Pirates March To Grapefruit League Title Begins Today

The Pittsburgh Pirates march to the Grapefruit League crown begins today. The Bucs are 6-10 and on a two-game-both-in-the-same-day streak.  It’s the halfway mark of spring training.  (At least that’s what we are going with.)

The first few weeks have been pretty awful.  Walks.  Walks.  Pickoffs.  Not much power. No big injuries–just pitchers recovering from them.  Walks.  A renovated ballpark.  Not really much to cheer about outside of yesterday when Jameson Taillon and Gerrit Cole woke up the voices.

The addition of Jose Contreras is interesting.  The rebuild of Jonathan Sanchez has been ho-hum.  Frank Liriano is supposedly ahead of schedule.  Jeff Karstens will be pitching in a minor league game this week.  Meanwhile, the rookies named Jeff Locke, Kyle McPherson and even Phil Irwin to some degree, have pitched well at times.  The depth in the pitching staff is high in quantity, but not so much in quality thus far.

The offense has sputtered to score runs thus spring, yesterday’s outburst aside.  The big surprise has been Joe Tabata, but there hasn’t been a Matt Hague Grapefruit League MVP like performance this year.

It’s time to finish.

The expectations of Clint Hurdle are that winning 95 games will put the team in a good place.

Well it’s time to get it started.  The ballclub talks about not getting the job done the past two seasons.  What better way to start learning how to finish than well, finishing.  Close out the final weeks in Florida by stacking up some wins!  Nothing wrong with that, right?

Wait…that’s the lineup today?  Oh, maybe this post is a week early.  Sorry about that gang.