During the very first off-season that this blog existed, the Pirates tried to sign Bill Mueller. I’m having a hard time remembering 100% of the granular details, but what I can piece together from my old blog posts (holy cow — pretty much every stylistic flourish I used to use back then make me shudder) more or less matches my memory of the incident. The Pirates made Mueller an over far and away greater than the Dodgers and Giants were offering him, Mueller used the Pirates to play chicken for a couple of weeks to get a better offer from one of the two West Coast clubs, and once he determined he’d gotten their best offer, he left the better offer from the Pirates in the dust. I don’t want to retroactively assume motive, but Mueller must have figured that he had at least a couple of years left in his career (he didn’t: a degenerative knee condition limited him to 32 games with the Dodgers in 2006 and that was it for him) and there was no chance in hell that he was going to waste them on the Pittsburgh Pirates.
After the Pirates struck collusion-induced gold in 2003 with Reggie Sanders and Kenny Lofton, pretty much every off-season for the several years includes some kind of story like this. The Pirates desperately wanted to supplement their roster with free agent talent, but no free agent with anything at all left in the tank would dare take money from the Pirates, no matter how big the offer was. The only people the Pirates could lure to PNC Park were the people with no other options. During the endless parade of Burnitzes and Randas (both of whom were signed with the money designated for Mueller) through Pittsburgh, my dad would call PNC Park baseball’s “Elephant Graveyard.” It seemed like every year the Pirates would struggle to find someone to take their money, eventually dump it on someone who was obviously past their prime, and then watch that person disappear into the baseball ether after an awful year in Pittsburgh.
Things improved under Neal Huntington’s front office, but not so quickly that you’d notice. When the Pirates traded for AJ Burnett in February of 2012, it was a big deal that he didn’t void his limited no-trade clause to be traded elsewhere. Seriously, it was. The Yankees needed to deal Burnett to get his money off the books, but the Angels supposedly made a better offer than the Pirates did. The Angels were obviously a better destination than the Pirates in 2012 but they were on his no-trade list, and he didn’t waive the clause, even though the only other option was the Pirates. It’s been an unexpectedly wonderful ride ever since.
When Burnett was named to this All-Star team, the general consensus among baseball and the baseball media was that it was surprising that Burnett had never made an All-Star team before. With no disrespect meant to Burnett, it shouldn’t have been that big of a surprise. Before 2015, Burnett only had one season with an ERA+ of 120 or better (121 in 2002) and he’s only got five other years above 110. For the most part, Burnett’s almost always been a good pitcher, but almost never been better than that.
Almost never: the exception is his Pirate career. After a bounceback year in 2012, Burnett lead the National League with a 9.8 K/9 rate in 2013. He had a 2.80 FIP, easily the lowest of his career. He helped lead the Pirates to the playoffs for the first time in 20 years, and he started Game 1 of the NLDS. He left after the season for Philadelphia, of course, he came back, and now he’s having the best season of his career.
He’s having the best season of his career because the AJ Burnett that showed up in Pittsburgh wasn’t anything like the AJ Burnett that pitched in Miami, Toronto, or New York. Burnett was a notoriously stubborn pitcher for most of his career, but (and this is detailed in Travis Sawchik’s Big Data Baseball, which is highly recommended if you haven’t read it yet) when he came to Pittsburgh, he listened to Ray Searage and Jim Benedict and started phasing out his four-seam fastball for a two-seam fastball. Burnett had seen his ground ball rate drop quite a bit after his move to the American League in 2006 — his groundball percentage was under 50% in each of the four years before his trade to the Pirates, which was something that had only happened once previously. He started throwing a two-seamer, though, and he started working hitters inside, and his ground balls spiked to around 56%. When he went to Philadelphia they dropped right back to 50%. This year, they’re at 53%.
The performance is the main thing, of course — last year’s Pirates showed that even good teams have trouble getting 200 innings out of an average pitcher. This year’s Pirate team isn’t great through 88 because they have Gerrit Cole or Francisco Liriano or AJ Burnett, they’re great through 88 games because they have all three. Last year’s Pirates only got 51 starts out of Cole and Liriano combined, and they ended up leaning hard on Edinson Volquez. If all Burnett provided this year was depth, it’d be a huge boost to this Pirate team. He’s gone well beyond that, of course.
The intangibles are harder to quantify; as an outsider I hate speculating too hard on Burnett’s influence on the pitching staff or how his presence on the roster might have weighed on the minds of Russell Martin and Francisco Liriano over the winter between the 2012 and 2013 seasons. It seems clear to me that the young pitchers look up to him, and it looks equally clear to me that he relishes that role. What I can say is this: his decision to void his contract with the Phillies and basically demand his agent get him back on the Pirates isn’t anything that I thought I’d ever see. After all those years of free agents using the Pirates as a negotiating tactic or only taking the Pirates’ money because they had no other options, seeing a pitcher with something left in tank say Get me back to Pittsburgh because that’s where I belong gave me goosebumps.
The Pirates helped make AJ Burnett an All-Star. AJ Burnett helped make the Pirates a place people want to play baseball. Seems like a pretty good trade to me.
Photo by Jared Wickerham/Getty Images
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