Brian Graham believes in slow cooking

Sometimes it seems that Pirate management has built a strategy in reaction to Chad Hermansen's inability to walk on water. And then there was Doug Froebel.

A lot of this is self-serving spin, of course--not surprising from an organization that issues the slogan "We Will" and then interprets it publicly as some vague paean to organizational excellence instead of, you know, we will...win baseball games. But I digress...

A few points about all of this:

• It's absurd to assert that improvement at the major league level and more capable major league players now provide the opportunity to cook minor leaguers more slowly. If this were true, would we not see some improvement in the won-lost record of the major league team?


• It's absurd to generalize in the way that Graham is generalizing here. Matt Capps is 22, and Tracy has decided that he is ready. Are we cooking him too fast? Who knows? Ramirez was probably undercooked when he played for the Pirates at age 19, but he became a franchise player according to our former manager. So do the exceptions disprove the rule? There is no rule--as with many things, it all depends.


• We can cook the guys at the lower levels of the minors all day in the crockpot, but the meal is still likely to taste lousy. The quality of the ingredients is more important than the length of time the ingredients are cooked.

For more on slow cooking, see my lovely wife Rebecca's great food blog.