Subtitle: What, exactly, have the Pirates accomplished this offseason?
If I were to say that I thought that the Pirates’ move this winter were underwhelming, that would be among the nicest things said about how Neal Huntington has spent his winter. Late last month, Charlie at Bucs Dugout has said that this offseason reminds him of Dave Littlefield’s Drive for 75; last Friday, Jeff Passan absolutely ripped into the Pirates, calling their winter (among other things) Misguided In-Limbo Spending and making some allusions to Littlefield himself; finally, today Dejan Kovacevic used the first real post on his new blog to ask if the Pirates have improved at all this winter and he concludes that they really haven’t.
Personally, I can’t say that I love anything the Pirates have done this winter. Correia probably represents a marginal upgrade on Zach Duke at best and he certainly could flame out. Matt Diaz should make a decent platoon partner for Garrett Jones in right field, but Lastings Milledge already provided that service with considerably more upside and at a lower price. I think there’s also a decent shot that Diaz gets much more playing time than he deserves, which won’t help the club at all. Lyle Overbay’s glove should help some and I think there’s a chance he’ll hit better in the NL Central than people expect, but I really would’ve liked to see John Bowker get a regular shot at playing time.
Still, I can’t get myself worked up about these moves. I understand the Littlefield comparisons, but I feel like they’re a little off the mark here. The quintessential Littlefield offseason was prior to 2006, when he went out and dumped $12 million on Jeromy Burnitz and Joe Randa to play positions that the Pirates already had filled with internal options that were better than Burnitz or Randa. Freddy Sanchez ended 2005 on a tear and began 2006 backing up Randa for reasons that no one really understood. Craig Wilson tore the cover off of the ball from 2001-2005, but the Pirates’ ownership hated him for various reasons so comical that Kevin McClatchy and co. seemed more like a 1930s pulp supervillian than an actual major league general manager.
The moves the Pirates made this offseason certainly have a short-term slant to them, but the players directly affected are guys like Bowker, Milledge, and Charlie Morton/Brad Lincoln. All four of those guys have had their problems at the big league level and while I’d like for them to have more of a chance with the Pirates, I just don’t see taking playing time or cutting them as Littlefield-type moves. It’s possible that I’m fooling myself here, but it just doesn’t feel like the same thing to me.
I doubt we’ll ever know the full truth of the situation, but there’s a good chance that it just wasn’t an option for the Pirates to open up 2011 with a $35 million payroll. We know the Marlins got reprimanded for their extremely low payroll last year and the Pirates haven’t been all that far ahead of them the past few seasons. If you make the assumption that the Pirates had to spend money this offseason, their options were limited. How do you add payroll and improve the team and not cripple your team four years in the future? It’s not easy to do in the Pirates’ position.
Maybe I’m equivocating here. If I ever do think the Pirates are headed back onto the path they were on in 2006 and 2007, I’ll probably pull the plug on this blog and scale back my Pirate fandom in a huge way. I don’t want that to happen, but Lucy can only pull the football away so many times before you give up, you know? Maybe that’s happening and I don’t want to see it just yet.
I don’t think it is, though. And I think that’s because the question that DK is asking — if the Pirates have improved this offseason — isn’t quite the right question. The Pirates got better last year when they replaced Aki Iwamura and Andy LaRoche with Pedro Alvarez and Neil Walker. They got better when they put Jose Tabata in the lineup every day. They got better when they traded for James McDonald. They really were a bit better in the second half of the season last year than they were in the first half, even if their record doesn’t reflect that. If they’re going to be a lot better in 2011 than they were in 2010, it’s going to be because of Alvarez and McCutchen and McDonald and Tabata and Walker and Ohlendorf and Morton, not because of anything Huntington did in the offseason. That would’ve been true even if they’d managed to lure Adrian Beltre or Jorge de la Rosa to Pittsburgh whether or not the media narrative would’ve painted it that way.
Like I said, I don’t really think the Pirates have had a great offseason and I do kind of wish they’d gone about things a little differently or maybe a little less conventionally, but I’m just not sure that their offseason represents a deviation towards the Drive for 75 or that it’s been that awful for the club. At least, I hope that’s the case and I’m not just being optimistic.
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