FanHouse DanMccutchen

Things are about to turn a corner in Pittsburgh. End the Futilitywatch, ace pitching prospect Daniel "The Man" McCutchen will make his Major League debut Monday night against the Cincinnati Reds. This year McCutchen is already 13-6 with a 3.47 ERA in 24 starts, and in his last 52 innings has walked only four while striking out forty. He is like Jay Bruce and Matt Wieters combined! Except his pitches!

Though general manager Neal Huntington said last week that the Pirates would not go to a straight six-man rotation in September, it appears that they are reconsidering it, because 38 guys on their 40-man roster are pitchers. The other two are Lastings Milledge and the Parrot.

Tonight's Dugout is after the jump.

FanHouse continues its 2009 MLB Preview with a look at the Pittsburgh Pirates.

For the better part of the last decade, the Pittsburgh Pirates aimlessly wandered through the wilderness of baseball with Kevin McClatchy and Dave Littlefield at the helm. Finally, they lost their jobs and Frank Coonelly and Neal Huntington took over. For more than a year, the new front office has been working on digging out of the hole dug by Littlefield during his reign of terror. There's only one real problem: The hole dug by Littlefield was so deep that it's going to take more than a year to dig out of it.

The Yankees' worst fears were confirmed this afternoon following an MRI on Chien-Ming Wang's right foot. He's been diagnosed with a sprained Lisfranc tendon and a partially torn peroneal longus tendon and will be confined to a walking cast for the next six weeks.

Once the cast is removed, he'll still need at least another month throwing bullpen sessions and making minor league rehab stats to regain his conditioning, which means that the earliest he's expected to return is September. Not surprisingly, Wang's teammates aren't optimistic about being able to replace him. From George King III of the New York Post:

"Nothing against (Alex Rodriguez) and (Jorge) Posada but when you lose a front-line starter, that's a big deal," [Mike] Mussina said Sunday. "There are seven other guys in the lineup. When you lose your No. 1 starter, that's very hard. He is the ace."

How will the Yankees replace him? Apparently from within, if you believe Brian Cashman. From Peter Abraham of the LoHud Yankees blog:

"There is no trade market at the moment," he said. "I'm not optimistic that something can get done on that front. We have to try and plug this gap internally and that's not going to be easy."