Results tagged ‘ Pirates ’
How Long Until The Pirates are Competitive?
Jack Wilson wants some gamers in Pittsburgh. Buccos GM Frank Coonnelly points out that the Rays and Phils were built with an old-school focus on drafting, depth, and development. Both men are right. But if the Pirates were to get serious right now about building a winner the old-school way, how long would it take for them to become competitive? Sure, being competitive and being a winner are two different things, so how far are the Bucs from either both? I don’t know anything about their farm system (apart from Patel and Singh) so I don’t know what they’re starting out with.
17 losing seasons. Man. 17 years ago Jamie Moyer was in his 30s. Think about that. That’s a long time.
Patel and Singh To the Bucs
I get that expanding baseball’s reach is good for the sport. I get that promoting baseball abroad is good for the American game. I get that all if this is good for MLB, Inc. I get it, I get it, I get it.
If you haven’t heard of Dinesh Patel and Rinku Singh, the long and the short of it is this: Sports agent JB Bernstein organized a contest in India to see what kind of latent baseball talent has heretofore gone undiscovered in a country of 1 billion people (where none of those 1 billion people play baseball). Specifically, the winner of Million Dollar Arm Challenge “would be the person who could throw 85 mph or higher and consistently for strikes. In addition to handing out a $100,000 cash prize to the winner of the contest, organizers also promised the winner training in the United States to prepare him to be scouted by Major League clubs” according to various MBL.com articles.
Singh won, but Patel was impressive enough to earn a closer look and both men have been learning how to pitch for strikes over the last six months. Both men have now been signed by the Pirates, and neither know how to play baseball. They don’t know the game and have never actually played it. They are becoming “pitchers” in a purely pragmatic sense, and that’s all good for now.
I wonder, though, what a Million Dollar Arm Challenge in the the Americas, The Netherlands, or parts of Asia where baseball is played (the rest of Asia, right?) might yield. I’m all for spreading baseball’s reach and I’m all for promoting Patel and Singh, should they be successful, as much as possible to raise interest in parts of the world where baseball isn’t already part of the culture. But I have to think that there are thousands of unknowns in places where baseball already matters that are just as good as Patel and Singh with internalized understandings of the game. Give them a shot, too.
Baseball’s a game that takes lifetime to learn. That’s why even very good players make mental and physical errors they should have outgrown in Little League. I think it’s going to be very hard for Patel and Singh to overcome such a learning curve in a professional context alongside rookie-leaguers from, say, Southern California, the Dominican Republic, Tokyo, or, well, any other part of the baseball-playing world. Then again, they are going to the Pirates, so maybe that won’t be such an issue. Ouch.
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