Posting will probably be rather light over the next few days, since I'm moving from San Diego to Columbus, with a stop in Wisconsin on the way to pick up some things my girlfriend has stored there. I finished my degree and am excited to move closer to home - I'll be driving east to Morgantown a lot, which will give me plenty of excuses to take the detour to PNC, and I'll also be within driving distance of road games for three of the Bucs' minor-league teams. Oh, and my family lives near there too.
Speaking of the minor league teams, State College ended its season yesterday. It wasn't a terribly impressive season statistically, and it would have been nice to see more from Mel Rojas in particular. But it's always unwise to read too much into short-season stats, and probably the most important thing about the season was the fact that the Spikes had a bunch of teenage pitchers (Zack Von Rosenberg, Colton Cain, Zack Dodson, Zachary Fuesser, and Brooks Pounders, plus Trent Stevenson, who's technically 20 in baseball years but was drafted as a high schooler last year).
Von Rosenberg, in particular, bears watching next year - he struggled in his first few starts in June, then was lights out the rest of the way, with a 2.11 ERA and 3.5 strikeouts per walk in his last ten starts.
West Virginia ends its season today. This article says the team's attendance has been declining steadily, but I don't think that necessarily has anything to do with the Pirates, who gave the Power a competitive team this year. When I went to go see them this summer, there were a ton of people there, but it obviously wasn't much of a baseball crowd - it was dollar beer night, and most of the attendees seemed to be twentysomethings who turned the stadium's large concourse into a meat market. When the economy is particularly rough (and when beer isn't being sold for a dollar), those people just won't come out. The Pirates will probably send a bunch of bigger-name prospects, like Jameson Taillon and most of the teenage pitchers mentioned above, to West Virginia next year; it'll be interesting to see what effect they have.