe it's time for the Pirates to stop acting like the Pirates and giving a guy a quicker promotion than they usually do. Most of the time having the best players on the major league team results in more wins, so how about the Pirates try that one for once?

And hey, if McPherson starts doing the damn thing in Pittsburgh, I might be able to eat for a couple extra weeks by selling some more t-shirts.

Weighing interest in the 2013 Pittsburgh Pirates

So a new season is nearly upon us and I don't think it's necessarily wrong to say that the Pirates are coming in with the best looking roster they've had during this entire rebuilding process. While that's not saying a whole lot, it is definitely cause for optimism. Despite the recent collapses, the team seems to be getting better every season, which is what the fans who understand the unfairness of baseball really want.

You'd think that would have fans really excited for 2013; to see how far this team can go. Now I don't speak for everyone, in fact I've found during my lifetime that my opinions are almost always mine and mine alone, but I'm not nearly as geared up for this season as seasons in the past, even when the team was coming into April with close to a 0% chance of doing anything at all.

I'm not going to attribute all of this to the collapse of last year. Sure, that was demoralizing and frankly disgusting, but on any other year I would have expected those bad feelings to wear off as spring came into sight. But the feelings really haven't been going away, and I think that's more because of my current state of life than anything else. I'm a senior that's about to head into the real world, and I've recently realized that my dreams of being a baseball reporter/writer/radio host were too far off to grasp.

Now I don't think I have a lot of 12 year olds reading my blog and idolizing me, but if I did I'm probably the worst role model ever. I've basically given up my dreams before I even got into the waters. I haven't finished my education yet and I'm throwing in the towel. Maybe that's a bad idea, maybe that's a good idea. The good news is that I'm sure I'll be very happy doing whatever I end up doing, and at least I'll have some money to move out of my parents house with. Now this isn't a pity post, it's a baseball post, so we can get off this topic.

The point I'm trying to make is that the roster coming into this spring is one that screams of optimism. Pirate fans should be extra excited and eager for the 2013 season to begin. Frankly there are a lot of things that could happen this year that will make this Pirates campaign very interesting. However, to my very subjective eyes, it doesn't seem that way. I think everyone is going to be very careful to get too indulged with this team. And why shouldn't they be? This team has broken its fan's hearts two years in a row. Why would anybody get emotionally attached to this team before it's 100% clear that they will have a winning season and/or make the playoffs? What have the Pirates done to warrant unwavering fan support? The answer is nothing. But humans aren't logical, they are emotional, and there will be a ton of people that get fully engulfed in another baseball season, which will just continue to feed the pockets of the front office in which many people have lost faith.

Have I lost faith? No. I'm ready for another season, I'm excited to see what this team can do and I genuinely believe that this club has enough talent to make some noise this year. Am I expecting it to happen? No. Am I going to jump right back into a frenzy of passion for baseball and the Pirates if the team is in first place at the all-star break? Probably not. Should it be that way? I don't know.

So here's a poll to weigh some interest in this year's Pirates campaign. Obviously if you're reading this blog, you're probably a pretty big Pirate fan, so this probably isn't the best audience to grab this data from, but we'll try it anyway. Just tell me how your level of interest right now compares to your level of interest in the past.

Kevin Correia believes in leprechauns

Although I am just a shade of the journalist that I once aspired to be, I will do the right thing and credit the source of this post's inception. My former colleagues at RumBunter came out with this post in which they quote Kevin Correia as saying the following.

“I’m probably not going to strike out 250 guys but I think at the end of the day you’ve got to look at wins and losses. That’s what’s important."

Let's just get this out of the way first and point out that Kevin Correia's career high in strikeouts is 142. Sometimes a writer can state a fact and not have to explain why he or she stated that fact, and I believe this is one of the cases.

Kevin Correia is a Major League pitcher, he is sufficient enough to keep a job in the league, but there will never be a bidding war for his services. He's replaceable. That said, the Twins wanted him bad enough to give him a frankly ridiculous two year, ten million dollar contract. That's another story entirely, however.

Correia operates under the belief that he has value because he wins baseball games. His career winning percentage is .480 (60-65), which is actually pretty impressive considering he threw 63% of his career innings for the Padres and the Pirates, while being in the bullpen for the majority of the other 37% when he wore a Giants uniform. You can't blame the guy for finding a positive statistic he's posted and using it for his verbal advantage. That doesn't mean that we can't have a problem with him saying such things.

