Kuzul

The Pirates are concluding yet another terrible season with only two games left in the 2010 schedule. They are going to pick first overall in next year’s draft and have over 100 losses.

This seems pretty dim and honestly it is hard to get excited over much, but the Pirates have their young core finally and have reinforcements on the way.

With any luck they will be just a little bit better in 2011 and will make huge strides in 2012. No need to look that far ahead as you will need a reason to get tickets for next year.

These are the five players that will have you glued to the television next year when the Pirates are on FSN.

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New York Yankees legend Don Mattingly will be replacing Los Angeles Dodgers manager Joe Torre at the end of the season. This ends a disappointing fun for Torre as the Dodgers manager.

Torre started his Dodger career with a 5-0 victory and kept on winning right into the 2008 playoffs. There, he managed his team to a 3-0 sweep over the Cubs.

This was the Dodgers first postseason series win since their championship season in 1988. The postseason victory would be short lived as the Dodgers were beaten by the Phillies four games to one.

He would lead them to success again in 2009 with a 95-67 record which clinched them the top seed. They would beat Torres’ old club the St. Louis Cardinals 3-0 and rematch the Phillies.

Despite having the best record they were again bested by the Phillies. They were beaten in five games this time around.

2010 has not gone so well for the Dodgers and Torre felt it was time to step down. He leaves behind an interesting legacy with the Dodgers.

He was far from a failure as he went to the playoffs two out of three years and had the best team in the league one of those years.

Despite all of that he had a very poor postseason record and that is where he made his name. It is hard to really get a feel for someone when they only spend three years there.

It is suffice to say that he wasn’t the same manager that laid waste to baseball in the later 1900’s and early 2000’s

Are the Dodgers happy about what he did? I would say yes and no. He got them on the winning track but couldn’t get them to the promised land.

Mattingly will take over at the start of the 2011 season and face a difficult task. The Dodgers are going through a tough year and the owner situation is far from figured out.

Attracting key free agents this off-season will be hard and the current team seems to be the underachieving type.

Mattingly has been with Torre his whole managerial career and it would seem like he isn’t going to be much of a change from what Torre brings to the table.

He will surely bring different elements to the table but how different is a question that only he can answer. At any rate Mattingly will be the head of this team next year.

Where Torre will go from here is anyone’s guess. It is already rumored that he may be the top choice for the Florida Marlins job.

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As a Pittsburgh Pirates fan myself, the last thing I want to do is throw a wet towel on a great week.

With the signings of Jameson Taillon, Stetson Allie, and Luis Heredia, the Pirates have added three power arms.

They signed the best American high school arm, arguably the second best American arm, and the top international arm of 2010.

For a team like the Pirates, this is a major step in the right direction. Every year they get slammed for not spending money at any level.

You cannot make that statement this year, as they have spent what appears to be $12 million on the draft. They then dropped another $2.6 million on Heredia.

You’re looking at almost $15 million being dropped on players this week. This is what the Pirates need to be doing, and finally this year they have done it.

With Taillon and Allie you immediately put two pitchers in the system that can reach 100 miles per hour on the radar gun. Heredia is younger at 16 but already reaches 94 miles per hour.

Taillon and Heredia are destined to be starting pitchers for the Pirates, and Allie could be too. If he doesn’t carve out a niche as a starter, he will be the closer of the future.

If you look past the first two picks, the Pirates did a great job of getting players signed. They signed six of the top 10 draft picks and 27 of the 50 overall players.

It would have been nice to see more of the top 10 signed, but it is what it is. You add in the signing of Heredia, and the loss of four top-10 draft picks isn’t as bad.

With these three young stud pitchers (and 14 more pitchers), this is the kind of draft that I truly believe changes the Pirates franchise.

They have the young position players in place at the major league level and now have the pitchers that can make a rotation. They may be three or four years off, but the cavalry is on its way finally.

This is the third good draft in a row for the Pirates, but this is the one we will look back on and say, “That is when everything changed for the Pittsburgh Pirates.”

The biggest testament of this draft may not even be the players. Some of these guys won’t pan out, and some of them will.

The lasting effect of this draft may be the money spent on it. Taillon got $6.5 million, Allie got $2.25 million, and fourth rounder Nick Kingham got double his slot money at $480,000.

That list could go on for a lot more players. The Pirates drafted the people they wanted and then made sure they got them on the club.

Now all this is great and dandy but let’s get honest with ourselves here.

The Pirates are going to have their 19th straight losing season. This is something that needs to be repeated every year.

We should be 19 years in and finally get our first big international signing. Yes, this is the third good draft in a row, but we have missed some important signings in that time period.

