Pittsburgh Pirates

All right, it's only grapefruit league. These games don't "count." Even so, there are a couple of former cellar dwellers that were touted as turnaround prospects, that don't look like such in spring training. One of them is the Washington Nationals. Another is the Pittsburgh Pirates.

As a consolation, the World Series champion Yankees are 5-7, with their formerly vaunted starters, CC Sabathia and Joba Chamberlain, struggling mightily. The Pirates are 2-2 against them.

At the end of 2007, the Detroit Tigers needed a new shortstop. The Pirates had one, Jack Wilson, that they were willing to trade.

Detroit was willing to part with an advanced pitching prospect, Jair Jurrjens, who almost came to Pittsburgh, but the Tigers finally took the Atlanta Braves' Edgar Renteria instead.

This choice was made through the rearview mirror. Renteria did have a better 2007 than Wilson.

Pirates fans haven't been treated to much good baseball or many star players since former Pirate Sid Bream raced home to win the NLCS for the Atlanta Braves in 1992.

But 2010 could be different, even if the won/loss column does show the Pirates with an above-.500 record when everything is said and done.

There is plenty to like about this years team and plenty of reasons to watch the Pirates as they continue the long journey back from the cellar.

For anyone who enjoys watching young players develop and stars bloom in the majors, Pittsburgh is the place to be the next few years. An organization that seemed hell bent on losing and destroying talent for almost two decades now has something it has not had in many years.

Young talent...and lots of it.

From Low A to the Majors, the Pirates have young players worth watching.

Let's meet five of those players and take a look at what we can expect from them in 2010.

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When you think Pittsburgh Pirates you probably don't think of a sturdy, young, and reliable rotation. What probably comes to mind is 16 straight years of losing, 17 if you want to count the strike-shortened 1994 year. 

Charlie Morton's 2009 ERA of 4.55 shouts "league average."  But that's exactly what he is not, because he got there in a funny way.

My father (a retired civil engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon University) used to say that there were two types of "B" students.  One type made "straight Bs." The other (rarer) kind made half As and half Cs.

The Pittsburgh Pirates have been trying.

For 17 years, they've been trying to get back to the playoffs, the World Series, and even to respectable status in the sports world.

They've been trying, and they've been failing.

Whether or not it was a huge mistake for Bob Nutting to make his now infamous "dynasty" comment a few weeks ago is not as important as this question:

Could he be right?

The Pittsburgh Pirates are one of the most storied franchises in all of baseball. A whole generation of baseball fans are unaware of that fact, thanks largely in part to 17- straight losing seasons.

2010 will very likely be the 18th-straight season of losing for the Pirates and their fans.

However, it finally appears the team is done retooling and is heading toward respectability.

No player embodies the youth movement of the team more so than Andrew McCutchen.

Paul Maholm may or may not be the best pitcher in the Pirates' rotation. But he is clearly the one to beat for front-runner.

A stalking horse, by definition, is a pretty good racehorse that may or may not be the best, but is certainly good enough to set the pace for the others. In short, his defining characteristic is reliability. That pretty much describes Maholm.

As late as the beginning of 2008, he was a distant third among Pirates' hurlers. But two more obviously talented throwers, Ian Snell, and Tom Gorzelanny, fell by the wayside that year.

The ability to hit 25 Home Runs in one season is a special skill. The ability to steal 25 bases in one season is a skill just as special. The ability to do both is exceptionally rare and is a talent that can not be ignored or denied. However players like these somehow find a way to fly under the radar.

But how?

How could a player with such rare skills be passed on so long in a fantasy baseball draft?