Author: mattbandi

It is late February and spring training games are about to begin. It is a wonderful time of the year, a time for...

The 2011 Pirates Prospects Annual is here. The Annual is a PDF e-book, and it consists of 151 full-color pages filled with in-depth...

As I am sure you have seen on a few other sites, the Pirates invited a few of us bloggers to PirateFest Friday night for a chance to pick the brains of Frank Coonelly, Neal Huntington and Paul Maholm. I am not going to go too in-depth, but I thought I would touch on a few subjects that came up.

You may have noticed that things have been kind of slow at Pittsburgh Lumber Co. the past couple months. I have not been posting regularly, and I apologize for that. However, there was a reason for this inactivity. I have been busy working on a new project, the 2011 Pirates Prospects Annual.

Just a little nugget of news on a slow January day. Tony Sanchez tweeted the following this afternoon.

I am sure many of you are already aware of this, but be sure to check out the Pirates Prospects 2011 Prospect Guide that was put together by Tim Williams. It looks to be a great resource, one that I ordered immediately once it became available.

Many Pirates fans were angry when the team signed Lyle Overbay earlier this week, because he will likely take playing time from younger players. But I'm not sure his addition should necessarily keep those younger players off the field.

Former Pirate Lastings Milledge was involved in a bench-clearing brawl yesterday during a Venezuelan winter league game. Click here for video.

For the third year in a row, the Only Bucs message board is conducting a poll to determine the top 30 prospects in the Pirates system.

The fantasy baseball annual Graphical Player 2011, published by Heater Magazine's John Burnson, is now available for purchase. For the third straight year, I served as the Pirates team expert for the book. Feel free to check it out if you are interested.

Rocco DeMaro, host of the Pirates post-game show Extra Innings for the past four seasons, revealed some unfortunate news on his Twitter feed this afternoon.

In the Kevin Correia thread over at Bucs Dugout, a long discussion broke out today about PETCO Park’s effect on Correia’s 2010 numbers. After reading through the debate, I decided to do some digging and see what I could figure out.