35 Comments

I hope we could put a stop to the talk that Davis is good defensively, he has improved to just below average at best. Hope to someday stop reading about his work ethic as well unless he finally pairs it with talent.

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It’s extremely rare to have a competent major league catcher who is also capable of hitting at an average rate. If the bat progresses ahead of the defense, it’s usually a position change. If the defense progresses faster than the bat, they max out as a backup catcher. Players very rarely put it all together at the position and most of the time they’re a little older before they do. For every Adley Rutschman, there’s 10 Travis D’Arnaud’s.

I say all that to say this: I do like Davis and hope going to Indy lets him relax and press the reset button. I think he put a lot of pressure on himself to carry the offense this season. But I do agree with you, eventually the “outstanding work ethic” has to carry over into actual production.

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A.M., Davis has an injury?

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The Pirates are going through a tough streak at the plate right now. In their last 7 games played, the following are each players' individual numbers:

Cutch - 1 for 23

Suwinski - 1 for 16

Olivares - 2 for 21

Reynolds - 4 for 28

Taylor - 3 for 17

Hayes - 6 for 27

Cruz - 5 for 22

Joe - 6 for 23

Triolo - 7 for 26

Tellez - 5 for 17

This is not a player or two dragging us down. Our team leaders need to step up, take charge, and get this slump behind us.

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No Stars and less than a hand full of good players, and yet there are fans out there that think this is a competitive team...

Once again the words embarrassing, pathetic are the words of the day for this miserable team, I would say clean house but that will just bring in more of the same. What is it now 27 out of the last 32 are losing seasons...

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Going back to the last title in 1979 I believe there has been less than 10 stellar seasons. That's a long history of suckage.

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Either Cherington has failed us in that we lack talent or the coaching staff has failed us in that we're unable to develop and put that talent in a position to succeed. Or possibly both--if we lose 90+ games, I'd say both. But the bottom line is that unless there is a dramatic change in quality of play, there has to be changes to leadership that goes beyond getting rid of Haines.

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And my upbeat comment is that we're nowhere near as bad as we've looked the last 2+ weeks so things will get better. And feelings can change quickly--I feel like the Reds have been playing well or at least that their fans should have a lot of optimism, but they're only 2.5 games ahead of us. One series sweep.

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My upbeat comment about the state of the Pirates:

Everything has a season. The losing, the silent bats, the crappy development of hitters, will all change one day.

Now please resume bashing those responsible for this unmitigated disaster.

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Turn, turn, turn...

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Dump Tellez and fire Cherington. Stop drafting "this is the best bat to ballhitter available (Gonzalez) or maybe ever (Temarr). Johnson seems unable to put bat to ball over 80% of the time. We RUIN players.

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God AJ Preller is something else.

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Thing is... they have had an impressive minor league system during his tenure there: almost as good as Baltimore's now is. If they would have just stopped trading away all of their good prospects and overpaying for a year or two of every 2nd year arb. guy on the trading block, they would have one of the top teams in baseball. They never run out of quality prospects to trade. It is amazing actually.

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They do a good job of (how do I say this) enhancing their own guys and knowing when to cut bait. Hassell, Gore, etc. Trading all of the guys they have up to this point, there is no way they’ll never get burned a bit on any level. But yes, they’ve drafted and developed really well.

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Hold on just a second. You can't proclaim anything except a lot of failure during his long long tenure in SD, even with the blank checks he was writing 9-figure deals with.

Maybe "your something else" was not a compliment......but that was my first impression.

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He’s one of a kind and goes against the grain is what I meant. Does that mean he’s good? Not necessarily, and they really haven’t done anything beyond an NLCS run. He’s impatient, probably too impatient for his own good. But given this organization (and the last management team) seemed so sure of themselves they could never be wrong and there’s no reason to make changes, they eventually become boring and stale. Say what you want about Preller, but he’s never boring.

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Yeah agreed, he's a good fans GM

making moves.....until the product doesn't come together on the field.

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I guess I appreciate the willingness to change when things aren’t working. He probably does it to the extent that it’s counterproductive. But a little of that gene in our GM would be nice.

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I’d rather have Preller-style churn than the Pirates’ long boring trudge to failure. There’s always something to get interested in at least. Of course, far better to have Friedman-style action, which is incredibly effective from top to bottom.

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As I said when he acquired Cease (who has been great), it would be a lot of fun to have a GM that is always looking for ways to win now. FG has the Padres up to a 47% chance of making the playoffs and evidently that's enough for Preller to cash in some trade chips to improve the team.

As an aside, we're down to a 7% chance of making the playoffs after being at least as high as 34% a few weeks ago.

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Exactly. There’s so much groupthink with a large swath of GMs are too much about process as opposed to results. Ours is one of those.

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Some variation of "trust the process" is what anyone will say when they cannot produce or point to results to justify their continued employment.

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I’m not seeing much coherent process here. I see a lot of flinging crap at the wall and trying to see what works.

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You’re talking Preller flinging crap at the wall? Yeah I’m not sure how it makes sense. But I see our teams “process” and don’t see anything resembling success anywhere.

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One thing I neglected to mention is the other side of the return on the Arraez deal. That is a massive overpay for the surplus value of Arraez. Exactly the sorts of trades we haven’t been able to make over the years. Bendix did well here.

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Addendum to my above comment: the Marlins are eating all of Arraez’s salary, making it less of an overpay. Still, it’d be nice to have management that ate that kind of money to get better prospects.

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If you look at how Preller has constructed his teams it’s basically just acquiring a bunch of good players without any thought to lineup or defensive coherence. And when you look at the amount of prospect and financial capital he’s chewed up versus his results, it’s decidedly unimpressive.

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That’s true. I thought he was trying to acquire a team full of shortstops last offseason. Has he been burned much by any of the prospects he’s traded? I don’t seem to think so, but maybe I’m wrong.

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deletedMay 4
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I just re-read and good question. Actually both Cherington and Preller TBH.

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Explain please.

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He traded with Miami for Luis Arraez last night.

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Thanks.

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