Tuesday links and things

Chris Jaffe at the Hardball Times has some cool background on the recently-ended seven-game winning streak the Pirates put together against the Cubs.

This is a little old now, but it definitely deserves a link: Tim at BUCCO Fans did some great work examining the McKechnie Field park factor and throws some cold water on the ridiculous lines some of the Marauders have put up so far.

It’s taking way longer than it should have, but I’m finally almost done uploading my pictures from spring training. You can see what I’ve put up so far here, with pics from one game and Pirate City still to come. I know spring training was a long time ago, but I did get a bunch of good pictures that someone might like seeing, and they frankly don’t do much good sitting on a memory card or hard drive so I figure it’s better late than never.

Starling Marte did have his hand surgery and should be back by August. The long-term prognosis for the surgery is good (most players make a full recovery, but lose power in the short-term), but losing so much developmental time is not a good thing.

I had a very short Twitter conversation (actually, it was more like he said something, I asked him a question, and he followed up with an answer — is that a conversation?) with FanHouse’s scout Frankie Piliere over the weekend (Are you following WHYGAVS on Twitter yet? You should be!) where he mentioned that the Pirates don’t seem to be interested in Jameson Taillon with the number two pick and are deciding between six players, with Drew Pomeranz and Manny Machado as the top two. Baseball America’s Jim Callis also tweeted that Machado is in the mix at number two. I’ll have more on the draft in the next two weeks, but if the Pirates are choosing between Pomeranz and Machado and don’t pick Machado, I’m going to have angry words.

Also, I’m getting a lot of complaints about the captcha in the comments. Here’s the problem with it that I can’t do anything about, really: if you’ve registered with Bloguin, the only way to log in is in the top right corner of the page and every time you click away from the page, you get logged out. So I think that the problem is that the captcha is for unregistered users only and people who have usernames and think they’re logged in or who are trying to log in at the comments box and are using their regular posting handles are getting rejected, because the system recognizes that name as being taken. Which is a really long and involved way of saying that you should just register with Bloguin and try to remember to log in every time you want to leave a comment. Unfortunately, I can’t turn unregistered commenting off entirely, because that hides comments from everyone that’s not logged in and since I can’t turn that off, I have to leave the captcha there as an anti-spam measure. Basically, you just have to remember to log-in at the top of the page, which I know is confusing because it’s not anywhere near the comment box. Believe me, I know this isn’t perfect and I’ve asked the guys in charge if we can make a work-around (like a log-in box at the bottom of the page), but that’s the status of the situation right now.