It's 2013. Baseball has come a long way in the last decade or so, but unfortunately it seems that winning percentage for pitchers still means something to people. Kevin Correia believes that because he has won 48% of his decisions in the past means that he will continue to win 48% of the time regardless of everything else his numbers state. To a mathematician, such a claim is irresponsible. But Correia doesn't care. He's a winner, and winners stay winners because they're winners. Kevin Correia lives in a fantasy world; a fantasy world with endless supplies of hair gel where the man with the most pathetic mustache is king.

Correia realizes that he's not actually a good pitcher, and he also realizes that he's been pretty damn lucky to this point in his career. What he doesn't realize is that luck isn't predictive.

Or maybe, just maybe, Kevin Correia knows something we don't. Whatever the truth it, Kevin Correia will make roughly $10 million more than I will in the next two years, so the joke's really on the nerds that sit behind their computer screens and bash him. Here's to four-leaf clovers, and Kevin Correia!

17%

Baseball Prospectus rolled out their 2013 playoff odds this week, which you can see here. They give the Pirates a 17% chance of making the playoffs, which is probably as high a chance as we've had in a very long time.

But what is 17%? What does that mean? Let's take a look at other things that involve 17%.

• If a skier were to ride a chairlift for 100 million miles he would have a 17% chance of being killed by that chairlift.
• An American child born into the bottom fifth, based on household income, has only a 17% chance of making it to the top two-fifths.
• An American male aged 65 years old has a 17% chance of living to be 95.
• 17% of children and adolescents aged 2-17 are obese.
• Last week, PepsiCo reported a 17% increase in fourth quarter profit.
• 17% of heterosexual couples say they met online.
• 17% of British teens say they are embarrassed to be seen reading.
• 17% of Americans regularly attend church.
• 17% of Americans have some sort of hearing loss.

Here's hoping that the Pirates hit on their 17% chance, and here's hoping that 0% of my readers experience hearing loss this year.

Return of the McEffect

My name is Jon Anderson and I, unfortunately, like the Pittsburgh Pirates. I used to do some blogging for the team, but after a crushing 2012 season I quit. A few months have gone by and the feelings of disdain have worn off enough to where I want to start writing about the team again, so here I am, crawling back to the blog that made me who I am on the Internet.

Unfortunately, I don't trust myself enough to keep this going to invest any money into quite yet, so for now we're just going to roll with mceffect.blogspot.com, which is lame but that's how it's going to be. Everything is pretty much bookmark and link driven nowadays anyway, so that shouldn't have a big influence on traffic. In fact, I'm not really in this for traffic anymore... I'm in it for the Twitter followers AH HAH.

I kind of feel like I'm going to take a bit of a different angle at it this time as well. I'm probably not going to write as often as I used to, and I'm really not going to report news or do any obvious opinion things. It's just going to be different, weird, funny, and hopefully interesting articles. Personally, I've never understood blogs that just report news and give baseline opinion anyway, you can get that stuff anywhere, and unless you're a really credible source, your opinion doesn't mean much of anything. We'll see what we can do here, just don't expect much from me.

What you can do is follow me on Twitter at @JonPGH, because that will never stop.

Early Thoughts on the Catching Situation

The biggest question the Pirates have coming into the offseason is who will be playing catcher for the 2013 Pittsburgh Pirates? Rod Barajas will not be brought back, and the free agent market is thin at best. It really does not seem like the Pirates would get value for the money they would have to spend on a free agent backstop, which is unfortunate considering how little they got out of the position last year.

Some rumors have come up about a possible trade for the Red Sox Jarrod Saltalamacchia. Salty hit .222/.288/.454 last year with 25 home runs while playing respectable defense. The offense is inexistent; the Pirates would be lucky to see him outperform Barajas at the dish. The defense would probably be an upgrade, but then again we thought more of Barajas before this year started. Throwing out baserunners may be something that no catcher in the league could have been too successful at last year just because of how poor our pitchers were at stopping the running game. That said, there needs to be improved defense behind the plate.

