Good stuff. Take a look.

Screw Dr. Orloff Ohlendorf…the Pirates now have real monster humans!

For further perspective, in 2003, the year Eric Gagne pretty much set the gold standard for a closer’s single-season performance, he had 55 saves and a 0.69 WHIP, the latter not far from either Grilli or Melancon right now.

Before this season, Grilli never posted a WHIP below 1.14. He got that with the Pirates last season at age 35. Before joining the Pirates in 2011, his career WHIP was 1.45, roughly double what it is ...

A great breakdown of Mark Melancon.

What do all these shifts do to defensive metrics?

Wait…I thought it was Matt Kemp.

As of the end of April 17: .089/.180/.089 in 50 plate appearances. He’s without an extra-base hit, obviously. He has four hits in 45 at-bats. He’s struck out in over a third of his plate appearances. If Alvarez is the most perplexing hitter in baseball, this wasn’t a perplexing start. It was simply awful. I went through the game logs, and just started tallying the plate appearances up. So instead of a narrative, you’re going to get a list of factoids.

  • ...

I believe he’s using a Luis Polonia model.

A judge has rejected a plea agreement from the former head of a sports memorabilia auction house who admitted to using shill bidders to drive up prices and to altering the most valuable baseball card ever sold.

William Mastro of Mastro Auctions admitted to doctoring the 1909 Honus Wagner cigarette card that was once owned by hockey great Wayne Gretzky. The card sold for $2.8 million in 2007.

Once again The Great One shows uncanny instincts.

Wild!

Pieces falling into place for Pittsburgh:

Jonathan Sanchez WILL be in #Pirates rotation.

— Rob Biertempfel (@BiertempfelTrib) March 26, 2013

...if Jonathan Sanchez makes your rotation, and if he’s not even the fifth starter, which he likely isn’t here, you have a pretty precipitous falloff afoot.

Francesspool likes this. A lot.

Although Inge knew that the surgery and his age might scare off some teams, he said he never considered retiring.

“I think I’ll play until someone just physically kicks me out of the game,” Inge said. “I’ll play as long as I can. If I’m enjoying something I do—and that goes for anyone in any aspect of life—you should probably do it as long as you can.”

...Inge has accepted the fact that he won’t be offered a job as a starter, but still believes that he can ...

The East York, Ont. native has turned into a whipping boy for Canadian fans and experienced a first-hand account of the backlash Wednesday, getting booed in all three of his plate appearances from a strong Blue Jays contingent at his home park, McKechnie Field.

“They are booing me because they care. I’m sure if they saw me at dinner or something, they would want to come and shake my hand,” said Martin, who signed a two-year, US$17-million deal with the Pirates in the off-season.

...

The story of a father, a son, Roberto Clemente, and a bat that *might* belong in the Hall of Fame.

I go over the Schmitt film one more time with Duane. “So after the game, my dad goes down to the clubhouse, asks Roberto for the bat, and he gives Dad the Louisville Slugger he got the hit with.”

“No,” Duane says.

“What do you mean?” I say.

He says, “The Hall of Fame definitely has the wrong bat.”

Wow! I haven’t seen a middle infielder quit this quick since Eddie Stanky!

Russell Martin has withdrawn from the World Baseball Classic, leaving Canada without its starting catcher.

Martin, who signed as a free agent with the Pittsburgh Pirates over the off-season, decided to remove himself from the team because he wasn’t going to be allowed to play shortstop.

According to Martin, both the Pirates and the Canadian team were uncomfortable with the Chelsea, Que., native switching positions ...

Yes, and I expect to play bermudavarius for Guadalupe Plata in some rancid tent at SXSW.

“It’s hilarious, the reactions I get,” Martin told Morosi at the Pirates’ spring training complex on Monday. “It’s like, ‘this guy’s a catcher. He wants to play shortstop.’”

The three-time All-Star has logged 925 games in his seven-year major league career, but none have come as a shortstop. Martin does have experience playing the infield, though. He spent a season in the minors as an everyday third ...

I can’t believe Delmon got a job first!

The Pittsburgh Pirates have signed former Tiger Brandon Inge to a minor-league deal, MLB.com’s Tom Singer reported Tuesday night.

Inge, 35, a third baseman who spent 12 seasons in Detroit, was released by the Tigers last June and signed with the Oakland Athletics.

