Beaver County Times, April 20, 2014

The Penguins' first-round playoff match-up with Columbus is probably as comfortable a series as they could have requested.
They're playing a just-happy-to-here low seed with very little playoff experience, one that also happens to be without one of its best players.
Still, Blue Jackets don't stir the postseason passion the way Capitals did and Flyers still might. Who hates a Blue Jacket? Despite the proximity of the two cities, there's never been anything approaching a hockey rivalry between Pittsburgh and Columbus.
But given the Penguins' wobbly finish to the regular season, the Blue Jackets might represent the ideal way to get back on track for tougher opponents.
Meanwhile, it seems curious that speedy but undersized Brian Gibbons wound up as one of Sidney Crosby's wingers in the first game of a playoff series.
Pascal Dupuis' season-ending knee injury had a big impact, but the injury occurred on Dec. 23. There's been time to formulate Plans B through Z.
It's a reminder of the days when Mario Lemieux would get stuck with whatever wingers had just been claimed off the waiver wire. The theory was that Lemieux was good enough to make any slug better, so he got an over-the-hill Wayne Babych or Charlie Simmer on his wing.
The playoffs really shouldn't be a time for experimentation -- not even against Columbus.
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--TAKE A NUMBER
The idea of honoring Jackie Robinson every year is fine. The execution is terrible, though.
MLB remembers Robinson on April 15, the anniversary of his debut. Every MLB jersey used that day carries Robinson's No. 42 and no name.
The purpose of numbers is player identification, and that becomes impossible on April 15 because everyone is No. 42. Who's warming up in the bullpen? It's a righthander and a lefthander, No. 42 and No. 42.
Who is the pinch hitter on deck? It's No. 42, who will hit for No. 42. That's unless the other team brings in No. 42. In that case, No. 42 will be called back and No. 42 will pinch hit instead.
In the middle of a three-city, nine-game trip, the Pirates had to lug along an extra set of uniforms with No. 42 on all of the jerseys.
How does total confusion honor Robinson's memory? Here's a better approach: Designate one player from each team to wear No. 42 on Robinson's day. Or have each manager wear the number. Or design a special (and marketable) cap that has No. 42 on it instead of the team logo. Do something that makes sense.
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--DISARMED
Good to see that the Pirates quietly buried the pantomime gun-and-holster gimmick they were using to celebrate hits.
It was intended to replace the two-year Zoltan "Z," but it struck a bad note from the start. The players were waving imaginary pistols, then miming stuffing them in imaginary holsters.
Apparently someone convinced them that wasn't the best image, so they've switched off to the "yes" salute that's borrowed from a WWE character.
There was a time when accomplishments were embellished with nothing more than a spontaneous hand clap or fist pump, but that ship sailed a while ago. That was back in the dark ages when players didn't even get to pick customized walk-up music for their plate appearances.

