On Pedro Alvarez: Let's Calm Down, People

take the skirt off and let him play. Trying to guess how he will react to some initial failure is silly. He did seem to get over it at AAA last year.

They could trade him.

I bet Jermaine Dye is available.

thats interesting… it ll be interesting to track this one… as of now, it doesnt hold much weight because of sample size, but it’s good thing to note.

True, Huntington has not lucked out and cobbled together a winning team from paper clips and duct tape. But, his trades have not been the disasters that they have been portrayed as. He has actually made the Pirates better through the trades, just not as much as everyone hoped.

The Kyle Drabek point is solid.

Cedeno/Wilson is similar to Milledge/Morgan to me. The guy we got is doing better than the guy we traded, but it’s still pretty bad. It’s hard to really call those acquisitions wins for the Pirates in the sense of acquiring Tabata or Morris (which are what I’d call the only real trade wins at this point since they are doing very well at AA or better)

In a nutshell, the Pirates traded Jason Bay and Freddy Sanchez for Jose Tabata and Bryan Morris.

Also, they basically let go of Jose Bautista and Matt Capps for very little, and picked up Garrett Jones and Evan Meek for very little.

Given the players acquired have more years of control, it’s a good transaction record overall. Some of the other players in the deals could pan out late, as well.

Braves send Chavez to AAA
M’s DFA Snell.

a beat writer, I don’t know what Finder is but he is pathetic. Cook writes opinions

His strikeout rate and other things can easily be used to justify waiting a few more weeks. There is some serious money to be made on that homestand, and it wouldn’t kill him to spend a few more weeks there. In the scene of things, it isn’t that long. You’d think a pennant depended on his imminent arrival. When he does get here, let’s remember that Muke Schmidt hit .180 and change in 1973, Aramis Ramirez was nearly booed out of town, and that this kid is a human being, not a savior.

Indeed, I think he’s trying to say the opposite: that it’s better for fans to have low expectations and be pleasantly surprised than to expect too much of him and have him branded a failure in the public eye because he had a slow first month.

It wasn’t true then, and it isn’t true now, either.

Pedro was #8 coming into this season. Still, the larger point stands.

the Bucs had three guys in BA’s top 13 in 1998? Wow

…when people interpret “accountability” to mean “immediately fire a bunch of arbitrary people because I’m bored/frustrated/delusional”.

Littlefield left this team in a terrible state. If you’d made Jesus Christ Himself the GM, He still wouldn’t have been able to turn it around yet.

or I m guessing that would have been the point. Jose Bautista has a HR/FB of 19.6% which is gonna come down a wee bit, I think, and some things are gonna roll off cliffs. Not all, and he’ll still have value, just not the present monstrous love-child-of-Dunn-and-Willingham kind of value.

…have not turned the team around during the 14 losing years that he wasn’t in charge!

Wait, what?

for whatever ownership is feeding him. Like many emotional fans, he’ll support the Pirates no matter what plan they say they have and no matter what they do.

The problem with writing about stuff you don’t know anything about is that once you’ve written it, everybody knows you don’t know what you’re talking about.

Bob Nutting is in the business of making money. Do you think that a good team that puts 35,000 butts in seats a night, increases the road take, the beer and food and merchandise take, TV rights, etc., wouldn’t be intriguing to him.

Frank Coonelly is a Type A labor lawyer who happened to work at the same firm I did once (he left before I arrived). Now, a lot of our mutual acquaintances don’t like him, and there was a time I was livid that they brought a union buster out of Bud Selig’s shop to run the Pirates. After I calmed down and engaged my brain, I decided to pick up the phone and call him. Surprise—we have a number of mutual friends, and we spoke for close to an hour. Turns out he has a bit of an edge, and I can see why people may not like him, but we had a thoroughly enjoyable talk. We agreed to meet up my next trip in, and had a great time chatting. He was pretty candid and I left feeling that he is exactly what logic tells you he would be: an ambitious guy who was given an opportunity of a lifetime and wants to succeed at it. So I’m now fine with him.

Neal Huntington is a guy who was given an opportunity Vlad once said he would “give his left nut” to have. He will, I am sure, own up to that honest and completely understandable sentiment. Now, having been given this job, it makes no sense in the world that he would go about systematically doing all sorts of weird ass stuff designed to ensure that he never has to worry about giving his left, right or middle nut for any baseball job again. (Although having said that, an industry that keeps recycling the likes of Ed Wade, Jim Hendry, Jim Bowden and Dave Littlefield means that anyone can be resuscitated—that said, only Jim Hendry would hire Littlefield as a scout).

Now, I may not (and don’t) like every single decision Huntington has made, but his contract and job description do not (and I’ll bet MY left nut on this) have no condition inherent that he make no mistakes. He will, presumably, be evaluated on the totality of his performance. Since that performance cannot possibly be properly evaluated, given the unusual nature of the circumstances with which he was presented (a bag of steaming shit, a small shovel, a full gasoline can, a computer and some rubber bands, the full gasoline can and computer representing the only useful tools) until his first couple of drafts mature.

So what the fuck do people want? Look at the Cubs. They could have done what we did. They didn’t. Instead, they opened their veins for Fukodome, Ramirez (what the hell is happening there?), Soriano and Zambrano. Multiyear deals, no trade clauses and oceans of money down the drain. Piniella probably will walk, and the new ownership will almost certainly shitcan Hendry. And they should. Compare what he has done and what Huntington has done, and tell me why Huntington deserves to be fired.

There comes a point where you have to give people the benefit of the doubt and a chance. While it can be fun to bitch, I’d rather argue over whether our 30 games over .500 team should have taken player X or player Y with the 30th choice in the first round. I have no idea whether these guys will get us there or not, but they haven’t had nearly enough time to do it. You want to bitch, feel free, but remember that you are operating in a fantasy construct: that ambitious human beings will make decisions designed to cause them to fail. Some of you will invoke Littlefield and leap to say he did. My answer is that intelligence is a given in my assumption. Huntington is intelligent, and Coonelly clearly so. Based on my interactions with Littlefield and listening to McClatchy, I am now convinced that the two of them together are not as intelligent as a box of hair.

So that’s my opinion. Rip away.

I’m not sure if I said it here or on the FanPost, but my problem isn’t with them delaying him, but with this coy are-we-aren’t-we nonsense. There are 3 options: bring him up this week, either against Chicago or Cleveland, or bring him up in a few/several weeks. Let’s stipulate that, development-wise, there’s zero difference between bringing him up tonight or Friday.

It appears that they won’t bring him up against Chicago; if they bring him up tomorrow or Thurs, I think they lose tickets relative to a Sunday evening/Monday morning announcement. I think bringing him up this weekend, during the 1960 celebration, is a mistake (wasted ticket sales, takes the spotlight from the 1960 heroes, and happens in front of an easily disgruntled audience when they could easily manage a more knowledgeable audience).

If they’re not bringing him up this week, why are/were they hinting that they might? I just think this whole situation is an unforced error. And I’d feel this way even if it weren’t affecting my own personal situation (although I’d probably be about 10% less annoyed).

that I keep forgetting that – you’re the second or third person to point that out to me.

Although honestly, is a PTBNL for Aki worth even 1000 tickets for Pedro’s debut? But hey, maybe someone gives us something worthwhile for DY, and I’m happy despite it all.