The Pirates and Orioles agreed on a trade to send Travis Snider to Baltimore tonight in exchange for minor league lefty Stephen Tarpley and a player to be named later. On its face, this seems like a bit of a strange move for a contender to make: even if you assume that Gregory Polanco was going to start in right field over Snider (he was), Snider is a relatively cheap, relatively good bench asset for a team to have, especially after he started to come into his own in 2014’s last couple of months. You can, of course, argue that the Pirates won’t miss Snider, because between Polanco, Andrew Lambo, Jose Tabata, Josh Harrison’s ability to play the outfield, and Jung-ho Kang in the infield, it’s certainly possible that the whole 2015 season will come and go and the Pirates will have either not had a need for Snider or didn’t miss him thanks to their generally good outfield depth.
That means that it’s not hard to read this trade as a sell-high on Snider; he’s 27, his projections don’t look great, Tarpley is a reasonably interesting young lefty, and I read Huntington’s comments about “two” prospects as an indication that they know who the PTBNL is and that it’s a decent player. And yet, you don’t have to watch much baseball to understand how important a fourth outfielder can be and so something feels just a little bit off about the Pirates sending a known-quantity fourth outfielder to another club for nothing but low-level prospects. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad trade or that it won’t work out or even that it’s worth getting upset over, it just means that it’s a move that fits the 2012 Pirates better than the 2015 Pirates. Rob Biertempfel did some tea-leaf reading and thinks that maybe the move is a precursor to something else, but for now that’s just speculation; we’ll have to wait and see.
Anyway, the last thing worth saying here is that Travis Snider was a whole lot of fun to watch as a Pirate, even if he didn’t really pull everything together until the second part of 2014. He always looked like loved the hell out of being a Major League Baseball player, and so his biggest moments (and there were a few, particularly his pinch-hit homer that won the Pirates their 81st game in 2013) always felt turned up to 11. He was a part of two Pirate playoff teams, and he was a big part of last year’s fantastic stretch run. I really can’t do anything but wish Snider the best in Baltimore; he’s going to get a chance to play regularly that he wouldn’t have gotten from the Pirates, and I hope he makes the most of it.
Photo by David Maxwell/Getty Images
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