PIRATES PROSPECTSPITTSBURGH PIRATES MINOR LEAGUE NEWS, TRANSACTIONS, AND ARTICLES

The Pirates sent Romulo Sanchez to minor league camp today, along with Pedro Lopez, Miguel Perez and Daniel Haigwood. It certainly seems as if the Pirates were unhappy with Romulo, and were attempting to make a statement by optioning him. Said Neal Huntington:

He’s got a lot of delivery work to do, and we felt that it was best that he do that outside of major league camp, with the way he came into spring training. He’s got a great arm and still has a future with us, but he’ll have to work his way back to the majors. He wasn’t in line to make this club.

Romulo is a big guy, officially listed at 260 pounds. I would not be surprised if he arrived at camp a bit out of shape, although I have not seen anything to back that up.

Here is a pretty interesting ESPN segment on Pirate prospect Mpho Ngoepe, who the team signed out of South Africa over the offseason. He is playing for South Africa in the World Baseball Classic if you have a chance to catch any of their games. They played today, but I was not able to get a glimpse of this young kid. Hat tip to Bucs Dugout for the link.

Pirates SS/2B prospect Jarek Cunningham will have knee surgery due to a torn ACL and will miss the entire 2009 season. This is not a new injury for Cunningham. Here is an excerpt from Baseball America’s 2009 Prospect Handbook:

Cunningham missed his senior high school season in 2008 because of a knee injury, which caused him to slip to the 18th round of the draft. Doctors originally thought he had torn his anterior cruciate ligament and meniscus, yet when he went in for surgery they found the ACL had reattached itself.

The Pirates took a bit of a risk when they drafted Cunningham amid uncertainty about his knee, and it is a shame he will lose a year of development. But he just turned 19, giving him plenty of time to fully recover and get back on schedule. He still has a bright future in the organization, even if it is delayed by a year. I have spent the winter rehabbing from ACL surgery myself, so I have an idea of what Cunningham is about to go through. With a little luck, he may be able to play a little winter ball after the season, although the Pirates may decide to be cautious with his recovery. I don’t have any knowledge of his specific injury, but I’m not worried about it having any long-term effect on his performance.

Inspired by the folks over at Beyond the Box Score, I thought I would throw up a graph today. Using the numbers at Fangraphs, here are the win values by season for five Pirate starters who have been in the majors for at least a few years now. These numbers include both offense and defense, and account for positional difficulty.

Please note that catcher defense is not included, which would affect Ryan Doumit’s value a bit. Off the top of my head, I think John Dewan valued Doumit at -2 runs (or -0.2 wins) in 2008 in his most recent volume of The Fielding Bible. I have not gone through his methodology yet, but keep that in mind.

I included the 2005-2008 seasons.

After a quick glance at this graph, I had a few thoughts.