It’s a bit of a slow news day, but Jon Heyman tweeted last night that the Pirates are still interested in Derrek Lee, with the implication being that the acquisition of Casey McGehee and tender of Garrett Jones would not keep the Pirates from re-signing Lee, should he be interested.
That’s a relatively innocuous tweet, but from it I think we can make a couple of decent conclusions. One is that the Pirates are not terribly confident in Garrett Jones as an every day first baseman. That makes sense, both because of his glove and his limited bat there. I don’t know that Lee would add a whole lot at this point (see: this post) and now that they have Casey McGehee and Yamaico Navarro and even Nick Evans I really don’t see why the club would still be interested in Lee, since I think that he really adds depth more than anything and the Pirates have quite a bit more first base depth than they did when the off-season began.
The other thing that this means is that the Pirates are still planning on spending a bit more money. Which means that I hope they spend it on a starting pitcher, and not Derrek Lee. It’s good to know that Neal Huntington may have more on his shopping list before spring training starts, though.
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