I don't think it would take much to get Saltalamacchia, but I'm not even sure Bob Nutting wants to fork the cash for the extra letters to stitch his jersey with, so I'm thinking that's not going to happen.

Here's the way I look at it. There's really no way for the Pirates to bring somebody in that can hit as a catcher. They already have two pretty decent defensive options in Michael McKenry and Tony Sanchez that aren't going to cost them much money at all, so why even think about bringing someone else in? Chances are you'll get the same crappy offense from McKenry/Sanchez as you would from bringing someone else in, and Sanchez gives you some offensive upside.

We'll talk about this more later, but for right now I'm thinking the Pirates best bet is to stay with what they have right now and spend their money elsewhere. Just be ready for another disappointing offensive season from Pirates catchers in 2013.

My MVP Case for McCutchen

Andrew McCutchen is an MVP finalist, as everyone fully expected him to be. At the very worst, McCutchen was the second best player in the National League this year. It's a two man race between him and the Giants' Buster Posey. Now, the Giants had a much better season than the Pirates. Not only did they win their division, they won the World Series. The MVP award is not supposed to consider the playoffs at all, and the voting takes place before the playoffs even begin, so Posey's World Series Grand Slam won't factor into the equation at all, but unfortunately the fact that the Giants made the postseason and the Pirates didn't will have an influence.

Most baseball people are saying that Posey deserves the award, and I don't have much of a problem with that. However, I think McCutchen had a season that should seriously be considered for the award. Here's my case.

The name of the award is Most Valuable Player, not most outstanding player or best player. I think that a lot of the time, voters vote for the best player instead of the most valuable player, there's a huge difference there. Keeping that in mind, here's some statistics:

The below picture shows McCutchen and Posey's individual seasons. I also took out McCutchen and Posey's statistics from their teams final season lines, just to see how much better these players were than the rest of their teams. Here's what it looks like (click to enlarge):

You can see the differentials there. McCutchen raised his team's batting average by nearly 100 points, their on-base percentage by 265 points, and their slugging percentage by 24 points. Posey's differentials don't compare with McCutchen's. I understand that this isn't the fairest way to look at it, because we are basically giving McCutchen credit for being on a really bad team. However, doesn't that prove his value to the team? He took a team that hit .262/.314/.381 without him and got them 79 wins. Posey played on a team with Melky Cabrera who hit .346/.390/.516 until mid August when he was suspended, Pablo Sandoval who hit a very solid .283/.342/.447 in a full season, and a pitching staff who put the National League's 5th best ERA. Posey was certainly very valuable to his team, but I think it's safe to say that the Giants still would have been in contention without him.

You certainly cannot say the same for the Pirates and McCutchen. The only offensive players that you could even argue for having a good offensive season were Pedro Alvarez (.244/.317/.467 with 30 HR), Neil Walker (.280/.342/.426) and Garrett Jones (.274/.317/.516 with 27 HR). The Pirates were average at best on the mound.

Let's take a look at the correlation between these players performances and how their teams did throughout the season. Here's a chart of McCutchen's performance by month, followed by a chart of the Pirates win percentage by month, and then the same for Posey.

McCutchen:

Posey:

Both players had some really great months and some not so great months. McCutchen's worst was August when he hit .252/.347/.346, the Pirates win percentage dipped heavily with that at a .393 winning clip. He also struggled in September, although some of the power came back, Cutch hit .254/.361/.500 and the Pirates won just 25% of their games. In Cutch's best month, July, Cutch hit .446/.510/.739 and the Pirates won 65% of their games. It's a pretty direct correlation. When Cutch was good, the Pirates won, when he wasn't good, the Pirates didn't. Obviously there was more to it than that, but the point remains true.

Posey has some correlation as well, but not nearly as striking. The Giants catcher had his worst month in May when he hit .253/.311/.363, however the Giants still won 52% of their games. Posey had a stellar second half of the season. In July he hit .381/.448/.595 but the Giants had their worst winning month of the year winning just half of their games. Posey kept going and hit .371/.482/.652 in August while his team won 62% of the games and the Giants were even better in September, winning 70% of the time while Posey hit .364/.415/.607. The Giants were still a .500 team while Posey wasn't doing much at the plate.

