Category Archives: Weekly Feature

We’re about a week into Spring Training, and the first game will come this Saturday. Even while everyone makes a scene out of the date pitchers and catchers report, most players wind up arriving at almost the same time with a few stragglers actually pushing the boundaries of anything resembling a position player deadline.

Oh man, it’s so close you can taste it. Soon we’ll get our first clips of pitchers firing the ball and the signature pop of the mitt that might as well be a starter’s pistol for the season.

We’re down to a little over 2 weeks until pitchers and catchers report to camp and the next season officially starts. All the talk, all the player moves, all the panic about potential player moves, everything will transition to on the field questions.

There isn’t much the Pirates could do on paper that would merit the response they received for signing Andrew McCutchen, but when you focus on the field, or what this team could actually get done this year, it’s arguably not even in the top 5.

Even as I look out the window in my Pittsburgh home at the frost covered ground, it’s hard to not have my sights set on Spring Training. Baseball is as associated with the seasons changing as the weather itself and when you finally get to the point where the team itself looks ready to change…well, it adds another layer of anticipation.

I’ve been writing this weekly feature since March of 2020. If you were to go read through them all, and there’s one for every week I assure you, you’ll get a picture of how this team has slowly evolved. Today, I’m going to highlight some of that specifically, evolution.

I hope this piece finds you basking in the afterglow of a wonderful holiday with your friends and family. The Pirates were relatively quiet over the break, which for those who assumed a big Christmas Eve deal in the style of a classic news dump is a great thing.

It’s hard to believe when you really sit back and think about it, it’s already Christmas week. It should be a relatively quiet week in baseball, but we all remember the Christmas Eve that Ben Cherington pulled off the Josh Bell move and I had to explain to my wife why I was writing during It’s a Wonderful Life.