Pittsburgh Pirates 2010 Review Part III: Stachetastic. Strasmas.

2010 concluded with Giants fans rocking beards

to celebrate their World Series Championship.  The Pirates started growing mustaches at the end of May.  Trendsettin.

Say what you want about Neal Huntington, Frank Coonley, and the Pirates player development staff, but they seemed to be able to push the buttons of the young talent in 2010. It was obvious they pissed off Neil Walker to see how he would react.  It worked.  Huntington might not have drafted Walker, but he pissed him off enough to ignite a fire in the first round pick that made most of the forever doubting Pittsburgh media eat crow.

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It was obvious Garrett Jones was kept in AAA a little longer than most thought was necessary last season.

The extra time in AAA certainly helped Andrew McCutchen when he came up to the bigs.

"McCutchen entered Friday having played in 160 games, more than any Major League outfielder since his debut, and he has recorded 185 hits, the second most in franchise history through 160 games. (In 1933, Arky Vaughan had 191 hits through his first 160 games.)"

All of those moves worked out pretty well didn’t they?   Near the end of May, Huntington did it again.  On his radio show he mentioned that the Bucs felt Tabata had some work left to do.  Tabata responded with hits in eight of ten games.

We did a story on why we desperately wanted to see Jose Tabata join the Pirates lineup. The Pirates would face some outstanding pitchers in the month of June, but heading into the month,  the opposition was a combined 21 games under .500.  [If you’re a regular at this site, you know we can’t write for shit, but if you read one link, we think this is one of our better stories.]

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Just a couple days later Tabata made his impressive debut, got a cramp and nearly gave us an aneuryism.

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We went to see the debut of Stephen Strasburg at Nats Town.  Strasmas.  We took pictures.  We made a bet.  We would drink a beer every time a Pirates player struck out.  I can’t remember what we were supposed to get, well except drunk.  Winner.

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On June 11, we had watched enough.  It was time to fire up the PhotoShop.

The Value Over Replacement Player combination of Aki Iwamura, Ryan Church, Bobby Crosby, and Lastings Milledge is a NEGATIVE 13.4. That isn’t good. Baseball Prospectus

And then not even before mid-June, mainly from watching the likes of Aki, Church, Crosby and Milledge we put it out there….yeh, we asked about the possibility of catching the Baltimore Orioles for the worst record in MLB.  Sorry.  Had to.

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We will continue the recap of 2010 in the next post, but for now we leave you with one of our favorite videos from 2010:

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