The False Dichotomy of Being Buyers or Sellers

A newt

You may have noticed that the Pirates look like a sinking ship. Andrew McCutchen has been turned into a newt. Jeff Locke misses more lunar eclipses than bats. Francisco Liriano, Juan Nicasio and Jon Neise have left a mess on the mound and there's no one to help closer Mark Melancon clean it up. After a 6-20 stretch from May to late June, they're under .500 and so far behind the Cubs they're about to be lapped.

So, the thinking seems to go, management either believes they can win a Wild Card or they're going to sell off parts at the trade deadline.

Talk about a false dichotomy.

Trading away valuable veterans makes sense if your team won't contend until those veterans leave or lose their value. If Pittsburgh brass believes 2016 is a lost cause they might want to unload a player who turns free agent in November. But jettisoning assets from a team that won 98 times last season for future value is the work of a paranoid schizophrenic.

Total Rebuild as Default
We have become so accustomed to the total rebuild that we've lost sight of what a dramatic and desperate act it is. It's tantamount to giving up in hopes of bouncing back twice as strong a few years hence. Which is why it shouldn't be the default position for any franchise, much less one that seems to be in nothing more than a slump.

That's even assuming the Pirates are a lost cause. In fact, they're a fine offensive and defensive team, except for a rotation that's lighting up scoreboards and dragging the team to a 37-40 record. If you're going to suffer the extended scuffling of good players, it might as well be in the element of the game that is most inconsistent under the best of circumstances.

Small Improvement = Wild Card Contender
Indeed, if Bucco hurling improves from fourth worst to middle of the pack in their remaining 85 games, the Pirates could easily make up the 4.5-game gap between them and the Wild Card. With a pitching coach, Ray Searage, considered something of a mound whisperer, and a rotation of hurlers who have achieved success in the past, that is eminently possible. It might even be predictable.

If GM Neal Huntington believes third basemen David Freese and Jung-ho Kang are sufficiently redundant to swap one for a set-up man or a third starter, that's defensible. If he wants to hedge his bets on sacrificing the long-term for a Wild Card charge that might fall short, that's understandable. 

If he announces he's flipping the roster for draft picks and Single-A All Stars, I want to see a picture ID, because that's some irrational fan talking, not the savvy team builder who turned the franchise around from the two dark decades that preceded him. 

The Pirates have more choices than just buyers or sellers. If the pundits don't know it, I guarantee that the people who run the club do.

When Do the Bucs Get Good?

A blog post on the Pirates has been slaking through my brain for the better part of the new year. So you can imagine how my ears perked up today when I heard that the Pirates and Yankees were on the verge of a trade involving A.J. Burnett. 

Wouldn't a trade that includes the mercurial right-hander mean a one way ticket to Pittsburgh? Why on earth would a rebuilding team want an erratic 35-year-old with an ERA over 5.00 the last two seasons? The only way this deal makes sense is if Pittsburgh receives prospects as reward for absorbing some of the $33 million owed Burnett for the next two years. 

(Reportedly they'll send a prospect and roughly split the bill. Blecch for the Bucs.)

The slack that the SABR world has cut Pittsburgh brass over the last four-and-a-half years will begin getting taut in 2012. In the five off-season's since Frank Coonelly and Neal Huntington came aboard as president and GM, they swabbed the decks of the veteran core for a treasure chest of young players and minor leaguers. Gone are Jason Bay, Xavier Nady, Nate McLouth, Freddy Sanchez, Jack Wilson, Ian Snell and other, lesser lights. Bay tore up the AL for the Red Sox in '08, but otherwise, few in Pittsburgh are lamenting these losses.

The losses they're lamenting are across from the Win column in the standings since. The Pirates' 19-year streak of losing records is not Coonelly and Huntington's fault, and they have been wise to ignore the record and focus on building a contender for the long term. But at 72-90 in 2011, their best record since '04, there's no clear sense that the team is headed in the right direction. (Baseball Prospectus projects the Pirates for 71 wins in '12.)

In swapping the present for the future, the Pirates brought back the likes of Jose Tabata, Jeff Karstens, Ross Ohlmendorf, Dan McCutchen, Brandon Moss, Andy LaRoche, Craig Hansen, Gorkys Hernankdez, Jeff Locke, Charlie Morton, Lastings Milledge, Joel Hanrahan, Jeff Clement, Ronny Cedeno, Tim Alderson, Chris Snyder, Pedro Ciriaco, James McDonald, Andrew Lambo, Kevin Hart, Jose Ascanio, Josh Harrison and John Bowker. This group will determine whether the Pirates are contenders or pretenders in the future.

In 2011, the payoff was still small, and Pittsburgh's fans, even the most patient, are going to be hard pressed to remain so in 2012. Hanrahan saved 40 games with a 1.83 ERA, Tabata and Harrison  provided replacement level hitting at left field and third base, starting pitchers Karstens and McCutchen both got good results as starters despite vexing strikeout rates and Cedeno is a glove-only shortstop now entering his 30s. Besides that, the treasure trove from all those trades is mostly seaweed and sand.

