Tag: Akinori Iwamura

The Pittsburgh Pirates traded Freddy Sanchez to the San Francisco Giants at the 2009 trade deadline, leaving a big hole at second base with no internal options at the top two levels.  To fill that hole, the Pirates traded for Akinori Iwamura, sending Jesse Chavez to the Tampa Bay Rays in November 2009 to land […]

This off-season the Pirates will probably face a much tougher set of roster decisions than they have in years.  Several factors are coming together to create a lot of those decisions.  The team has spent a couple years now accumulating players, very few of whom have established themselves as solid major leaguers.  Many of the […]

To make room for Pedro Alvarez, the Pirates designated Aki Iwamura for assignment today.

I am not going to spend much time talking about Ron Cook’s article in this morning's Post-Gazette. There are plenty of misguided thoughts in the article, but I just wanted to make a single point.

According to John Russell, Neil Walker will receive the majority of playing time at second base moving forward. This pushes Aki Iwamura to the bench. With Iwamura out of the lineup, Andrew McCutchen has moved back to the leadoff spot.

The Akinori Iwamura acquisition made sense at the time, but things have changed. Even if we factor in expected positive regression, Iwamura is likely to provide slightly below average production for the season. At 31-years-old and on a one-year contract, that’s just not very valuable. It is time to replace Iwamura with the rejuvenated Neil Walker.

The Pirates will likely bat Akinori Iwamura first, Andrew McCutchen second, the pitcher eighth and Ronny Cedeno ninth often this season. [Link]

Steve Sommer of Play a Hard Nine posted 2010 defensive projections in November, so let’s look at how the Pirates stack up. Steve combined UZR numbers and the results from Tom Tango’s Fan Scouting Report to come up with his projections. Check out his post for details on the methodology. In an attempt to give […]