After swapping Brad Lincoln for Travis Snider last night, I’m guessing that Neal Huntington has fired most of his major trade deadline bullets. There was some thought amongst Pirate fans (not any actual rumors connected to this, just speculation after the Snider trade) last night that Huntington may now flip Starling Marte in a bigger deal since he has another young outfielder with upside, but I don’t see that happening. My guess is that the Pirates are planning on going forward with a Marte/McCutchen/Snider outfield because that’s a young outfield with crazy high ceiling and a metric ton of potential.
That doesn’t mean that Neal Huntington is going to sit on his hands between now and 4 PM. The Pirates can use another reliable big league reliever with Brad Lincoln gone; Bryan Morris is certainly a viable internal option to replace Lincoln (it’s possible they can bring Morris up and not even notice Lincoln’s gone in the short term), but the Pirates really could use a true LOOGY (left one out guy) for their stretch run. They could trade Kevin Correia, though after McDonald’s struggles on Sunday and the Cubs’ bombing of Bedard last night I feel like he may have more value to the Pirates internally than in a trade, where he probably won’t fetch much. It’s also possible that they try to trade for a shortstop, because, well, you know.
Here’s how we’ll do the deadline today: any rumors that I see will go into this post, so you can keep it open and just refresh it. Actual trades will get their own post. Once the dust has cleared, I’ll do a roundup this evening.
9:36 AM UPDATE: Jon Heyman says the Pirates will probably be focused on relief pitching today, which seems like a safe bet. On the other hand, Neal Huntington has been like a ninja with the Rodriguez and Snider trades (the Snider trade was particularly out of the blue last night), so who knows?
11:24 AM UPDATE: Heyman says that there’s still a 50/50 chance that Chase Headley gets dealt today and he puts the Pirates as one of the five teams still in on him. Picking up Headley in addition to Snider … would be quite a shocker.
1:06 PM UPDATE: Not much on the trade front for now, but we do know that Daniel McCutchen will replace Brad Lincoln on the roster tonight. This is not the reliever I would’ve picked, but there are a couple of possible explanations. One is that the Pirates don’t have a long man available with Lincoln gone and Correia and Resop burned the last two nights. Another is that maybe Kevin Correia is about to be traded. A third is that the Pirates think that Daniel McCutchen is the best option to replace Lincoln. I hope it’s not the third one. In any case, this also means there will be a corresponding move to make room for Snider, whenever he joins the club. That probably won’t be tonight, so the Pirates have a bit of time.
3:04 PM UPDATE: Ken Rosenthal says the Pirates are close to getting Gaby Sanchez for Gorkys Hernandez and their competitive balance draft pick.
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