Beaver County Times, April 13, 2014

The local pro teams do a lot of good deeds in the community. You know this because they usually alert the media to their philanthropy.
Rarely does a good deed go unpublicized. So when the Steelers help kids get winter coats or the Pirates fix up a youth field or the Penguins hand out pizza to students in the ticket line, camera crews are there.
There isn't anything fundamentally wrong with that. Image buffing is reality in corporate America. Back when Jerry Lewis was running a telethon, certain sponsors showed up every couple of hours with another check presentation. They could have written one check and dropped it off quietly, but things don't work that way.
Still, it reminds of Catfish Hunter's famous line about teammate Reggie Jackson: "He'll give you the shirt off his back. Of course, he'll call a press conference to announce it."
That climate makes it even more impressive that Penguins players Beau Bennett and Robert Bortuzzo took it upon themselves to visit victims of the knife attacks at Franklin Regional High School. Bennett and Bortuzzo showed up at the hospital on their own, delivering some autographed gear and good wishes after practice on Friday.
Nobody sent them, it was their own initiative. Friday was the only day that worked in the schedule because of the playoffs looming. So there they were, trying to cheer up some kids who had endured a horrific experience.
Spies at the Penguins report this generosity isn't uncommon. Bennett and Bortuzzo frequently make quiet hospital visits. Bennett is from California and Bortuzzo is from Thunder Bay, Ontario, but they feel a connection to the community.
Now they're getting publicity for this, which they didn't seek. They did it just because it felt like the right thing to do, and that makes their effort even more impressive.
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--HANGING ON
Joe Beimel is pitching in relief for Seattle, his first major league work since the Pirates released him on Aug. 30, 2011.
The Pirates dropped him, coincidentally, just a week after he said he wanted to be like former teammate Jesse Orosco, who pitched until he was 46.
Between Pittsburgh and Seattle, Beimel kicked around the Texas and Atlanta organizations without getting to the majors. Now he's back, pitching for his seventh team in 12 years at age 37 and making $850,000.
As long as a lefthanded pitcher still has a pulse, he has a chance to be in someone's bullpen.
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--READY FOR PRIME TIME?
The NFL schedule is supposed to be released this week, which is worth a tailgate party somewhere.
The NFL has always loved the Steelers in prime time because they've consistently been a contending team loaded with big recognizable personalities. Does the NFL still want to showcase the Steelers after consecutive 8-8 non-playoff seasons?
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--TOO EARLY TO TELL
If we believe these first two weeks have turned Pedro Alvarez into an efficient cleanup hitter who doesn't have a monstrous number of strikeouts, do we also have to believe that Andrew McCutchen has morphed into a clueless .194 hitter?
Small sample sizes can distort. It could be that Alvarez has turned a corner, or it could be that he's on one of those hot streaks we've seen before.
Give it time.

Beaver County Times, April 6, 2014

Dan Bylsma has won more games, regular season and playoffs, than any other Penguins coach. He is one of three Penguins coaches with his name on the Stanley Cup (the other two are in the Hall of Fame).
GM Ray Shero reaffirmed his belief in Bylsma with a two-year contract extension last summer. The Penguins have had a successful regular season, again topping 100 points and nailing down a division title with relative ease despite a relentless series of injuries to key players.
So why does it feel like his job will be on the line when the playoffs start in about 10 days?
This is about expectations. The Penguins are built to seriously compete for the Cup every year. They haven't been to the Final since they defeated Detroit in 2009, the season when Bylsma replaced Michel Therrien in February.
The current Penguins are an interesting mix of state-of-the-art skill and utter mediocrity. When you're paying superstar salaries to some of the best talents in the game, the rest of the roster suffers. The Penguins can load the top two lines with enviable talent, but they're in trouble if circumstances dictate rolling three (or heaven forbid) four lines.
The past playoff meltdowns have been well-documented. After winning two rounds last year, they fell hard to Boston in four games with Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin getting shut out.
If something like that happens this year, look for the Penguins to make a coaching change. NHL coaches generally don't stay in one place too long. It's not always their fault, but it's the most efficient way to change an atmosphere gone stale.
Maybe that halting monotone Bylsma uses in interviews has faded into background noise for the Penguins. Maybe his systems are lacking. Perhaps this roster is just too unbalanced for playoff hockey.
If the Penguins exit in the first or second round, Bylsma is as good as gone. He might also be in trouble if there's another third-round collapse like the one last spring. Shero, the son of a legendary coach, is patient, but one of the Penguins owners has a long history of devaluing coaches.
Should the Penguins fall short of seriously competing for the Cup, it's not hard to imagine Mario Lemieux suggesting that a coaching change is in order. Disco Dan could be riding in a Stanley Cup parade, or could just as easily be doing the hustle out of town.
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--NOT A KID
It's hard to think of Crosby as old, but that's sort of a theory in ESPN Magazine.
Their article cites researcher Eric Tulsky's work suggesting Crosby is on the cusp of the time when NHL forwards start declining.
Per the magazine, "average scoring rates for centers and wingers start dropping off at age 25 and plummet once they hit 30." It further notes that Lemieux and Wayne Gretzky got the majority of their goals and all but one of their combined six Stanley Cups by age 26.
Crosby turns 27 in August.
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--KICKED OUT
Fox recently dropped Brian Billick as an NFL analyst. Fox doesn't do many Steelers games, but this should delight the lunatic fringe of Steeler Nation who believe that anyone who ever lost a game to them holds a lifetime grudge (Hello, Cris Collinsworth).

