Been There Wrote This
Don't Count Your Chickens Yet
By John Mehno

Do these names mean anything to you?

Jason Kendall, Trey Beamon, Chad Hermansen, Freddy Garcia, Charles Peterson, Ramon Morel, Jose Guillen, Lou Collier, Kane Davis and Jimmy Anderson.

If you're any kind of baseball fan, you'll recognize them as one-time Pirates prospects, most of whom have turned out to be better suited for other lines of work.

Kendall is a solid major leaguer who heads into this season with a .300 career average over seven years.

Hermansen, at last check, was with his third organization in less than a year, looking for a spot as a fifth outfielder. Garcia hung around for a couple of years with occasional home runs and frequent strikeouts. Guillen seems to have carved out a niche for himself as an extra outfielder with a different team every year. Collier is a utility infielder and Anderson was filling out a pair of extra large pants as a non-roster player with Cincinnati this spring. Beamon and Morel logged short stints with the Pirates, as Davis did with other teams.

Yet those 10 names, in that order, were the Pirates' top prospects in 1995, according to Baseball America, which covers the minor leagues extensively.

The publication does not come by these annual lists on its own. There is always input from the development and minor league staff of the team. So the Pirates were wrong on most of these players, too.

Eight years later, there's one legitimate major league starter among the 10. That should be instructive this season when the truly obsessed will be studying the minor league averages every week and projecting the Pirates' lineup for 2011. The Pirates have an interesting crop of young talent starting at the Class AA level in Altoona.

But not only can a lot can happen between there and the major leagues, it usually does.

There was a time when people counted the days until Hermansen got to Pittsburgh. When he left last summer, it was with a .199 average against major league pitching and trade value no better than a pair of iffy minor league pitchers.

Until they get to the major leagues and produce, they're only prospects. So enjoy the minor leagues and charting the weekly stats. Just understand that scouting and player development is a risky business and the best-laid plans will always have a degree of Freddy Garcia in them.

In other matters

o   When Warren Morris' career was disintegrating, it became popular to blame Manager Lloyd McClendon for the decline. The popular theory was that McClendon disliked Morris and his laid-back approach to baseball. In the year since he left the Pirates, Morris has been with four other organizations. He's played in exactly four major league games. Either there are a lot of managers who don't like him or he just isn't very good.
o   Maybe this will be the year the Pirates catch on to the idea that a retro park and a constant bombardment of manufactured noise is not a good mix. Then again, maybe not. They insist on bringing back the egregious in-game entertainment squad, those annoyingly energetic people who run around with whistles, balloons and basketball hoops attached to their heads. Because a giant parrot and racing pierogis just aren't enough.
o   The memory still lingers after all the years—Bob Prince, the Voice of the Pirates, leaning out of the radio booth at a dinky spring training park to yell something at Cookie Rojas, who was on deck for the Philadelphia Phillies. Rojas responded, which caused Prince and sidekick Jim Woods to chuckle about the episode for the next few innings of the meaningless game. This year, chief announcer Lanny (Hi, Friends) Frattare offered a detailed explanation of an official scoring call in a meaningless exhibition game. You kids hear this all the time but it really applies here—you don't know what you missed.
o   As the Penguins rebuild, they need only look at one of the old Boys of Winter ads to know there's a steep attrition rate in starting over with young players. Steve Gatzos, Tim Hrynewich and Mitch Lamoureux were among the ones you were invited to come and watch grow.
o   Kordell Stewart is with the Chicago Bears. Steelers fans are going to need the full preseason to find someone else to blame for everything.
o   The Penguins wound up with a guy named Rico Fata. That sounds like a name Rick Reuschel might use if he started a career as a rapper.

You can e-mail John Mehno at: johnmehno@lycos.com