Again, this a one season sample, and you can't take all that much from what I just said. Just because Posey had bad month and the Giants still won half of their games doesn't mean that they would have been a .500 team with him hitting .250 all season long. That said, this part of the study certainly favors McCutchen for MVP.

A lot of attention goes to Wins Above Replacement when you're looking at the MVP picture. Posey does have the edge in that category (7.2 to 7.0 on baseball-reference and 8.0 to 7.4 on FanGraphs). A lot of that has to do with Posey playing catcher, which automatically helps his WAR number. Defensively, Posey was superior to McCutchen, who was a below average center fielder. All-in-all I don't think it's all that fair to just look at WAR. That number compares these players to a league-average replacement player, and has nothing specifically to do with the teams they play on.

The word "valuable" really is what makes me think that McCutchen should win the award. I personally don't really agree with the award being about value, because that eliminates some players right off the bat. Nobody from a really terrible team could ever be considered for the award, which isn't fair in my eyes. Every player strives to be the best player in the league, not the most valuable. Why not make the most prestigious award in the sport available to all the players, and not just the one on good teams? That's a question for another day. If we're talking straight value, and we are, the edge goes to Cutch in my eyes.

Front Office to be Maintained

We all have what they call "pet peeves" in this life, one of my biggest ones is when somebody can't admit when they aren't good at something, or they don't know a lot about a certain subject. If you have been reading this blog in recent months, you know that I will be the first one to admit that I have not been paying all that much attention to the Pittsburgh Pirates and I definitely do not have the strongest opinions on everything going on, but for now I'll weigh in anyways.

As you probably know, today Bob Nutting spoke with the media and told everybody that the front office will be maintained. There's been posts written about this all over Pirates blogs, so check those out for some more analysis, because what I'm going to give you now certainly won't be enough.

Basically, I'm down with keeping the guys around. You can certainly argue it either way, but from what I can tell, Neil Huntington and company have done a pretty good job since they've taken over. When he took the job, there was very little hope for the future; you can't say that anymore. The major league team is much, much better, and we have some real superstar caliber players in the minors. I wouldn't rank the Pirates very high up on the list of top farm systems in the game, but it has improved greatly, and there is still a bunch of young talent that will be on the 2013 Opening Day roster. Maybe you expected us to have been in this stage earlier, and you thought that by the time 2012 rolled around the Pirates would be a playoff team. They were nearly that last year, but a horrible collapse really turned things for the worse. The five year plan didn't exactly work, but I honestly think with another year or two this team is going to be a serious contender.

I like what Huntington has done. He's made his mistakes and has wasted some draft picks, but you won't find too many teams that haven't had their share of that as well. It's really hard to pick players that can make it to the big leagues and be consistently productive. Not that that's an excuse for a GM to be bad at his job, but you can't blame Huntington for all the bad things that have happened recently.

Kyle Stark keeping his job is something that I really don't have an opinion on. I know very little about that job description or what he actually does (I'm being brutally honest here). The whole NAVY SEALs thing is going away, which is kind of funny to me. Stark has been implementing this thing and nobody even really knew about it until the collapse happened. To me it wasn't a big deal at all. It lasted a few days and didn't seem like anything that had anything but a positive impact, but again I could be wrong. I can say this though, if the collapse didn't happen it would still be going on.

The question I want to raise here is who would replace these guys? It's not like there's capable MLB GM's and scout directors just lined up waiting for jobs. Huntington and Stark have jobs for a reason, and if they were obviously worse than somebody that's unemployed, why would they be here in the first place? I'm not saying that there aren't better options out there, because I'm sure there is, somewhere. I just don't know how easy it would be to replace them, and if it's really a good idea to do it at this stage. The team has been improving in recent years so why mess with it now? We have a team that looks pretty solid on paper for 2013, let Huntington and company have a chance to finish what they started.

If you think I'm completely wrong and you disagree with Nutting's decision to keep everyone around, I won't even argue with you. Keep the peace Pittsburgh.

Thoughts on Jay Bell

I started getting really into the Pirates when I was around 7 years old. That was around 1997. I distinctly remember the names Jeff King, Al Martin, Kevin Young, Francisco Cordova, and yes, the man of the hour - Jay Bell.

Apparently Bell spent some time recently as a double-A hitting coach in Arizona's system. He's also coaching the New Zealand national team, which is ... interesting.