Beaver County Times, March 30, 2014

The season hasn't even started and the Pirates have already made an error.
What is the point of bringing in Barry Bonds to present Andrew McCutchen's MVP award? Dick Groat, the 1960 MVP,  will also be on hand, and the idea is clearly to connect the Pirates' present to the past. But why?
The Pirates finally had a season to celebrate, and they're going to dilute that by linking to the past? It's finally a chance for the franchise to focus on the here and now instead of relying on nostalgia.
By inviting Bonds, the Pirates have bumped McCutchen out of the spotlight. The coverage will focus on how fans react to Bonds and what he says. Bonds left the Pirates after the 1992 season, which means someone has to be nearly 30 to remember his years here.
This isn't a healing, because no one is aching for a reconciliation. Bonds played the first seven years of his career with the Pirates, and posted exceptional numbers in the final three seasons. Then he left as a free agent and played 15 seasons with the Giants. The Pirates didn't even make an offer when he hit free agency. He belongs to the Giants, and they're welcome to all the baggage he carries from his expanded physique years.
Opening day 2014 should be a celebration of the Pirates' long-overdue success in 2013. Instead, it's needlessly been turned into a referendum on Barry Bonds.
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--DRAGGING ON
We're still more than two weeks away from the start of the Stanley Cup playoffs, which is another reminder that the NHL season is too long.
Last year's 48-game season, shortened by the lockout, came with an urgency. A team going through the kind of tough stretch the Penguins are now experiencing might be in trouble. Instead, the Penguins are still coasting because of the cushion they built in October and November.
A 60-game regular season would be about right, but it won't ever happen.
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--GETTING TESTY
Remember when Clint Hurdle was first hired by the Pirates and he was this rollicking loud guy with a big John Wayne personality who wanted to make sure everybody was "all in?"
Has anyone seen that Clint lately? Seems like there are a lot of days when he comes across as excessively irritable. He was snapping off non-answers to questions the other day like he was being interrogated by the secret police.
Maybe it was just a bad day, but it seems like clipped Clint shows up often. Some of the people who cover the team daily are young and inexperienced, but that isn't their fault, nor does it preclude their right to ask questions. Hurdle sometimes even snaps at the announcers who host his pre-game radio show, even though they work for the team and aren't trying to trip him up.
At least Mike Tomlin reserves his blatant contempt almost exclusively for questions asked by Jory Rand.
Hurdle has enough finesse that he doesn't need to steamroll people over minor matters.
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--UNIQUE COMBINATION
When Root does one of those cheapo combined spring training broadcasts with the Red Sox crew, there's one positive takeaway:
The mash-up of Jerry Remy's chowderful New England accent and John Wehner's Pittsburghese is oddly compelling.

