How we plan to look forward

So I'm cruising around the Pirate Nation blogs, newspaper sites, and discussion forums, and I find everyone is doing things like 2007 player reviews, or community projections, or worrying about Rule 5 losses finalizing the roster, and I'm thinking to myself - why?

Instead of looking backwards, we're going to continue looking to the future of the Pirates and not the junk that makes up the current club. Here's how we'll be doing that:

1 -- Front office replacements.

I explained during the GM search that Neal Huntington stepped on highly respected toes getting the job and there are a lot of people very loyal to those toes who are refusing to join Huntington's wagon.

Paul Meyer at the Post-Gazette is the first to report problems developing with his article and a few other writers are starting to pick up on it too. People are turning Huntington down, for a lot of reasons including the toe stomping.

Trying to figure out who Huntington will be able to get as manager, scouting or player development directors, or scouts and coaches for his system is just impossible to do. Just don't expect big names.

I mentioned at Pirateball.com's discussion forum I'd guess the next manager will be an ex-utility player who has less than 3 years managing experience above AA unless it's Jewitt. And flip-a-coin on the rest of the hires, probably many from within.

2 -- Blowing up the roster.

While everyone else in the Pirate Nation seems to be worried about the roster and future projections, I'm certainly not. Even Huntington will be able to find a market for the players he'll want to deal.

Now the question becomes, will Robert Nutting and Frank Coonelly allow Huntington to sell short? Every MLB team knows the Pirates are going to rebuild and we only have one or two pieces, possibly as many as five if pitchers are included, that could bring on a bidding war. Everyone else will probably have to be dealt short.

So we'll continue forward over the next week or two trying to identify trades Huntington should make. We'll do that the best way we can as fans using the basic five-step scouting approach of 1-tools, 2-stats, 3-makeup, 4-health history, and 5-player acquisition cost.

Tools are best identified in Baseball America reports, stats we'll provide you with, makeup is impossible for us to identify unless someone was arrested last week for arson or something, health we'll have to rely on Internet reports, and when we finally target who we want, we'll try to determine costs to do the deal.

Hopefully, by the time the GM meetings start in November, we'll have laid out an action plan and identified the top five targets in two categories: either 0-3 years of service time type players for each position/role in rebuilding, or younger impact type players for each position/role depending on the road Huntington plans to take.

My suggestion is, if you want to be involved in this planning, you can cut and paste the statistical research I put up in your copy of Excel or by using Google Spreadsheets to keep track. Then when you identify someone via the stats or on your own, you can use the comment section to let everyone know what you are thinking.

I'm not going to waste your time putting up ten paragraphs why someone like Jose Bautista is worth keeping and what his projections might be because, to be quite blunt, if we still have players like McLouth and Bautista on the roster expected to take on a future role with this team, Huntington will be fired within a year or two.

Let's look toward the future players that will make up the Pirates roster past the transition year of 2008 and forget about projections on junk or worrying about losing ten pieces of crud in Rule 5.

Get ready to boogie.