The next thing I should say here is that I don't think hitting coaches really do all that much. I wrote about Gregg Ritchie a lot this past season, and I arrived at the conclusion that any offensive struggles or successes cannot be attributed to the hitting coach on the team. The players are in the major leagues for a reason, they don't need to be taught any longer. They need another set of eyes to help them make corrections when needed, so the hitting coach does have some hand in the players' successes, but I really don't think it has a very significant impact.

Saying that, it's obvious that I wouldn't have really cared who the Pirates got to be their hitting coach for next year. The name Jay Bell is generating buzz just because people know who he is and remember him doing some good things for this team. Let me ask you this, if the Pirates signed another team's AA hitting coach to be their major league hitting coach, and you didn't know who he was, would you be excited about it? I don't see why you would. If Jay Bell had never played or the Pirates, would he even have been considered for the job? I doubt it. Did any other team ever consider giving Bell a hitting coach at the big league level? That's possible, he was a bench coach for the Diamondbacks between 2005-2006, but hasn't had any major league action since then. It's hard for me to believe that he was a name that was sought after by any other team.

Bell was a good defensive shortstop and he had one huge offensive year (38 home runs in 1999, his next highest home run total was 21). For his career he hit .265/.343/.416, which isn't great. Just because he wasn't a great hitter in his time in the majors doesn't mean that he can't be a good coach, but again, he just doesn't seem like a guy that was a hot name on the hitting coach market.

It's hard for me to be upset about a position that I don't feel has any real influence on the win-loss total of the team, but I'm just a bit surprised by all the positivity coming from this move. Although some positivity is a good thing, since all we've had since August is negative, negative, negative.

Weighing Interest

The World Series starts tomorrow night, and the Pirates are not in it. To be honest, this is the least interest I have had in the baseball playoffs in years. There's no doubt in my mind that the Pirates collapse had everything to do with that.

I haven't been writing on here or tweeting about baseball since August, and I'm sure nobody has really missed either of those things just because of how disgusting this season turned out to be.

But how long will it take us to get back into it? It's always nice to take a month or two off at the end of a long season to try and think about other things, but I'm usually antsy to talk baseball again by December. I'm not sure if that's going to be true again this year. To be honest I have no desire at all to think about what the Pirates should or shouldn't do this offseason, and I'm hoping that that desire comes back. The blog and Twitter have made the past three years of my life a lot of fun, and I don't want it to end even as I move on from college and head into the real world next year. Only time will tell where I'll be come this summer, but for now I'm just hoping for one more offseason of good-hearted speculation and prediction as we all look forward to another 0-0 record.

So where is your interest level at? Are you going to be following the offseason and winter meetings as closely this year? Will you care more? Less? The same? let me know below, and I promise to start writing here more frequently, although it might be more emotional and philosophical than in previous years.

Did the McEffect Have a Positive Effect in 2012?

by: Patrick Reddick

Nate McLouth was named the Player of the Game for the fourth game of the Yankees, Orioles ALDS last night after a solid defensive performance and hitting a solo home run in the fifth inning. Yep, that same McLouth whose namesake was on the McEffect shirt I wore as I watched the game. But was there really a “McEffect”? And did it have a good or bad effect on baseball and the Pirates this year?

The Pirates had seven Mc’s; more than any other team in the Major Leagues and likely more than any other team has had at any point. McCutchen, McGehee, McKenry, McLouth, McDonald, McPhearson, and McCutchen.

Andrew McCutchen was easily the Pirates’ star in 2012. He missed just five games, was in the top three in the NL in batting average, on-base percentage, and total bases. He led the NL in hits with 154. Cutch was an All-Star and had a WAR of 7, just .2 behind NL leader Buster Posey (he was fifth in all of MLB, even ahead of Cabrera who will win the MVP just because of that lame Triple Crown thing).

Casey McGehee played 92 games for the Bucs as the team’s main first baseman. McGehee had a .297 OBP and a .377 slugging average that were an improvement over last season, but nowhere near his 2009 performance with the Brewers that the Pirates were hoping he would recapture. McGehee played in 22 games after he was traded to the Yankees, but performed poorly and is not part of their post-season team.

