Only choice is to spend on the draft

Thursday, August 19, 2010
By Gene Collier, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
http://www.post-gazette.com/sports/?m=1

The Pirates introduced Stetson Allie to the begrumbled media before the game Wednesday night against the Florida Marlins, and while Stetson is a confident and engaging young man with a cool name, the specifics of his persona pale for the moment next to a single fun fact about his right arm.

It can throw a baseball 102 mph.

"The top would be 101, 102," he said when I asked specifically, "but consistently 95 to 97."

So let me repeat that first fact for emphasis, along with an even more emphatic completion of a compound sentence.

Stetson Allie's right arm can throw a baseball 102 mph, and it is the property of the Pittsburgh Pirates.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer's 2010 High School baseball Player of the Year: St. Edward pitcher Stetson Allie

Really, at this point, some matter of hours from an 18th consecutive losing season, you wouldn't have to be a second-round draft pick with $2.25 million bonus bucks in your account to be introduced in this venue. With a 102 mph fastball, you could be a former alien slaughterhouse worker/former female impersonator from the former planet Pluto and have been welcomed at 115 Federal Street with equal enthusiasm.

Why this week's rush then, do you think, to slap Pirates general manager Neal Huntington and his bosses on the back for signing Allie and Jameson Taillon, the team's No. 1 pick in the June draft, when there was no real alternative? If you're not going to spend money on the major league level (and who would blame you given the current 100-loss mess?), and you don't spend it on the draft, it is then that people are going to start dialing the phones.

"Hello police? Yeah, like to report a GTB."

"You mean, GTA, grand theft auto?"

"No, GTB, grand theft baseball."

So don't start the official review of the Huntington Administration, which was 169-273 as play began last night. It's great that we're getting to see Pedro Alvarez this summer and you'd hope for many summers to come, but any 15-year-old with Internet access, a Baseball America subscription and ATM privileges at the Bank of Nutting would have drafted Alvarez in 2008.

Alvarez represents a looming return of mashing offense in the grandest Pirates tradition, a legacy of swashbuckling line drive hitters and long ball threats. Allie and Taillon represent what's missing not only now, but for two or three years to come, or until they get here -- actual talent in the pitching rotation.

"I'm pretty excited about getting these kinds of arms," manager John Russell said in his pretty unexcited way. "When they get here, it'll be an exciting time. It's kind of when Pedro started. It was always fun to watch his progress. It was fun to watch [last year's top pick] Tony Sanchez's progress until he took a ball off the jaw. All these guys are on the radar.

"I'd just tell these two pitchers to enjoy the moment, then it's time to really get down to work. The glitz is gone."

Is it ever.

Asked what he could bring to this desperate situation eventually, Allie had no trouble with the correct answer: "Hopefully, quality starting pitching, not that I'm saying they don't have any quality starting pitching."

Well no, that won't be necessary.

It was fairly instructive that Allie arrived the day after the latest performance from Zach Duke, an unwitting co-conspirator in the ballclub's shameful ingrained habit of substituting incompetence for big league starting pitching.

The National League is hitting .321 against Zach Duke.

Clemente hit .317.

When everyone you face is effectively a hair better than Clemente, well, that's a tough way to play baseball. Duke has somehow been allowed to start 21 times this summer, going 5-12 with a 5.33 earned run average. Since winning eight of his first 10 decisions in 14 wildly misleading starts at the end of 2005, Duke is 34-65 in the big leagues.

He was this team's opening day starter. Remember that when we start spring training 2011 with the obligatory discussion of who the fifth starter might be.

Fifth starter?

Who is the first starter?

Who is the second?

If one of them is Duke, you can go back to assuming that the Pirates are not serious about what they're doing regardless of what they spent in the draft in the past three years. If the team even makes Duke an offer in arbitration, the same conclusion is valid.

Before terribly long, the top of the rotation around here had better be Jameson Taillon and/or Stetson Allie, and perhaps one or two others who are throwing something other than batting practice.


Gene Collier: gcollier@post-gazette.com.

Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10231/1081124-150.stm#ixzz0x2sRIz9d