Seems like a perfect match.

The Pirates announced that they signed left-hander Jonathan Sanchez to a minor league contract…

Sanchez spent the 2012 season with the Rockies and Royals, struggling with both teams. He posted a 8.07 ERA with more walks (53) than strikeouts (45) and a 39.7% ground ball rate in 64 2/3 total innings pitched. He also spent time on the disabled list with biceps tendinitis this past season.

However, the 30-year-old is not so far removed from the 2010 season that saw him ...

Well…Deacon Phillippe had already gone to that glorious rural retreat in the sky.

Joanne Murphy knew something was unusual when she opened up an old Bible last week. The holy book turned up among the tens of thousands of materials donated to the Friends of the Sacramento Public Library each year.

Inside the Bible, 31 different signatures were emblazoned on the first page along with “Pirates 1953” written across the top in blue ink.

Murphy, an antiquarian book repairer, didn’t know what all ...

That’s coefficient of friction not fiction.

The mystery of Francisco Liriano’s broken right arm received some unsubstantiated clarification recently with a newspaper in his native Dominican Republic reporting he suffered it in a bathroom fall.

According to elcaribe.com, the newspaper’s website, Liriano fell days after the Dec. 21 agreement on his original two-year, $12.75 million contract with the Pirates, fracturing the humerus bone in the upper arm.

Citing a “source close to the player,” ...

The Wildcats celebrated their coming out party [the Great Alaska Shooutout championship] with a good old-fashioned snowball fight, and Lofton played a starring role in that battle, too. “Basically, it was Kenny versus the rest of us because he had such a ridiculous arm. He was throwing snowballs like 100 miles per hour, just knocking guys off their feet,” Mason Jr. remembers. “Afterwards, we said to him, ‘Man, you should play baseball.’”

He listened.

So why’d Sammy wear #27?  Wait a minute… what’s halfway between 19 and 27…

It was called the Masjid of Tucson, a mosque where Muslims could worship and study the Koran in the Arizona desert under the idiosyncratic tutelage of Rashad Khalifa, its founder. On Jan. 31, 1990, the mosque, at the intersection of Sixth and North Euclid, near the University of Arizona campus, became the scene of a murder investigation.

Khalifa was found near the kitchen that morning, stabbed to death. It appeared ...

It’s official.

The Boston Red Sox on Wednesday acquired All-Star closer Joel Hanrahan and a prospect from the Pittsburgh Pirates in exchange for reliever Mark Melancon and a trio of minor leaguers.

Also headed to Pittsburgh in the deal are pitcher Stolmy Pimentel, infielder Ivan De Jesus and first baseman/outfielder Jerry Sands. Along with Hanrahan, the Red Sox also received infielder Brock Holt.

Also read WEEI: HOW THE RED SOX VIEW JOEL HANRAHAN AND BROCK HOLT.

The tease of potential.

This is the kind of track record that gets a pitcher described as an outlier. For whatever reason, Liriano has been consistently terrible at stranding runners, and while it’s easy to write that off as a fluke over a year or even two, it gets a bit tougher to believe that this is all just random variance in sequencing when he’s at 840 innings pitched and has a career LOB% under 70%.

But yet, here are the Pirates, paying Liriano for a performance that requires his FIP ...

Ben Cherington trades major-league ready, pre-arbitration talent for a relief pitcher.  Because one of these times, it’s got to work out.

According to a major league source, as first reported by Jim Bowden of ESPN (via twitter), the Red Sox and Pirates have reached an agreement on a deal that would bring All-Star closer Joel Hanrahan to Boston. The deal, however, is not yet final. The source confirmed Bowden’s report that the Sox will send outfielder/first baseman Jerry Sands and right-hander ...

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

According to David Waldstein on twitter, the deal is 2 years, $17M. 

Who says the Yankees get all the big free agents?

Pittsburgh made a pair of minor trades, acquiring right-hander Zach Stewart from the Red Sox for a player to be named later and getting right-hander Vin Mazzaro and first baseman Clint Robinson from the Royals for minor leaguer pitchers Luis Santos and Luis Rico.

Seems like a decent set of lottery tickets, at a relatively low cost. A fair number of Pirates fans have been eyeballing Robinson for a while now.