Plugging The Leaks: Pirates Defense Now And In 2011

but I don’t see the limited range for Pedro Alvarez that people talk about. He seems athletic enough to get to balls and, like you mentioned, has a good arm. He passes the eye test for me, and I believe the botched routine balls can improve.

Same with Walker—he should be atheltic enough to handle second for a long time, and his bat is valuable there. Move him to third and if he doesn’t hit .310 he’s pretty vanilla.

out of town. With his decreased playing time coupled with his disagreements with the FO, I don’t see any way he’s in Bradenton from spring training. I also think that walker should stay at 2nd. His bat doesn’t play nearly as well at third, and Alvarez is still young with a pretty athlethic base.

I thought, surely, there’s no way that happens. And yet… It’s entirely possible they believe Brignac can be their shortstop for the long term and find another second baseman. Then again, his strikeout rate is 27.5% this year, although the walks are almost to 6% as well.

except, IMO, for Walker. Not much I can add that hasn’t been said already, but I really think Walker has shown flashes of excellence at second, and another year of experience should help hugely. His problems have mostly been issues of inexperience, not athleticism.

1- walkers range is below average?
2- cedeno’s defense has gone downhill.
is this an opinion or do you have numbers or facts for this? if anything, cedeno’s fielding has gotten much better since the trade brung him over. his range is legit and his numbers prove this. this sounds pretty much like another “i wish our hero Jack never left town” kinda post, IMO.

I don’t think Walker’s range is suspect, I think his experience is limited and his fielding will improve with more reps. He has shown great range at 2nd at times, but like someone said, let Maz have him for a spring and we’ll see if he blossoms. His turns on DPs have to improve.

I think Pedro’s defense is of more concern and I’m anxious to see if a major league job in hand come spring training has any effect – maybe he relaxes and gets more specific instruction since he will be the starter. I have to question why Andy has not been inserted as a defensive replacement late in games we are winning – like Saturday’s game. He was used as a PH when he could have played the field in the 8th-9th. Granted, he is no gold glove, and I’m sure the club wants Pedro to get the experience, but when a game is winnable and it appears to be slipping away, try to win it. There was never a problem running Church out to right in the late innings. I would do the same with catcher when Doumit is behind the plate – winning late in a close game, defensive replacement.

whats with the Snyder is possibly below average defensively, even though he is rated as one of the better catchers in the game by multiple publications? framing pitches? doumit is better at framing pitches??? is that all you can think of? maybe its because Doumit cant MOVE LEFT TO RIGHT TO BLOCK THE PLATE AND HE HAPPENS TO BE IN THE RIGHT PLACE TO CATCH A BALL DOWN THE MIDDLE??? LOL…

at all… none… he had the McLouth career year last year, and now look at him. he is slightly better in the field than cedeno and not an improvement at the bat. you say iwamura is not an option at 2B because of his age when orlando hudson is older. i agree that the fielding has been $#@!, but SS/2B/C and CF are taken care of very nicely, thankyouverymuch.

I agree that there’s a chance he can become better with more reps, given the extreme difficulty of learning a position on the fly. If we had the opportunity to acquire a solid 2B, though, I’d have no compunction about moving Walker back to 3B, where we already know that he can be a very good glove.

Pedro is going to be a 1B. The only real question is whether we try and make him fake it at 3B for another year or two, or whether we grasp the nettle and do what needs to be done on our own terms.

One way or the other, we can’t keep running out an infield defense as ragged as this year’s if we’re going to fill our rotation with high-BIP pitchers like Duke and Karstens. It’s not fair to them, asking them to play in front of such lousy gloves, and it’s not fair to us to make us watch hit after hit dribble into the outfield.

Walker is the ideal 2nd basemen, hit for average, hit for power and won’t make a lot of errors, a lot of great managers will tell you to give them a player that makes the plays they should make, Walker does that. Release him and see how long it takes for someone to grab him. He is far from a defensive problem on this team and he will continue to get better.
I have seen most of the 2nd basemen in this league he can hold his own with most of them and he has what, played the position for about 3 months of his life.

2011, start with a new manager, better starting pitching, a couple of better relief pitchers, a closer, 1 power hitter and this will be a much improved team if:
The manager manages differently than the one we have, another JR is not going to do anything but continue to hold back the team.
I get a kick out of how afraid the reporters are to counter his dumb answers to their questions.

I may not even be able to do it myself, but what if we gave the -1 treatment a try for BFD1 and his ilk a try?

We’ve already responded logically to all of them, and they come back and post the same tripe over and over.

I’ll see if I can get it started. A simple -1 and nothing more.

Seriously, what happened to the usual intelligent discourse on this site?

@ BFD1 – I try to be respectful of others’ points of view and keep an open mind toward them.

I think the main issue with your presence here is that, whether you realize it or not, you do take on the “troll” persona and perpetuate all of the negative stereotypes thereof. You come on here, accuse people of being stupid sheep, blindly following the FO propaganda and being relatives of the Nutting family. This is the same bashing that occurs when folks from this blog venture over to Smizik’s blog on the P-G site.

We’re all frustrated with the Pirates’ losing streak and we all wish it would end sooner rather than later. The folks here tend to take more of a “it’s a process” stance, while the folks on Smizik’s blog take a “find a quick fix by spending money” point of view. These are completely incompatible, and while it would seem like the team could be competitive at the MLB level while still building toward the future through the draft, MLB is not really set up that way.

Another issue is that you come here and start yelling about Nutting spending money, but when pressed, you offer no concrete solutions; it’s just “buy Free Agents, raise payroll to a respectable level” over and over again. Most of us have reviewed the list of impending Free Agents and see that it is mainly a vast wasteland of flotsam and jetsam, has-beens and never-will-be’s. While it’s very true that “it’s not our money, so why do we care how Nutting spends it,” we realize that the Pirates’ current ownership either cannot or will not spend $100MM plus, so we have to hope that they will spend it wisely instead of dropping $48MM on Jeff Suppan or $30MM on Randy Wolf, hoping that guys who are nothing better than average will turn into something more overnight.

@ Everyone Else – don’t feed the trolls and get into degenerative flame wars with them. We purport that we are thinking fans and understand how finances are just as critical to the ongoing success of the Pirates as the players, but when things descend into childish name-calling, you look like a bunch of douchebags. The trolls invade here to get a rise out of you and you give them exactly what they want.

I know that I sound like an old man and will probably catch a lot of crap for this post, but I come here to intelligently discuss the sport I love and the team that I love, not act like my 5-year-old daughter on the playground.

Peace.

And I understand that you took an unfair amount of name-calling, which you perpetuated, which they perpetuated and so on and so forth.

By definition, you are a “troll”, because your primary purpose by posting here is to inflame or incite others to respond to your posts in a negative manner. Using terms like “regime”, as though this were some military-style junta, accomplishes this.

As for the FA list, you yourself mentioned earlier that you didn’t know who was on that list, but you write now that they would be an upgrade over the current bunch on the field. It’s uninformed blanket statements like that one that will open you up to mass criticism.

Again, I can completely see your point of view. It’s just your execution that could use a little work; not everyone here is sympathetic to the cause as they are over on Bob’s blog.

Of course, the team needs more than just defense for run prevention. Maholm has regressed a lot this year, and all the other starting pitchers are (also) comfortably below league-average, according to Baseball Prospectus SIERA marks.