I know a decent number of you go to FanGraphs, and I'm sure some heard seen the new game they unveiled yesterday. It's kind of convoluted the way they made it, but I think it could out to be pretty good fun.

Basically, you can create a player for up to 8 positions and put them on a team, and all palyers on each team compete for a place of the depth chart, and to be to #1 player at the end of the year. To do that, you pick a major league player each day with a cap of 162 games (for the most part) and $1000 (for the most part). For each day, whatever each player you does at the plate, or however they pitch, those stats are added to your created player. Over the year the stats will build up like your player would be playing in actual games, or whatnot.

So, since there is a way to keep track of specific created players, I thought maybe we could have a Bucs Dugout "league" as it were, where everyone who is interested would be in the group and we'd just kind of compete against each other, or track each other during the year. I made a player for each position and obviously made them all Pirates, although the team you select isn't really that important, at least for this. So if anyone wants to do this, post in here and I'll figure out how to add your players to the list because I haven't actually tried that out yet. But it should be like adding real player to a real Custom Teams list which is pretty easy.

You can see the complete rules for the Game here. A FAQ post just went up recently as well.

All right so Fangraphs had a series of posts over the last week rankings teams by position. Unsurprisingly the Pirates didn't do so well, having only two positions in the top ten and having several down near the very bottom. I figured I'd copy all the tables so the Pirates' rankings and ZIPS and WAR projections could be in one neat and tidy spot. Hopefully this looks ok, it does in the preview.

Because I forgot at first, here's the post on Fangraphs that has a link to each Position Rankings post as well as each team's Top 15 Prospects post. There's also an Intro link that gives an overview of what the rankings represent.

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We could all use a laugh right about now. Or at least a chuckle. Maybe a titter? So here are some of things I heard today while listening to the Fan, whether they be from callers or the hosts or so forth. I don't want to say who exactly said some of this, but rest assured these were all (mostly paraphrased) actual thing people said.

Mike McKenry is now the Pirate Catcher of the Future and therefore they should trade away Tony Sanchez. (Just like Ronny Paulino)

The Pirates should trade Lyle Overbay, Ryan Doumit and Sanchez for Hunter Pence. (Darn, too late now!)

Or they could trade Stetson Allie, Starling Marte and Brad Lincoln for Josh Willingham. (I bet Oakland would take that.)

If Josh Harrison was taller he would be the Pirates first baseman. (Hitting a robust .270! Also comes with walk!)

Get Jason Giambi to play first. (Do they allow MLB players to play in wheelchairs?)

Steve Pearce is an absolute embarrassment to the Pirates organization and should be gotten rid of immediately. (That's not enough, I saw off with his head!)

Jose Tabata got injured and has had setbacks because he doesn't prepare enough for the season. (I have no idea what this was even supposed to mean.)

"Nutting should cut the strings off his damn puppet!" (This has nothing to do with an opinion that Bob Nutting is controlling everything that Neal Huntington does, no. It was just a helpful suggestion because Nutting, an avid marionette enthusiast, must have asked for help getting one of his puppets untangled.

Catchers are always overrated. (Yup. Always. And first baseman are always underrated.)

Brian Sabean is so respected because he wins. (Not to disparage Sabean much, but this still made me laugh.)

Right now the Pirates are in a bit of a unique situation. No other team and fanbase has really had to endure anything like what they have had to endure the past 18 years. Which leads me to the queston: Why are you a Pirates fan? Now obviously there are a lot of people around Pittsburgh right now who will say they are fans. But it takes a bit more dedication to be posting on a Pirates specific blog, especially if you've been here for years, and double especially for this team. It's not even a given that you're a fan if you live in Pittsburgh, like it usually is for the Steelers (and to a lesser extent, The Pens) This makes me think that there must be some interesting stories behind why you root for this team. Many of you don't live in Pittsburgh, and perhaps you grew up here, but maybe you didn't. Maybe some of you weren't even born in this country! This is what I want to know. 

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Basically I wanted to list the fWAR of all the #1 picks, minus the players drafted in the last few years. I was going to just post this as a reply in that thread, but the lack of formatting made it unreadable.

Career WAR is self-explanatory. WAR/150 is a batter's WAR per 150 games played, while WAR/200IP in the same, but per 200 innings pitched. They're not exactly comparable, and 180 IP might have been better, but I went with 200. Top 5 Peak WAR is the average of each player's 5 best WAR seasons. If they didn't play that many seasons, then the total was divided by however many seasons they did play.

What to conclude from this? Well for one, every pick averages out to be at least an average performer for the length of their careers, and even better during their peak. Like SHOOTFOR2010 said, they are 3 fairly obvious HOFs in Griffey, Jones and Rodriguez, although there is fairly steep drop-off from them to the next player in terms of career WAR, Harold Baines with 45.3. Of course, a few players drafted since 2000 can still get to that level or above, though now Mauer has an injury history and might move off catcher, and Gonzalez plays 1st, which is no help when attempting to accumulate WAR, and might very well have to DH eventually. Hamilton has already missed so much, so he probably have the chance to accumulate as much as he might have. That's about all I have to say I guess.