Well, in the interest of helping you out with your preseason predictions, I would like to bring a little something to your attention. It seems like just about every year, we hear that this is the year the Pittsburgh Pirates finally really start to turn their fortunes around and become respectable again.
Well, I'm here to tell you that turnaround may be a bit further off than that.
See, the Pittsburgh Pirates sent out a collection of their top minor league prospects to play Manatee Community College yesterday in an exhibition game.
And guess what? Manatee won.
There's something you don't hear every day, huh?
Now, I'm not entirely sure on this one; Manatee Community College could be an absolute hotbed of major league talent and I just don't realize it. However, until I see Manatee taking on Oregon State or UNC in the College World Series, I'm going to assume it probably isn't.
Seriously, how great is this? When your franchise is such a mess that a team of your best prospects, or even just your prospects, all of whom are real live professional baseball players, loses to Manatee Community College?
So as for that great Pirate turnaround that gets predicted every year, until the youngsters the Pirates are bringing up can start beating the local JuCo kids, I'll just assume it isn't going to happen.
The best quote of all came from Manatee coach Tim Hill.
"Not to take anything away from their guys, but they do that for a living... and we're not used to seeing the type of pitchers we saw, and this was the first time our guys used wooden bats." (Emphasis mine)
Now that's just awesome.
