By Stephen Zielinski

As I faced the task of writing another article on the 2005 Pirates, I quickly realized I couldn’t identify a topic to address! My failure in this respect makes it tricky to write an article, doesn’t it? I even found it difficult to write a ‘recent observations’ piece since little of significance occurred during the past week. ‘What to do? What to do?’ I asked myself. The answer then came to me: Why not write an article about lacking something worthwhile to write about! How very appropriate for this year’s Pirates team!

By Stephen Zielinski

Every so often I’ll write a few pertinent — or useless — comments for the Front Page. It keeps me out of trouble. The first installment:

My expectations for the season were low

Yet, the play of the team so far has made me look like a bug-eyed, knuckle-dragging optimist. To be sure, Perez and Wells will improve as will the hitting. They have the talent. So do some of the position players. Still, it’s not as though we can expect Fogg, Redman and Williams to pitch like Cy Young candidates for the whole season, as they did during their first start. Even with their great work, the Pirates still are 2-5! And, the hitting won’t improve that much that we should reasonably expect this team to win more than 75 games this season. To get to this mark of excellence, the Pirates will need to win about .471 rate for the rest of the year. McClendon’s crew are already in the hole.

By Stephen Zielinski

This will be a short essay which takes player bashing and a few related issues as its topics. I wrote it, I must admit, because I find puzzling the frequency of and the intensity which some display when tearing into ball players. ‘Why bother?’ is a question I occasionally ask myself when I read someone’s harangue. That is, why trouble oneself with the game if… Yet, many do trouble themselves!