A couple of years ago, Baseball-Reference added a cool feature to each team’s Franchise Encyclopedia pages; 20 pictures of the 20 greatest players in each franchise’s history by WAR. If you go to the Pirates’ page, here are the first 13 faces you’ll see:
- Honus Wagner
- Roberto Clemente
- Paul Waner
- Arky Vaughan
- Willie Stargell
- Max Carey
- Wilbur Cooper
- Babe Adams
- Barry Bonds
- Fred Clarke
- Ralph Kiner
- Bob Friend
- Sam Leever
Wagner, Clemente, Waner, Vaughan, Stargell, Carey, Clarke, and Kiner are all Hall of Famers, and Bonds was the very clearly the best player of the late 1980s and early 1990s even if you leave out discussion about what happened to him after he left Pittsburgh. This is one hell of a group of baseball players, not just Pittsburgh Pirates.
If you look one name further down, you’ll find Andrew McCutchen and his 38 WAR as a Pirate. McCutchen, as you know, is signed through 2018, by which point he will have almost certainly cracked the top ten (Fred Clarke is at 46 WAR) and could end up as high as five (Stargell is at 57 WAR, which seems like an unlikely peak for ‘Cutch given the way that WAR scores his defense, though I hate to think anything is beyond Andrew McCutchen’s reach).
This all confirms something that you probably already knew: Andrew McCutchen is already one of the best players in the history of the Pittsburgh Pirates. I would argue that he’s one of the most consequential, as well; the Pirates as we knew them when he joined the team were in one of the darkest stretches in their history (which says something, given the 1950s and the 1980s), and McCutchen has far and away been the best player on the team for a revival that’s sent them from the bottom of the NL to the second best record in the senior circuit over a three year period.
We are, however, quickly approaching the point in his career in which we start to contemplate what comes next. As mentioned above, his contract takes his Pirate career through 2018, and that means that this winter was a logical place for the, “What are the Pirates going to do with ‘Cutch” discussions to start.
These discussions are depressing. Extensions signed years before contracts end tend to look really bad in hindsight; the Ryan Howard deal in Philadelphia was a disaster before the extension even began to manifest itself and presumably SOMEONE in Detroit is horrified by the thought of paying Miguel Cabrera between $28 and $32 million a year for the next eight years. The same goes for the Brewers and the thought of what the Ryan Braun extension, which manifests this year after being signed in 2011, might hold for them (it’s a more reasonable ~$100 million when compared to Cabrera, but Braun’s last three years have not been great and he’s not getting younger).
McCutchen is coming off of a year in which his play was significantly hampered by an injury for the first time in his career; his knee injury kept his offensive stats suppressed until early May, and defense rated even worse by advanced metrics than in prior seasons (it’s never scored particularly well), possibly due to a first step hampered by the knee injury. It’s no secret that I’m a huge Andrew McCutchen fan that thinks the guy is capable of almost anything, and I think that it’d be irresponsible for the Pirates to agree to pay him in 2019 starting in the spring of 2016. That means it’d be almost impossible for the Pirates to extend him; either he keeps playing at a very high level and is priced way out of the Pirates’ range, or he declines and isn’t worth the money to the Pirates. There are scenarios in which McCutchen plays for the Pirates in 2019, of course, but they’re improbable enough that it doesn’t seem worth it to waste time thinking about them today.
This is, of course, not to say that I think McCutchen is washed up as a player; he is not. On May 6th of last year, McCutchen went 1-for-4 with a single and dropped his OPS down to .571. On May 7th, he went 3-for-4 with a double, two runs scored, and an RBI. Like a light switch, he was on. He would stay on. From May 7th until the end of the season, he hit .313/.425/.528, more or less exactly in line with (or, arguably, slightly better than) the .320/.405/.530 he’d averaged over the three seasons preceding last year.
What all of this talk about McCutchen and his knee and his long-term future does do, though, is put a clock on the Pirates. Up until their loss to Jake Arrieta last October, it felt like the Pirates had all the time in the world. The Pirates, as a franchise, might. The Pirates, as a particular collection of players, do not. For me, at least, that’s where some of the consternation over this winter comes from.
Photo by Jared Wickerham/Getty Images
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