Get on the Bucco Bandwagon. It’s baseball season now.
53 days until Opening Day.
Let’s Go Bucs!
P.S. – All the more reason to dominate the Brewers this season. Do it.
©2011 Raise the Jolly Roger. All Rights Reserved.
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©2011 Raise the Jolly Roger. All Rights Reserved.
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The White Sox signed Lastings Milledge to a minor league deal today, and he may have a decent shot to make the club. As I said at the time of Milledge’s non-tender…I couldn’t really argue letting him go but I did become a fan of his as he turned his reputation around in Pittsburgh.  He still has the potential to become an impact major leaguer (he’s only 25) if …

PirateFest was another huge success this weekend, as a record 16,389 showed up to the Convention Center for some baseball activity in January. This town’s enthusiasm for the Pirates never ceases to amaze me. I was particularly surprised with the record attendance figure because Friday was open only to season ticket plan holders (first time they’ve ever done that) and there wasn’t a whole lot of action this offseason beyond …

PirateFest is getting under way at the Convention Center downtown as I type. It should be a fun weekend for those of you in town and able to go–and it certainly sounds like most Pirate fans in the area will be there.  Why not?  There’s still another week to go before the Super Bowl, the Pens are on the All-Star break, and it’s a chance to bring back those warm …

Via MLBTR:
The Pirates will announce the signing of left-handed reliever Joe Beimel on Friday, tweets Troy Renck of the Denver Post.
Beimel, who went to Duquesne University in Pittsburgh and has ties to the area, [...] was originally drafted by the Bucs in 1998 and made his big-league debut with them in 2001.
After breaking into the Majors in a swing role, Beimel has evolved into a well-travelled lefty specialist …

Thanks to the Pirates’ “Tweet for the Bucs” program, you can once again get discounted Pirates tickets through RTJR. (Even more reason to stay away from those pesky “game day prices” that just increased!) All you have to do is go to this page, click the “Buy Tickets” button, choose the desired date, and use the coupon code “rtjr” to get access.
The discounts available range from $4-10 per seat, and …

I’m kind of surprised I haven’t seen more displeasure about this news – I certainly cringed when I saw it.
Ticket prices are remaining the same if you purchase before 12:01 AM on gameday. Walk-up buyers will have to pay $2, $3, or $5 extra, depending on the seat location (click here for exact details).
I will say that this annoys me. The Pirates call and email me (and a bunch of …

The Bucs will be traveling to various locations around the area all week long before converging back in the Burgh for PirateFest this weekend. Here’s the full schedule of events:

See Pirates.com for full details, of course.
If you’re headed to any of the events, feel free to snap some photos and / or send over some thoughts – just email to raisethejollyroger – at – gmail.com.
Oh, and if anyone’s near any …

Pedro Alvarez is getting married today. If you want details, you’re in luck as Rumbunter managed to find the wedding website. The bride is named Keli Murphy, daughter of former Arizona State manager and current Padres minor league manager Pat Murphy–who wrote a blog post about Pedro and Keli:
“She called me and said, ‘This Pedro Alvarez guy wants to date me, what do you think?”  I said …

Thanks to his new obsession with Twitter, we learned that Bucs catching prospect Tony Sanchez had LASIK surgery on Thursday. Apparently it went quite well:

The doc and I. The man responsible for my super vision. http://twitpic.com/3rupzkabout 4 hours ago via Twitter for iPhoneTSanchez26Tony Sanchez

The attached pic:

The reaction from his (future) teammates gave me a good laugh:

@TSanchez26 who’s responsible for your haircut? You should punch them in …

Tuesday was the deadline for teams to exchange salary arbitration figures – or agree on a last minute contract to avoid the process altogether. That produced a couple interesting headlines around the league…Prince Fielder will be making a whopping $15.5 million this year…and Matt Capps..sit down before reading this..will make $7.15 million.
Meanwhile, one of the Pirates’ arbitration eligible players was Joel Hanrahan, who agreed to a $1.4 …

The Bucs agreed to sign Jose Veras to a minor league deal today – he’ll make $1M plus incentives if he makes the big leagues, and $15K each month if not.
Veras is a 30-year old right handed reliever with a pretty respectable career stat line, so I think he could definitely find his way to the bullpen. The quick scouting report on him is classic Neal Huntington: throws hard, …

Minicamp is complete for the big leaguers, and Colin Dunlap wraps it up nicely after completing his first assignment on the Bucco beat. There’s some good stuff in there about Jameson Taillon, Steve Pearce, the closer situation (will it be Evan Meek or Joel Hanrahan?), Matt Diaz, Corey Wimberly, Tony Sanchez…and of course…Hurdle Power!!
In other news, the Royals signed Jeff Francis today to …

A Tweet yesterday from Tony Sanchez got me thinking…
View TSanchez26’s tweet

We need a better nickname than that for Clint Hurdle. I mean, “the Hurd” is probably better than “JR,” but it’s still pretty lame. After some brainstorming (by both me and a number of followers), we came up with a couple of pretty good ones, but the clear winner came from @Timko88 and @FakeJRodriguez…Teenage Mutant Ninja Hurdle. Seriously, that’s pretty …

Tuesday seemed like a relatively boring day of minicamp, aside from some tweets from Tony Sanchez (follow him @TSanchez26) about a team meeting that focused on the importance of sleep, along with a myriad of other topics. Tony’s been doing a great job reaching out and responding to inquiring fans since joining Twitter a week ago. Hopefully some more Bucs and future Bucs join him (for now, you can …

Stuff from Day 1 down in Bradenton:

The Bucs signed reliever Jorge Julio to a minor league deal (but did not invite him to major league spring training). Julio has bounced around quite a bit (including a brief minor league stint with the Bucs) and has a history of significant control problems, but he was fantastic this past season in the independent Atlantic League and this winter with the Tiburones …

The Pirates begin minicamp today in Bradenton. Don’t get me wrong – I’m glad that we will have real, live baseball updates to read about for the next couple of days and that it (sort of) represents the beginning of the season and means we’re closing in on Spring Training.
But RumBunter raised a really good point the other day, and reiterated it yesterday. Sure, minicamp is an optional thing. But …

This series seemed like a fun idea at the time, but it ended up getting cumbersome to write and probably a bit boring for you to read, despite there being *only* 57 wins to write about. Still, I hope you can enjoy reliving some fun games from an otherwise dismal season – that’s what I intended these posts to be all about. Here’s the last installment.
September 3: Pirates 8, …

Sorry for the delay in posting – I’ve been having internet problems lately. Time to catch up with some Bucs news from the last couple of days (in no particular order…)
- Brian Burres is back, on a minor league deal. I actually thought Burres was somewhat useful last year as an emergency rotation guy, so it’s nice to have him around the starting pitching continues to fall on hard …