That the plan was to take a 98 win team and let it tank by 15+ wins for any reason is enough to question whether the front office is competent. Teams that care about winning, and are competently run, don't do shit like this.
You sticking with your entire 'Neil Walker us a 2 WAR player theory'? That's worked out quite well for you.
The past 10 months have been a disaster by the front office, and Taillon and Bell make them look stupider by the day.
The fact that you think Taillon throwing pitches in AAA instead of MLB makes him any less susceptible to injury just shows how foolish you are (as if your defense of Walker trade, defense of the rotation as constructed the first four months, and playoffs being random declarations weren't foolish enough on their own).
Yeah, I'm going to stick by what Neil Walker's trade value was during last offseason. Why wouldn't I? The (lack of) market spoke pretty clearly to how much value teams thought he had relative to his contract number. I still don't think he's a significantly different player than that -- any additional value he has right now is based on defense and I don't tend to trust those numbers in a single year.
I don't understand why you're so hung up on the Walker thing, regardless. Like, that's just how teams operate, that move was being predicted before the 2015 season as what would happen with him. He wasn't an extension candidate, he's not a guy who is going to get a qualifying offer, so teams are going to do what they can to not lose an asset for nothing. You don't have to like how the market behaves, but it's still the market that decisions are made in. The Pirates weren't zigging while other teams are zagging.
You can Captain Hindsight your way to whatever you want, but it's extremely disingenuous to call last year's team a 98-win team and you know it.
Last year's team was projected to win 80 games by PECOTA heading into the season (ZiPS had them at 81, as best I can tell). They got some big overachieving out of Kang and Cervelli and a great season from Cole and tossed in some good cluster luck and wound up with 98 wins.
This year's team, by contrast, was projected by PECOTA to win 83 games heading into the season (ZiPS had them at 80, although it wasn't considering prospects). This year they've seen some underperformance relative to projections from some unexpected sources, but been able to offset that with some solid cluster luck once again.
I'm really, really trying to be outraged about all of this, but I just can't. I guess the best I can do is say that I'm sorry you were so attached to 2015 and actually thought baseball teams had a ton of control over how things play out?
I'm not getting into the Taillon thing and having to explain things like stress pitches or stress innings. Like, that's just such an irrational, illogical point of view based completely on hindsight and emotions and paranoia (shocking). All of the data indicates that it's not innings/pitches that cause guys' arms to blow up, it's the effort they're throwing with. You're acting like a guy has a finite number of pitches in his arm until his elbow pops, but that's not the case. Nobody outside of the Pittsburgh sports bubble would ever argue for a guy coming off 2 lost seasons to be thrown right into the fire. That's just completely crazy.
On the bright side, you've stopped scouting the minor league stat line on Tyler Glasnow and aren't using him as a referendum on all things Pirates in every post. Hindsight just didn't break your way on that one, but chin up.
On Bell, maybe he could have been up. If you want to say they should have optioned Frazier and used Bell as a designated pinch hitter I could buy that. They have Sean Rodriguez as a super utility option so it's not like Frazier served an irreplaceable role. But, even you have to admit that he's absolutely horrible defensively. That's going off any metric you want -- eye test included. Somehow, Billy Butler looked like Casey Kotchman compared to him.
