At this point in the spring, there are only a few remaining cuts, and the opening day roster is a very clear picture in the minds of many.  Pat Lackey over at WHYGAVS even posted what he thinks will be the roster come April 5th.  There’s still almost a week of exhibition ball yet to played between now and Duke v. Padilla at PNC Park, but we’re closer than we’ve ever been and I thought this would be a good time to talk a bit about expectation for your 2010 Pittsburgh Pirates.

Coming down the stretch last season, the Pirates were truly dreadful, playing some of the worst baseball seen around these parts in decades.  After the July 31st trading deadline, the team was 18-41 leading to their overall record of 62-99.  With little exception, the team that lost so consistently down the stretch last year is the team you will see this year, so it is hard to expect drastic improvement.  For any number of reasons though, the 2010 Pirates win-loss record isn’t what I want to focus on, so when I talk about expectations, I’m not talking about what I expect in terms of wins and losses.  Rather, there are several specific areas where I would like to see marked improvement in order to show me that this team continues to be on the right track toward long term winning.  I want to focus on those areas.  I don’t mean to imply that if all of these expectation aren’t met that the franchise is doomed.  Rather, my point is this:  it is very easy to look at the past 17 seasons and the current win loss record and conclude that no progress is being made.  It is harder, and requires a deeper analysis, to identify the areas the team is improving, and where they must continue to improve.  As Charlie over at Bucs Dugout notes, even 3 or 4 years ago it was obvious 2010 wasn’t going to be a good year for the Bucs.  But where is the team improving?  What signs can we expect to see this season that display that improvement?  And perhaps more importantly, what are the potential signs that things are headed in the wrong direction?

Let me start by completely contradicting the entire paragraph I just wrote.  Even if wins and losses aren’t the most important metric, they are a metric most people focus on, so any post talking about expectations that doesn’t at least address wins and losses is incomplete.  Therefore, I’d like to state for the record that I expect the Pirates to finish around the 70 win mark.  PECOTA projects a 70-92 mark for the team, and that sounds about right to me.  I actually think 70 wins is on the high side of where they will likely finish, but there are so many open questions (prospect promotions, potential trades, etc) and moving pieces with this team, any projection is going to be volatile.

With wins and losses out of the way, lets talk about some other expectation for this season, starting with a certain highly regarded hitting prospect.  I think pretty much everyone expects Pedro Alvarez to be called up in early June, similar to Andrew McCutchen last season and immediately take over duty as the everyday third baseman.  I think it’s important to keep in mind that he is starting the year at AAA, a level he never saw last season, and it may take him some time to get acclimated to that level of pitching before he excels.  Likewise, there seems to be a lot of people expecting Pedro to show up in June and immediately start raking, after all, both McCutchen and GFJ showed up in Pittsburgh last season and excelled immediately, so why can’t Pedro.  The flaw in that logic is that both players had several seasons at AAA under their belt, making the jump less dramatic.  I do expect Pedro to be called up in June or July, but I actually expect him to struggle a bit early on.  We know from his time in Lynchburg last season that he can be a bit of free swinger, so expect lots of strike outs balanced by some impressive displays of power.  A final line for the year of .260/.350/.480 seems reasonable to me, and as long as he is improving as the year goes on, posting his best numbers in September and October, I think I’ll be happy.  If he does indeed struggle in his first month or so in the majors, that is not a sign that the apocalypse is coming (plus, if the Pirates really could cause an apocalypse, it already would have happened at some point in the last 17 years, right?).

Pedro Alvarez is a very key piece in the development of this organization, but he’s not the only one.  I don’t really feel like enumerating every key prospect and my expectations for them this season (not to mention, I already kind of did that here and here), but I would like to touch on my expectation for the farm system as a whole.  When it comes to the farm system, this season is really no different than any other.  Basically, I want to see progress.  I want to see the high bonus HS arms they drafted last June to make solid pro debuts.  I want to see guys at AAA, much of which has been acquired via trade the last 2 years, pushing for spots on the big league roster.  All of this probably seems obvious and self explanatory, but there is a larger point I want to make here.  Not every prospect is going to succeed, as long as there is a general progression of talent through the pipeline, the system as a whole remains in balance which leads to a successful big league club.  The success(or failure) of any given prospect shouldn’t define the success of those running the organization.  As long as over the long term, guys are progressing through the levels, the organization is in good shape.  However, we are at a tipping point in how this team goes about acquiring that talent.  As has been publicly stated several times by the front office, the trades are “over.”  I put quotes around over because for a team in the pirates financial situation, there will always be trades, but I do believe that the en masse trading is done with.  That means that the vast majority of talent now will be acquired via the draft and international free agency, and player development in the key.  At this point, almost every player you now see called up to Pittsburgh will be a Neal Huntington acquired player.  A GM’s success or failure must be defined by his ability to evaluate, acquire, and develop talent and it will be the same with Huntington.  Therefore, now is the time to begin evaluating for real Huntington’s success in this area.

As I stated in the open, much of the roster is exactly what it was at the end of 2009.  The one area of the roster where this isn’t true is the bullpen.  Neal Huntington has stated frequently throughout his tenure as Pirates GM that relief pitching is the hardest thing to project in baseball, the implication being that spending big dollars on free-agent relief pitchers doesn’t make sense.  With that in mind, the way he went about building the bullpen for this season, combining young, talented, for the most part pre-arbitration arms with a few key veteran acquisitions and brining in a bunch of non-roster invitees to compete for the few remaining spots is likely to be his model to build a relief corps for the foreseeable future.  It will be very interesting to see how successful that effort was.

A quick aside: Generally, on this blog, when I talk about success I try to use numbers, and try to avoid speaking in loose, undefined language.  As a blogger, there are a lot of obvious advantages to always keeping things concrete.  For the purposes of relief pitching though, trying to do that is very difficult.  So many things affect bullpen performance, from inherited runners, to the defense behind them, that there are very few good statistics to measure relief performance, and the ones that do exist are hard to understand.  Baseball Prospectus uses something called WXRL and while I have a cursory understanding of that number, I don’t think it would mean much to most people if I said something like “I expect the pirates bullpen to post a composite WXRL of 10 this season.”  So for this one instance, I’m going to be speaking in very general terms, forgive me in advance please.

OK, back to the question at hand, what do I expect from the Pirates bullpen this season?  Lets just say that I expect the bullpen to be “better” than last year.  I expect Octavio Dotel to be more successful at closing games than Matt Capps was last season (that shouldn’t be hard).  I also expect to see the bullpen blow fewer leads and do a better job of turning quality starts into victories, but again, I’d like to stress that that is heavily dependent upon the defense (which will be bad this year, as I’ll detail in a future season preview post) so this may not be an easy thing to measure.  I think the important thing here is to see how successful a team can be building a bullpen from other teams castoffs, which is essentially what we have in Pittsburgh this season.  If it proves to be successful, it’s a very encouraging sign for future seasons when the quality of relief pitching will matter much more than it does to a 70 win team.

I’m already at 1600 words, so I think I’ll stop here.  I have (at least) 2 more season preview posts coming before opening day, the first focusing on position players, and the second on pitching, and I’m sure I’ll talk about expectations of certain players and how it relates to the team’s progress toward winning in those as well.