Spikes' poor start has director's attention
By Guy Cipriano
- gciprian@centredaily.comThe State College Spikes' woeful record has caught the attention of Pittsburgh Pirates director of player development Kyle Stark.
The Spikes entered Wednesday’s play at Lowell 8-24, the worst mark in the 14-team New York-Penn League.
Only four teams in affiliated baseball — a Dominican Summer League team that uses Arizona and Cincinnati players (.178), the Pioneer League’s Missoula Osprey (.206), Arizona League Brewers (.217) and Gulf Coast League Orioles (.240), — entered Wednesday with winning percentages below the Spikes’ .250 mark. The Spikes are the only non-rookie level team in affiliated baseball that hasn’t won 30 percent of their games.
“Obviously I’m not thrilled about it,” Stark said Wednesday afternoon. “But I think the reality is that they have played better as of late. Guys are getting better. It’s a situation where a number of our top picks were college picks and they are not there whether it’s because they haven’t signed or they have been pushed to Hickory. The record is definitely not something we want to see. But I think the team is starting to stabilize.” The Spikes lost third-round draft pick Jordy Mercer and ninth-rounder Matt Hague, who both played collegiately at Oklahoma State, to promotions less than two weeks into the season. Hague and Mercer are now with full-season Hickory.
The Spikes also lost fourth-rounder Chase D’Arnaud and eighth-rounder Jeremy Farrell for 17 games each because of injuries. D’Arnaud returned from a mid-foot sprain last Saturday while Farrell returned from headaches earlier this month. Neither player landed on the disabled list.
D’Arnaud and Farrell are the only players selected in the first 10 rounds of this year’s draft in State College. The Pirates have not agreed to terms with first- and second-rounders Pedro Alvarez and Tanner Scheppers and fifth- and sixth-rounders Justin Wilson and Robbie Grossman. The Major League Baseball deadline for signing draft picks is Aug. 15.
The Spikes have not received a new player since 20-year-old infielder Andy Vasquez was added to the roster on July 2. Three weeks without a roster addition or subtraction is considered unusual in the NY-PL.
“Part of it is the nature of having bigger rosters there so when somebody gets hurt we don’t have to put him on the DL,” said Stark, who has not visited State College since the Spikes’ minicamp in June. “Part of it is the fact that we are still waiting on some players that we are trying to sign. As far as shuffling guys, we aren’t going to take a guy from Hickory and move him to State College to win some games. It doesn’t make sense. And down in Bradenton we have younger high school and Latin players who are probably where they should be at.”
The Spikes aren’t the only team in the Pirates’ system with a disappointing record. Rookie Bradenton, which entered Wednesday 15-11, is the only team among the organization’s six domestic affiliates with a winning record. The affiliates entered Wednesday with a 203-267 overall mark. Stark said the organizational philosophy toward winning is the question he has fielded the most during his first year as the Pirates’ farm director.
“Anybody involved in this game wants to win and it’s not that we don’t care about winning,” Stark said. “That misses the target completely. A lot of our minor-league teams have won in the past but that doesn’t translate to the getting the best players on the field in Pittsburgh. Our ultimate job is to produce players who win in Pittsburgh where the wins matter the most.”