There’s not much going on on the Pirate front tonight, but John Perrotto has tweeted a few updates about the Pirates that help clarify a few things we’ve already heard. He says that the Pirates’ interest in Nate McLouth is because they want him to be a fourth outfielder and because they’re not certain Gorkys Hernandez is ready for that role. That’s about what I figured when I first read about the Pirates’ interest in McLouth last night. It makes sense to want to see Hernandez for another year at Triple-A before bringing him up and McLouth wouldn’t be the worst bench option in the world. It’d also give the Pirates room to trade Hernandez to anyone looking for a young, defensively sound centefielder, but that’s neither here nor there.
Perrotto also confirms the Bucs’ interest in Mark DeRosa, which was first reported by Ken Rosenthal. It doesn’t sound terribly likely he’ll end up with the Pirates, though, because the Pirates want him on a minor league deal to provide competition for Pedro Alvarez, but DeRosa isn’t interested. That dovetails pretty well with what Neal Huntington told the press today about having a contingency plan in place in case Pedro craters out again. Given DeRosa’s recent injury problems, I wouldn’t give him more than a minor league deal, but if the Pirates got him for that little it’d be hard to complain about it.
That’s about all for the night, and if anything it’s more confirmation that there’s not much exciting that’s going to go on on the Pirates’ side of things this week.
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