Mikey “The Fort” McKenry caught every pitch of a 19-inning game for the second consecutive summer, but only appeared in 87 other games because of something weird going on in Clint Hurdle’s brain. McKenry had a .320 OBP, nearly 40 points higher than Rod Barajas’s, and set multiple new career marks including his 12 home runs. McKenry threw out just 18% of base stealers (13-for-61) although that was triple the rate Barajas performed at. The Fort should be the main catcher for the Pirates next season or there’s something wrong.

James McDonald is the youngest member of the Pirates starting rotation and he started the second-most games of anyone on the staff. In his second full year as a starter McDonald matched exactly the number of innings he threw last year (171) as well as earned runs he gave up (80) also meaning his ERA stayed the same (4.21). That being said, he walked fewer batters, allowed less hits, and struck more hitters out. His WHIP decreased 0.2 to 1.263 and he had the lowest H/9 among Pirate starters (7.7).

Daniel “White Cutch” McCutchen did not do much in the Majors in 2012, although most fans might have liked it if he had done even less. His only appearance came in the bottom of the 10th inning on August 21, when he promptly walked a guy and gave up a walk-off homer to the next. He did have a 2.98 ERA and 1.07 WHIP in AAA where he spent most of the summer, so we might see him again next year.

Kyle McPhearson made ten appearances for the Pirates in late September and August, starting three games. He finished with a 2.73 ERA in 26.1 innings with seven walks and 21 strikeouts. He is only 24 years old, so it seems likely that we’ll see him again next season.

Which brings us back to our old buddy Nate McLouth who appeared in 34 games for the Pirates in April and May. He was bad (.140/.210/.175) and the Pirates released him as they should have. Five days later he signed with Baltimore where he played in 55 games and went crazy compared to his time with the Pirates (.268/.342/.435). He even stole 12 bases (12 more than he had with the Pirates) and has been a nightly leadoff man for the Orioles in the post-season.

Overall the Mcs had a combined WAR of 8.9 in their 2012 work in Pittsburgh, and while the Pirates will probably have a decreased number of Mcs on the roster next summer it seems overall, the McEffect is a positive one.

Another Offseason Begins

Well the 2012 season is coming to an end today as the Pirates are getting ready to try and finish their campaign off with a three game sweep of the Atlanta Braves, who will be playing in the one-game Wild Card playoff on Friday after a season in which they won 93 or 94 games. The fact that a 93/94 team might be eliminated by the 87/88 win Cardinals in a one-game playoff is absolutely ridiculous, but that's not the point here.

We all know the story of how this season went, and honestly to me I don't see how this isn't going to end up being one of the most disappointing seasons in Pirates history. Sure, it's an incredibly long history that I know very little about, but I just can't see how anything could be much worse than going from 16 games over in July to not even winning half of your games, especially after the past 19 years and even more especially how a similar thing happened last year. If someone else has a season they would elect to run against this one for most disappointing in franchise history, I'm all ears, but for now I'm going to stick with 2012.

All of that negativity out of the way, you can still take some positives from this season. I've been saying this for awhile now, and I know not a lot of people want to hear it. This team won 79 or 80 games, and they didn't look like a team that could do that well at season's beginning. Just ignore how they got here and take that as another stepping stone. Sure, the five year plan is taking longer than five years, but the organization is much better right now than it was when the plan started, so why not stay on board for awhile longer?

That's an interesting question to ask I think. How will fans react after a season like this? What will 2013 ticket sales look like? How will the TV ratings look? I know that this season took quite a toll on me. It took a toll to the point where I have honestly been completely apathetic about baseball pretty much since September started. I haven't watched more than a few innings of any game in at least four weeks, which is uncommon for me to say the least. I'm sure it has been this way for a lot of people, but the question now becomes how will this translate into feelings about the 2013 season? Will we forget about this and be just as excited and ready for next year to start? Or will baseball bring back the bad taste in our mouths that we have now. Only time will tell, but I'm guessing that we'll be pretty excited to be 0-0 once again.

This franchise has a lot of decisions to make in the offseason, and I promise that I'll start writing more regularly on here to talk about such decisions. Despite my lack of writing this last month, other Pirates bloggers and writers have kept strong through the collapse, and I respect them a lot for that. I also have the excuse that I'm a college senior and I do have some other things that take up my free time, but if this team were winning I'm sure I would have been on here more often. I don't really have to apologize, because I'm sure your day to day lives didn't change at all while The "Mc" Effect was idle.

