Neal Huntington is a Mark Shapiro prodigy, although he first worked under Indians ex-GM John Hart who left his position in 2001 allowing Shapiro to take over.  Kyle Stark had worked primarily under Huntington while employed by Shapiro. 

Huntington came to the Indians in 1998 and, starting in 1999, was their director of player development.  In 2002 he was promoted to assistant GM and remained one until joining the Pirates.

During the Hart/Shapiro years, one thing became crystal clear regarding the organization’s use of pitchers: for whatever reason, they ran them through revolving doors at both the major league and triple-A levels.  In fact, if you look at the table below you’ll notice the Indians used the highest number of pitchers in baseball between 1998 - 2007 (unique names each year, then add each year’s total number of uniques).

Of course, the Indians also won their division four times during those years and I suspected that might have had something to do with it, so I decided to look at which years were influencing the total and found the results in the table below:

Amazingly, the Indians stood well above the other clubs in number of pitchers used in a season by a significant margin with three of the top seven years, and two of the top three.  Notice too that all three years were non-playoff years and two of them, 2002 and 2004, were sub-.500 years under Shapiro control with Huntington as an assistant.  For the record, the Indians went above .500 just two times the entire time Huntinton was an assistant.

Because Huntington trained under Shapiro and saw this revolving door mentality as normal business, you can’t help but to wonder if it is going to carry over to the Pirates.  We probably won’t know in 2008 because the Pirates system doesn’t have enough pitchers in its system to ever reach 30, but we have used 19 just half way through the season and the revolving door mentality is in full bloom.

Now, why did it happen in Cleveland and why is it happening in Pittsburgh?

Let’s start with Kyle Stark.  We’ve seen what seems to be an unusually high number of promotions and demotions in-season so far in the Pirates farm system.  I haven’t even attempted to keep track of all the transactions but my senses tell me we are significantly ahead of pace of any year since 2000. 

I’d guess some of that is the result of reorganization Stark’s first year in, some it the result of putting out fires based on Huntington’s moves at the ML level, and some it just sifting through the organization.  We’ll have to continue to watch Stark’s work over the next year to see if it continues.

In Pittsburgh it’s a different story - for whatever reasons, Huntington’s own moves started the revolving door after he traded Solomon Torres and released Matt Morris leaving him painfully short-handed with healthy ML pitching.  Tom Gorzelanny has been nursing along an overworked arm from 2007, Paul Maholm has had on-again, off-again back problems, Ian Snell has had lingering elbow problems, Dumatrait went through the “he’s a starter, no he’s a reliever, no he’s our long man” spring and then was rushed into starting after the Morris release and now joins Snell and Osoria on the DL with more all but sure to follow. 

And Huntington took over this club fully aware these problems existed… it’s not like they just cropped up.  Gorzy’s use was before Huntington took office, Snell was down with an elbow problem in 2006 and had some kind of problem in 2007 that was never disclosed, Maholm’s back put him out of business last year, and Huntington had an option of stretching out Dumatrait more before thrusting him into the rotation with the quick release of the disgruntled Morris.

Obviously if Huntington had kept Morris and Torres while still acquiring Yates, he would have had a significantly stronger pitching staff which would have reduced some need for internal replacements.  Replacements, I should say, that have been excruciatingly painful to watch from this fan’s perspective.

That’s also important because that also put Stark under the gun having to ping-pong pitching up one level and then back down over and over throughout the system to cover starts, forced Bryan Bullington to take a back seat in development sitting on the pine in Pittsburgh, and numerous other ping-pong type moves from Indy.

Right, it snowballs, and obviously it’s far from over.

The last thing Pirates fans should want to see is a secondary attitude toward pitching.  Pitching and defense wins baseball games more consistently than offense and defense, history books remind us.  This year is a great example of that - we have a team OPS+ of 100 for the first time since Brian Giles, Aramis Ramirez, and Reggie Sanders days in 2003, and we’re still eleven games out halfway through the season.

But that’s the path Neal Huntington seems to be taking - pack the lineup card with an offensive scoring machine and try to outsmack your opponents.  You know, like Hart and Shapiro did/tried to do all those years in Cleveland.  And if you consider the starting position players Huntington might field after the break in 2009, you might even start to drool a bit:

McCutchen CF, Bay LF, Nady RF, LaRoche 1B, Sanchez 2B, Wilson SS, Alvarez 3B, Doumit C

until you realize the secondary thought mentality on pitching might produce so many broken arms we would have to field a starting rotation of:

Van Benschoten, Duke, Herrera, Taubenheim, and Bullington

Let’s hope Neal Huntington finds a little of Terry Ryan’s extraordinary ability to put pitching first, instead of continuing to use his Shapiro training.

In a hurry.