Beaver County Times, March 23, 2014

This is when spring training turns tedious for most veteran players. That wasn't the case for Reds reliever Aroldis Chapman, though.
He wound up in the hospital after taking a line drive off his face while pitching in an exhibition game.
Chapman needed surgery to repair a broken bone above his left eye and doctors say he will need to have a metal plate inserted in his skull. He's expected to miss six to eight weeks.
The hard-throwing Chapman has been the Reds' closer for several seasons. Pirates fans probably remember him best for the Aug. 3, 2012 game in Cincinnati when he drilled Andrew McCutchen with a 101-mile per hour fastball in the ninth inning.
McCutchen took the pitch off his arm, but that was only because he was able to twist and get his chin out of the way.  In the aftermath, the Reds claimed Chapman was just pitching inside and had no intent to harm McCutchen.
Not everyone believed that. The Reds and Pirates were battling for position in the standings, McCutchen was clearly the Pirates best player, and the Reds were leading in the game, which meant they wouldn't bat again and face possible retaliation.
There was no immediate revenge extracted, but the Pirates and Reds have been hitting each other with pitches regularly since then. Reds' second baseman Brandon Phillips went into a steep decline last season after he was hit on the wrist by the Pirates' Tony Watson on June 1.
Intimidation has been a convenient one-way street for Chapman. Because he's a one-inning specialist, he hardly ever has to bat. He made his first career plate appearance last season, the only time he's stepped into the batters box in 205 games.
Baseball is full of codes and unwritten rules. One of them is that pitchers are entitled to brush back hitters, or even hit them, but only below the shoulders. Even though batters wear helmets, there's still the potential for serious injury.
The Pirates' Gary Redus was hit in the face by a Tim Crews fastball in 1989. Two days later, the imprint made by the stitches of the baseball was still visible on his swollen cheek.
Karma, being an ethereal force, may have shown itself in the line drive that crushed  Chapman's face. While the physical damage was being repaired, Chapman didn't seem to have any psychological hangover.
He used social media to post a graphic photo of the surgical staples in his head. He'll be back, and he'll probably throw as hard as ever has.
But having experienced the damage that a baseball can cause, maybe he'll be more careful about throwing 101-mile per hour fastballs near anyone's head.
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--CHEAP TRICKS
Disclaimer: This is not a political commentary.
No matter who the leader of the free world is, you'd hope he wouldn't have time to work up a full bracket for the NCAA Tournament.
Yet that's what President Barack Obama did again on ESPN, taking Sharpie in hand to predict every game. Why? Image buffing to cast him as everyman? How about saying, "I hope it's a great tournament, but we have our hands full here with some serious issues right now. I'm pretty busy."
Wouldn't that mean more than his pick in the UCLA-Tulsa game?

Beaver County Times, March 16, 2014

The Steelers got some much-needed cap relief with Ike Taylor's new contract, but does it help their struggling defense?
Taylor agreed to a contract that will pay him $2.7 million, which is down from the $7 million commitment he had in place for the 2014 season. There wasn't really much choice.
Taylor knew that if he didn't make the concession, the Steelers would simply release him. Having watched the James Harrison scenario unfold a year ago, he also knew a fresh start wasn't necessarily a good idea. Moving probably wouldn't improve his financial situation much, and he'd have to learn a new system somewhere else.
Taylor and his agent were smart enough to realize familiar was better, even if it represented a significant financial hit. But now the Steelers are depending on a cornerback who readily acknowledges his skills are on the wane by accepting a pay cut of more than $4 million.
Is that going to help a defense that gave up too many big plays in 2013? Too much of the Steelers' defense looked old and tired last season, and Taylor was one of the prime suspects to fit that profile.
Having him back at a reduced price helps the bottom line, but it may not do a whole lot for a secondary that had major problems.
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--MIXED SIGNALS
The start of a new Pirates season is great for KDKA-FM (93.7 The Fan), which cleaned up in the ratings last year.
The Pirates' unexpected success gave the station a huge spike that culminated with spectacular numbers in October. The expected drop came after the season, but The Fan is still making piles of cash despite having a lot of uninspired programming on its regular schedule.
They're practically printing money with a sports talk station that hits a demographic advertisers covet. Because of The Fan's success for CBS, the expectation has been that Clear Channel, the other big operator, will launch its own sports station on FM.
That hasn't happened, and the reasons are complicated. Insiders say Clear Channel fears that a sports talk station would poach more listeners away from WDVE, which is the perennial jewel in Clear Channel's cluster of stations.
WDVE took a big hit in the most recent (January) ratings. It was sixth overall in the market, and even trailed two other Clear Channel stations. Some of that is seasonal because harsh weather tends to skew ratings in favor of news stations, but it appears WDVE has had erosion issues for a while.
Clear Channel's answer is to further spread sports programming among its other stations. Tim Benz, former morning host on WXDX (The X) now has responsibility for sports programming within the cluster. That includes hosting shows on ESPN 970 AM solo and in tandem with Stan Savran.
That's fine, but the station has a lousy signal and a lot of listeners don't have patience with anything that doesn't boom in on the AM dial. Meanwhile, the commercial breaks on The Fan get longer, the cash registers keep beeping, and they're looking at a fresh six-month boost from almost-daily Pirates' programming.
You can't have much of a sports talk battle if one side doesn't really commit to a fight.
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--NO PROGRESS
Duquesne must have had good reasons for firing Ron Everhart in 2012, but it isn't like things have gotten better.

