Managing rookies

Mac and Littlefield have the right idea with the way they are introducing the rookies. As we argued before, you don't guarantee playing time to unproven players. A lot of bad happens when you do that. It's also poor management to bring up rookies without a fallback plan. Here's what Joe Rutter reports for the Trib-Review as out of Mac's mouth on the question of whether or not this is a "youth movement":

"We've got to find out about these kids," McClendon said. "We're not trying to make a total youth movement. We're trying to plug some of them in that we think are ready to compete at this level. The only way we're going to find out about them is to run them out there and let them play. If we don't, we'll have those same question marks next year. We need to find out."

McClendon also is encouraged that the farm system is on the verge of producing more players to help out the big-league roster.

"We're in much better shape than we were a couple of years ago," he said. "We have options. If a guy doesn't perform at the big-league level and isn't ready, we can send him out and call somebody else up to do the job. We haven't had that in the past.

"It also lets guys know they can't relax once they get to the big leagues. You have to continue to perform because there are guys pushing you, knocking on the door to take your job."

Bob Smizik wrote Thursday that "it's hard to imagine a more unproductive minor-league system anywhere in baseball." I don't know enough about the rest of the minor-league systems to contest the argument that a worse one is "hard to imagine," though I can think of plenty of teams that rarely start a rookie.

Littlefield kept the prospects in the minors at the start of last year. This year they are adding a good number of minor-league players to the big team. In two or three months, we'll begin to have the results we need to judge how well the winning in Nashville, Altoona, and Lynchburg served the interests of the team in Pittsburgh.