The Pirates have also had five (more) years of high draft picks and have spent the most money in baseball scouring the globe for prospects. Yet they still lack an ace -- or a number two starter, for that matter -- and aside from Andrew McCutchen (.259/.364/.456) they still don't have anyone who can hit a lick.

It's early, to be sure. Almost none of the names above has entered their primes. But it's getting late to be early. A 20th year of failure will have the new management team's supporters assembling the plank for Coonelly and Huntington to walk.

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Keeping Us On Our Toes

Here's another reason baseball is a great game. An objective pre-reason forecast for the Mets offered little hope. The Queens contingent was drinking from a nearly empty pitching cup and sported Band-Aids all over the field.

It's a long season and the prediction may yet turn out right, but for now, the Mets are 10 games over and knocking on the door of first. How did a squad with a flashing check engine light manage to lap the field for two weeks? 

Well, R.A. Dickey is 5-0, 2.82. It's no knock against the early prognostications that none of them accounted for Dickey. He was neither a Met nor an asset before the season began.

Non-prospect Ike Davis, whose pedigree included half a year at Double-A prior to 2010, has banished the ghost of Carlos Delgado at first base. Pre-season reviews missed that. So sue them.

Mike Pelfrey dipped into 2009's 10-12, 5.03 performance and pulled out a 9-1, 2.39 exhibition so far in 2010. Whoops. Didn't have that.

Jonathan Niese was certainly on the early spring radar screen, but bets on rookies always have to be hedged, right Matt Wieters?

The Grapefruit League roster included train wrecks Oliver Perez, Elmer Dessens and Gary Matthews, Jr. After a few painful looks, Jerry Manuel has minimized their participation. D'Oh! Couldn't have predicted that.

In short, the Mets today aren't the team that broke camp in April. Nor, likely, are most others. The only constant in baseball is inconsistency, which makes pre-season predictions largely academic exercises.

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Word was floating around, as the Pirates sunk in the NL Central like Blackbeard in cement shoes, that manager John Russell and GM Neal Huntington would be jettisoned because of the team's poor performance. Anyone who believed (or reported) this needs a psych eval.

Neither Russell nor Huntington is being paid to break Pittsburgh's string of futility this year. They inherited a patient with strep throat, a broken leg, a bleeding ulcer, elbow tendinitis, diabetes, an ingrown toenail and bilateral plantar fasciitis. Their charge will require time, tender care and lots of patience before he recovers, and any attempt to send him home prematurely will delay his ultimate recovery.

Management in the Steel City gets this and recently revealed that contracts for Russell and Huntington had been extended through next year. There will be a reckoning for this administration, but it's not now. So stop looking at the Pirates' box score unless you've got the 2012 newspaper. 

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Reports, including mine, of the baseball death of David Ortiz have been greatly exaggerated. I revert to my original projection for Ortiz: he will be a diminishing asset, but an asset nonetheless this year. 

No really, that's what I said.

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Don't Believe the Tripe

If you purchased a fixer-upper, would you put new double-paned, super-insulated windows into sagging window frames or would you fix the wall first? Would you consider the resplendent brass faucets a useless luxury for a dented aluminum sink in a rotting counter top? Might you sell the hot tub to pay for a shower insert that would prevent further molding?

This is the situation facing the management, specifically the president and general manager, of the Pittsburgh Pirates. They will never make the playoffs with this team, notwithstanding two or three decent 31-year-old players. The Jack Wilsons and Freddy Sanchezes (Sanchezs? Sanchezs'? Sanchemen?) might help the Pirates win 70 games this year, but they're not going to contribute to the plan for a winning team in 2012.

So when you hear sports talk radio dingoes braying about the Pirates selling off their best parts, remember that Frank Coonelly (president) and Neal Huntington (GM) are trying to develop a franchise, not win 70 games this year. That fans in the Steel City haven't had a rootable ballclub for 17 seasons is immaterial to Coonelly and Huntington, who joined the club after the '07 campaign. Their job is to tear down the dilapidated eyesore and construct something habitable, and that's not going to happen this year or next.

Whether the Pirates have reeled in any usable parts from their offloads of Xavier Nady, Nate McLouth, Ian Snell, Tom Gorzellany, Adam Laroche, Wilson and Sanchez in the last two years is another matter. Huntington has snagged his trading partner's top three prospect in almost none of the deals. But as a scout with the Indians he helped recruit a constellation of stars (that has largely failed to produce) in Cleveland.

Time will tell whether the trades the Pirates have made were the right ones. But we already know that trading guys at the top of their value for young players is a strategy for future success, and that's the only kind of success Pirate fans can hope to have.
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