Mar 27, 2016 By John Perrotto for The 3 min read

Three thoughts on the Pirates:

1. Optimizing the offense

It seems weird to look at the lineup card posted on a wall in the Pirates’ spring training camp.

John Jaso leading off.

He is a catcher-turned-first baseman with 15 stolen bases in his seven-year career.

Andrew McCutchen batting second.

He is the Pirates’ biggest star and best hitter, the type of player who has hit No. 3 in the batting order since baseball was invented.

While a Jaso-McCutchen combination at the top of the lineup feels odd, it is potentially a stroke of genius by the Pirates’ brain trust.

A lot of power was lost in the offseason when first baseman Pedro Alvarez was not tendered a contract and second baseman Neil Walker was traded to the New York Mets.

Acquiring power hitters cost a lot of money and owner Bob Nutting doesn’t like to spend on players. So the Pirates are doing what the king of sabermetrics Bill James has been preaching for more than three decades by bunching their best on-base percentage players at the top of the order to maximize scoring chances.

Teams have long been reluctant to embrace the idea, staying bound to tradition by batting a speedy player in the leadoff spot and using a good bat handler who can lay down a bunt or executive the hit-and-run play in the No. 2 hole.

Jaso won’t steal many bases and McCutchen won’t have many sacrifices. However, Jaso’s career OBP is .361 and McCutchen has a .388 mark in seven seasons.

The Pirates should get runners on base. How often Jaso and McCutchen get driven in remains to be seem, but it is an idea worth embracing.

2. Uncle Ray profile

Because he has such a small margin in large part because of the low payroll he has to work with, general manager Neal Huntington rarely lets the media peek behind the curtain to observe the cutting-edge methods the Pirates use when it comes to analytics and injury prevention.

However, Sports Illustrated’s Albert Chen got a glimpse at the operation while writing his profile of pitching coach Ray Searage that appears in the magazine’s baseball preview edition.

It is on newsstands now and an interest piece well worth a read.

3. RIP, Joe

It was very sad to learn of the death of Joe Garagiola at 90 this past week.

Those of us who grew up in the days before ESPN, regional cable networks and the internet, cherished Saturday afternoons and NBC’s Game of the Week telecasts. It was a rare chance to see games other than those involving the Pirates.

What made the Game of the Week extra special was listening to Garagiola’s endless string of humorous comments and great baseball stories. He was a catcher for the Pirates in 1952 and loved to talk about that woeful 42-112 season.

Getting the chance to meet Garagiola when he came to Three Rivers Stadium to broadcast a game in 1988, which was my first year of covering baseball, remains one of the biggest thrills on my career 28 years later.