BA Dishes Bucs
Baseball America's Chris Kline sits down with Pirates farm director Brian Graham in the latest edition of Klines' Spring Training Dish. Nothing too illuminating here, but I was interested to see Graham dodge the issue of the system's lack of impact bat. I've been harping on this all winter and I was hoping Graham would at least address it a manner that gave me some glimpse of hope that the organization had plans to address this. Instead we get some nonsense about not being able to truly evaluate a player's potential until he's been in the bigs for a couple of years. It's true that propects often fail to live up to lofty projections. That's part of the game. Most of the guys pinpointed to be impact bats often don't realize that potential. But some do. And it is more common for a player with that "impact tag" to become an impact player than a player without to become one. And aside from Andrew McCutchen and Neil Walker, there are no players even close to earning that tag. And that's a huge failing of this organization.