Anyways, the offseason is starting and I for one am a bit relieved of that fact. While the offseason seems far too long every year, it will be nice to have a few months to think about things other than baseball and the travesty that is the Pittsburgh Pirates 2012 season. I've been honestly thinking about making another blog that has nothing to do with baseball, just because I have a lot of stupid stuff to talk about that most people that read this stuff would think is ... well ... stupid. I'll keep you updated on that.

Go Orioles... right?

Do We Really Need Changes?

News just came out that the Pirates will not be making any managerial or front office changes this offseason. After possibly the biggest collapse in Major League Baseball history, a lot of people are questioning that decision.

As for me, I don't think it's really a bad thing. I've never been one to believe that manager's really do much to a team's win-loss percentage. They certainly have some bearing on how a team performs, but I don't think hiring a different manager is the answer here. That doesn't mean that I think Clint Hurdle is the best man for the job, I just don't think that bringing someone else in will make any significant difference.

In terms of the front office, I'm less confident talking about it. I really do like the job Neal Huntington has done. You would hard pressed to find a General Manager that's done a better job in the draft since he's been with the Pirates, although the jury is still out on almost all of his picks. He's gotten a lot of talent for the Pirates money and things are certainly looking up right now. I also appreciate his understanding of how and when to spend money. Despite the collapse, I still think he did a very good job at this year's trade deadline. Who knows what would have happened if he had gone a different route, but regardless of that we still have a player in Travis Snider locked up for a few years that could really impact this offense.

I'm not too clear on what Kyle Stark and company do and how it affects the Major League team, but it's hard for me to believe that this collapse is in anyway his fault. We don't have a lot of organizational depth, there's no doubt about that. A lot of that you can chalk up to bad luck, but it certainly doesn't seem like the Pirates are the best organization at developing minor league players. Is that Stark's fault? Could be. Could someone else do a better job? Possibly. Does that mean you HAVE to fire him right now? I don't think so. You can't blame this collapse on Stark; I mean you can do whatever you want, but I think it would be foolish to say he's the main culprit.

To me, this collapse happened because we had a team that wasn't as good as we thought in the first place, and that team certainly wasn't capable of playing anything close to a full 162 games of baseball at a Major League level.

Personally I think it's time we stop looking for someone to blame and start looking forward to next year, while taking what positives we can out of 2012. That's probably easier said than done, so maybe just try saying it over and over again.

The Predictability of Playoff Baseball

One great thing about the game of baseball is how close it makes its competitors. It's very hard to predict who will win a single game of baseball, because of all the different random things that can happen during a game. We are nearing playoff time now, which is exciting for many reasons. One thing I can say about the playoffs is that they are easier to predict than regular season games. Teams have nothing to lose and you know that the best players and pitchers will be used at all times. We can gather a pretty decent idea of which teams have the best chance to be the last teams standing, click here for odds.

Baseball added another Wild Card team this year, which gives us a one-game Wild Card round to open up the postseason. That means a team that has won substantially more games in the regular season could be knocked out by a team with substantially less wins just because of the randomness of one game of baseball. It doesn't seem fair, but it's a reality. The series favorite will be a one game favorite, which will be mainly determined by which starting pitchers toe the rubber. If the second Wild Card team clinches its playoff berth in one of the final games of the year, they very well could go into that game with their ace pitcher unable to pitch. That would create a pretty decent betting situation, if you're into sports betting.

Right now the Texas Rangers come in as the World Series favorite at 4/1. The Washington Nationals and Cincinnati Reds are right behind them at 5/1. Obviously those odds will change as the playoff teams are sorted out and seeded, but there are advantages to getting into the action early. Right now there are a number of teams with a mathematical chance to win the World Series, that won't be true when the regular season ends, which means the odds will get worse as more teams are eliminated.

Right now, I like the Giants out of the National League and the Yankees out of the American League. Those teams seem to have a solid three man rotation, which is what really matters, and they have the bats and experience to compliment it. I've been wrong before and I'll be wrong again, so go figure out your own predictions, what do you have to lose?