Pittsburgh Lumber Co.

Last week, Brian Cartwright released his 2009 offensive projections over at Statistically Speaking. I figured I would take a look at the Pirates’ numbers. A quick warning…they’re pretty ugly.
Here is a look at projected wOBA in graphical form. In short, wOBA is a stat created by Tom Tango that combines the value of on-base skills [...]

The Pirates have reportedly signed Indian pitchers Dinesh Patel and Rinku Singh to minor league contracts. Both are 19 years old, and neither had played baseball until about a year ago. Both struggled in front of scouts a few weeks ago, but their extremely raw athleticism and quick progress since arriving in the [...]

The Pirates added five players to the 40-man roster today, protecting them from the Rule V Draft. As expected, Neil Walker and Jose Tabata were among those additions. Reliever Jeff Sues also was added. This was not surprising after his impressive return from an injury in 2007. Over 64.1 innings with [...]

David Pinto has been releasing his 2008 Probabilistic Model of Range (PMR) numbers, so I figured we should check out how the Pirates performed. PMR is a fielding metric that basically uses an assortment of play by play data from Baseball Info Solutions (such as direction and velocity) to determine an expected number of outs [...]

This isn’t a solution in the sense of it will make Adam LaRoche hit better. I have no idea how to do that. Instead, this a suggested solution for how the Pirates can avoid early season non-productivity at first base.
LaRoche’s splits the last couple of years in March/April, per Baseball Reference:
2007 – .133/.255/.265 with [...]

I don’t have much time to write, but there are a couple pieces of interesting news today. First of all, the Pirates have added Perry Hill as their first base coach. Hill, a highly regarded infield instructor, was out of baseball last year due to personal issues. The Pirates have been trying to hire him [...]

Just one week ago, I talked about Nate McLouth’s struggles in center field, recommending he move to a corner outfield spot in the future. Today, Major League Baseball announced the National League Gold Glove winners, and Nate was one of them. He is the first Pirate to win the award since Jay Bell [...]

I am certainly not going to claim advance SABRmetric knowledge on defensive statistics. However, I do know two things:
 
1. Nate McLouth has been awarded a Gold Glove for 2008.
2. There were some questions among the baseball thinkers earlier this year that Nate’s defense wasn’t as good as the raw numbers (as in errors committed) would [...]

There is an interesting article in today’s PG about Mpho Ngoepe, a switch-hitting shortstop the Pirates signed out of South Africa about a month ago. Ngoepe is 18-years-old, 5′9″ and 165 pounds. He is a long way from Pittsburgh, and the odds are against him making it that far. But this is [...]