Pittsburgh Pirates Wake-Up Call – Is this Rotation Good Enough As Is?

In our daily Wake-Up Call, we get you ready for the day with a complete look at all things Pittsburgh Pirates.

As the long baseball off-season slowly moves forward, I’m thinking about the Jose Quintana rumors and I’m still not buying them. I’m one of those people that wants (or has) to see the this front office make a big trade before I can believe that it will happen. I’m not saying they should pull the trigger on a deal and overpay for someone. I just need to see it happen.

So I’m preparing for the upcoming season without Jose Quintana and with the rotation as it is. Neal Huntington said when the off-season began that the team wanted to add a veteran starter, and they did that by re-signing Ivan Nova to a fantastic team-friendly deal. They never stated they wanted to go beyond that, so I see the rotation to open the year as Gerrit Cole, Jameson Taillon, Ivan Nova, Chad Kuhl, and either Tyler Glasnow or Drew Hutchison. Can this Pirates team as is compete for a playoff spot in 2017?

Of course it can. At least it has the potential to. Cole, Taillon, and Glasnow all have top of the rotation potential, and Nova pitched like an ace during his stint with the team last summer. But there are still a lot of ifs. Will Cole return to the ace-form he showed in 2015, or will injuries get the best of him? Which Nova will we see, the Yankee or the Pirate Nova? And will Glasnow live up to his top-prospect hype?

I think that Glasnow deserves a shot as a starter over a full season. And at the major league level, not back in the minors. And we’ll also see if Taillon and Kuhl can continue the success they had last season. It’s certainly a rotation that has a lot of possibilities.

Baseball Talk Around the Web

• Want to re-live some of the wacky, awesome moments from the 2016 baseball season. Jayson Stark of ESPN walks you through some of his memories from this past year.
• Matt Snyder of CBS Sports has an idea for speeding up baseball: limit mound visits. What do you think?
• And Jordan Bastian of MLB.com notes how 2016 was the “Year of the Reliever.”

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