Beaver County Times, March 9, 2014

Pirates fans loved Pedro Alvarez 36 times last season; 186 other times they weren't so crazy about him.

Alvarez's 36 home runs tied for the lead in the National League, but he claimed the strikeout title alone. There were 186 times when he didn't make contact, which meant he had no chance to advance runners or put pressure on the defense to make a play. That's an awful lot of swing and miss to put in the middle of a lineup.

That's why Alvarez represents one of the Pirates' most interesting decisions going forward. His salary took a leap from $700,000 to $4,250,000 this season because of arbitration eligibility, and there will be similar increases leading to his pending free agency after the 2016 season.

There's a perception that power hitters automatically strike out a lot, but that's not always true. Ralph Kiner struck out 109 times in 579 plate appearances as a rookie in 1946. It was the only 100-strikeout season in his major league career.

In 1949, Kiner batted 579 times and hit 54 home runs. He struck out 61 times and drew 117 walks. Then in 1951, he had 42 home runs with 57 strikeouts and 137 walks.

OK, that was a different era, and Kiner is a Hall of Fame player. There's a more recent comparison worth noting. Brian Giles hit 165 home runs in five seasons with the Pirates, and struck out 338 times. Alvarez has stuck out 366 times in the last two seasons.

Alvarez walked only 48 times last season. This could mean he lacks strike zone judgment, or it could mean opponents don't fear him enough to pitch around him. He was only walked intentionally seven times last year.

Giles in 1999 hit 39 homers, struck out 80 times and had 95 walks in 627 plate appearances. In 2002, his last full season in Pittsburgh, he hit 38 home runs, struck out 74 times and drew 135 walks in 644 appearances.

Alvarez's on-base percentage last season was .296. Perspective: Clint Barmes' career on-base percentage is .294.

Defensively, Alvarez has good hands and an exceptionally strong arm. Yet he also made 27 errors last season, tops among National League third basemen.

There's clearly room for improvement in a variety of areas, but how likely is that? Alvarez is 27. This season could be pivotal in determining whether the Pirates look to make an expensive multi-year commitment to him or start shopping him before he can leave as a free agent.

Some have compared him to Dave Kingman, an all-or-nothing power threat of the 1970s. That's not quite accurate. Kingman never struck out more than 156 times in a season. Alvarez has topped that twice.

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--NEW VOICES

Fox has chosen two people to replace Tim McCarver on its baseball coverage, perhaps an indirect commentary on the verbosity McCarver brought to the booth.

One is ex-player Harold Reynolds, who has bounced back from his sudden 2006 banishment from ESPN over sexual harassment allegations. The other is Tom Verducci. Shades of Howard Cosell, Verducci never played the game but he did cover it for Newsday and Sports Illustrated before entering broadcasting.

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--BUYING ON CREDIT

By restructuring contracts, aren't the Steelers just deferring their salary cap issues rather than solving them?