9:38PM Wednesday
March 6, 2013

I spent most of the winter bemoaning the Pirates' lack of pitching depth, but the whole time that I was doing so there was a significant elephant in the room: Gerrit Cole. -Cole is in camp with the Pirates, pitching big league innings, ranked in the top ten of most prospect lists and he rose to Triple-A in his first minor league season and people like Baseball Prospectus's Jason Parks write things like this about his ceiling:-

Fantasy Future:-Could develop into premier starter; 20-game winner; perennial Cy Young award candidate.

As a result, I think that there's the perception among some Pirate fans that the fact that Cole won't start 2013 because the Pirates are trying to keep his arbitration clock from ticking. Whether or not that's a justifiable reason to keep a pitcher in the minors is its own debate (short answer: I think that it definitely is), but I'm not sure it's applicable to Cole here. The reality is that Cole is a good prospect a...