Tag: Mark Appel

About once a year I take a look back at the Mark Appel situation in order to see how the move played out for the Pittsburgh Pirates. Typically this look involves comparing Appel to what the Pirates would have had to give up in order to go above slot and sign him. If you’re scoring […]

I missed the Q&A last week due to a common problem in Spring Training: I forgot what day it was. It was around 6:00 that I was driving home from a busy day at Pirate City and suddenly it hit me “Oh yeah, today is Friday. I didn’t do the Q&A.” It wasn’t going anywhere. […]

The Major League Baseball draft doesn’t allow you to go over your total bonus pool without some extreme penalties. These include the loss of future draft picks, as well as a 100 percent tax on the overage. If there was any team wondering if an individual player was worth those penalties, all they need to […]

The Houston Astros have agreed to a deal with No. 1 draft pick Mark Appel, according to the sources of CBS Sports’ Jon Heyman. Appel and agent Scott Boras turned down a contract offer from the Pittsburgh Pirates last year. [Update: Appel will receive a $6.35 million bonus, according to Jim Callis of Baseball America.] The […]

We will keep track of all of the draft rumors today in this post. In previous years it was easy to guess what the Pirates would do, since they were picking at the top. This year it’s up in the air, and the guys available to them will be largely influenced by the first eight […]

Every year it seems like there’s one surprise team that everyone starts talking about early in the season. The Pirates have been a surprise team in each of the previous two years, but I don’t recall the discussion starting this early (probably because they broke out in June 2011, and had a historically bad offense […]

It’s a big Friday night in college baseball as the draft is now just 13 days away. With the Pittsburgh Pirates picking #9 and #14, they are getting some last looks in at the players in their range. A lot of the talk recently has centered around players that have either dropped in the rankings, […]

A few days ago, John Sickels released his latest mock draft which we wrote about here. This is the fourth mock draft from industry experts that we talked about over the last week. There were also mock drafts from Baseball America, Keith Law and Jonathan Mayo. With these four all coming out around the same time, […]

The 14th weekend of college kicked of last night for some teams, while others began their weekend on Friday. For most teams, this is the last weekend of their regular season and they start conference tournament play next week. Check out the schedule for this weekend here. Check out the draft preview posted here and […]

Instead of the usual weekend recap this week, I thought I would cut it down to include more players. Using recent mock drafts, along with the weekly performances, I want to take a look at which players have moved up, moved down or stayed the same recently and just overall, where they rank now. There […]