We, the fans, should be downright giddy because of what has happened this week. We should also remember that the Pirates have been bad for a long time, and this should just be the start of something great.

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Ryan Doumit is not the X-factor that the Pirates want him to be. It is that plain and simple.

Doumit is serviceable with his bat when he is a catcher. He is a defensive nightmare this year at catcher though.

They decided he should try the field and put him at first base. His .257 average, eight home runs, and 34 RBI are very average for a first baseman.

Then we saw his defense and it was a total 100 percent nightmare there. So now they have decided to put him back into the field and currently have him playing the outfield.

The problem with putting him there means that Lastings Milledge or Jose Tabata are going to be sitting out.

Milledge was the one who got the hook last night. For all the flack Milledge has been getting this year he is having a very good year.

His .273 batting average is currently good enough for ninth in the National League, his .332 OBP is good enough for tenth, his .377 slugging is good enough for 16, and his .709 OPS is good enough for 15.

Doumit does sport similar or even better numbers with a .257 average, .326 OBP, .413 slugging, and a .739 OPS.

So you are thinking why am I making a fuss over playing a guy that has better numbers than Milledge. My problem is what is the advantage?

Doumit is god awful in the field and looks like a kid on prom night. He has no idea what he is doing in the outfield.

He lets routine balls drop in front of him and generally just looks lost. You add in the fact that Doumit only has eight home runs to Milledge’s three and there is no real power spike by making this move.

He won’t put the ball in play more as his batting average is 16 points lower than Milledge’s. Doumit only has two more RBI, 34 to Milledge’s 32, but he hits far worse with runners in scoring position.

Milledge is one of the best hitters with RISP. His stat line is a very healthy average of

Doumit only bests him in one category. His stat line reads .266 average, .377 OBP, .516 slugging percentage, and a .892 OPS.

Milledge has had six more at bats with runners in scoring position and still posts better numbers.

Then you add in the fact that Milledge is four years younger and this move is just maddening to fans. I know baseball is a game of numbers.

Most of their numbers are comparable and Doumit is even better in some areas but he does not pass the eye test when he is in the field.

He was catching tonight and hit the ball well. Hopefully the Pirates staff realize that he should be behind the plate or sitting comfortably in the dugout.

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I am a new writer to the Pittsburgh Pirates page but not a new writer to this site. I have lived in Pittsburgh all my life and have only been a Pirate fan for three years.

I am 20 years old and soon to be 21 in August. As everyone knows about the losing streak, that means I don’t ever recall a good Pirates team.

I got hooked on the Pirates when I bought a 10 game pack and started to attend games in 2008. Funny enough I originally got the 10 game pack to make sure I would have a ticket to one of the Yankee games.

Back to the main point though. I found out that baseball is a great game to watch, and believe it or not the Pirates are fun to watch.

Quickly I took to players like Jason Bay, Nyger Morgan, Matt Capps, Xavier Nady, and Nate McLouth in the first few years of my fandom.

When Duke came up I followed the Pirates very briefly and learned quickly that they weren’t good and they didn’t have many good players. So even though I liked these players it was always done with some reservation.

I knew they wouldn’t be around for the long haul and they certainly wouldn’t be around when we were finally winning. In the time I have been attending Pirates games there have been a lot of bad ones.

Hell I was in the stands when the Cubs made sure we were losers for the 17th straight year. We lost a game 20-0, we were outscored 54-3 in that series, and now we are losers of 10 straight.

Yeah it was frustrating and it was annoying to listen to everyone complain and generally crap all over the Pirates. There was always one thing that made it bearable, the future wasn’t here yet.

Once Andrew McCutchen got called up we got to see the first piece of the future. Then we made a lot of trades and our farm teams had hope again.

We then got to the 2010 season and our farm teams were stacked and the future was primed to come up and make an impact. Well last night Wednesday, June 16th ,2010 the future arrived.

With the arrival of Pedro Alvarez the biggest and best prospects we have now are up. The lineup of Jose Tabata, Neil Walker, McCutchen, and Alvarez represent something new.

They represent “Our Team”, the team that we can fall in love with and not hold back. This is the team that will be together when we win.

This team has a lot of work to do. We need to assemble a pitching staff and we need to assemble a better, younger bullpen. We have another few years ahead of us no doubt.

The new refreshing feeling is though this team is our team and we are going to go through the highs, and more often than not the lows, together for those few years.

Alvarez didn’t do anything spectacular in his debut. He went 0-2 with one strikeout, a lineout, and a walk with one run scored.

Tabata had the best night of the young guys when he went deep for the first time. Alvarez although not wowing on the field did something for all of us fans.

He made this team “Our Team” he made the core of young players here. Tonight wasn’t about our 10th straight loss, it was about this team becoming ours.

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