Pittsburgh Pirates Wake Up Call: Time to be aggressive

In our daily Wake-Up Call, we get you ready for the day with a complete look at all things Pittsburgh Pirates.

By all accounts, it has been an excruciatingly slow hot stove season, and not just for the Pittsburgh Pirates.

Many point to the most recent collective bargaining agreement — more specifically, the luxury tax — as a factor creating a slow market. While the highest spending teams are usually the ones that have to worry about staying under the luxury tax, it is often those same clubs that will set the market.

The Pittsburgh Pirates don’t really care about any of that. The club will operate in much the same manner as it always has, and it has to. The team must come as close as possible to maximizing value on every signing or trade to remain competitive in the current MLB landscape.

And that is exactly why the Pirates would be best served to get a little more aggressive than they have been previously.

To be clear, I’m not talking about the trade market. That is an entirely different animal, as we have seen with the seemingly endless Gerrit Cole trade rumor permutations. Rather, it is with the small pieces — the left-handed reliever, the fourth outfielder — that the Pirates can find value in. Rather than wait for the market to be set, the club could reach out to these pieces, perhaps a Xavier Cedeno or Jarrod Dyson, and aggressively make offers. Players like security, and many want to know where they will call home in 2018. The Pittsburgh Pirates are likely to look for these pieces regardless of what happens with Cole, Josh Harrison or even Andrew McCutchen, so there is no need for the club to sit back and wait.

Free agent target profiles:

Here are links to the free agent target profiles we’ve recently done on Cedeno and Dyson:

• Cedeno
• Dyson

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