When I was a kid, my best friend and I used to play Madden ’93 non-stop. He was awesome at the game and while I wasn’t all that bad, I could never beat him. I’d even lose when he let me pick an all-time best team while he picked the typical 1993 NFL fare. Every so often, I’d get a lead at halftime and think I’d have a chance as we entered the third quarter, but I’d choke it away every time. The odds against me were just too long. I had to be perfect on every play, both on offense and defense, for the entire game to have a chance at winning and I just wasn’t good enough at the game to pull it off. I loved it every time I came close — I’d talk trash and whoop it up like I always won and knew I was going to win again — but that’s because that’s just what friends do.
This is pretty much how I’ve felt about the Pirates the last few weeks. It’s awesome that they’ve been in contention as long as they have, but the degree of difficulty for them to stay there is enormously high. They have to keep being perfect, and they have to keep being perfect against teams that are just better equipped to contend than they are. The Pirates had a good run where they ran their record up against some bad teams, but it’s been awfully hard for me to believe they’re going to stay there as the schedule gets tougher. Still, I made the conscious decision a few weeks ago to enjoy the hell out of this team whereever it takes us, because we Pirate fans haven’t had many opportunities to enjoy baseball past April at any point in the last 18 years. That’s what I’ve been doing, without worrying much about how sustainable this run is or what it means for the future of the team.
This past week has been tough, though. We can say what we want about Clint Hurdle’s bullpen usage or extra inning games or calls by umpires, but the Pirates just lost seven times in 10 games against three of the National League’s best teams. That’s a reality, just like their record before these past ten days was also a reality. The Pirates aren’t really equipped for a playoff run this year nor are they close enough that a big trade or two could’ve patched up the holes. They’ve got some serious questions, both for this year and for the next three years. I’ve tried not to think about it, but the people that write that the Pirates need to embrace this season because they might get much worse in 2012 are right. It’s not a slam dunk that they’ll be bad next year just like it wasn’t a slam dunk that they’d be bad this year, but with some real questions about the future of the offense and the pitching staff being far from ready for prime time, the Pirates could easily be a 70-win team in 2012.
And so I sit here the morning after the trade deadline, and I can’t help but wonder if the Pirates blew it yesterday. The Rangers paid huge dividends to the Padres and Orioles for relief help. What was Joel Hanrahan worth in a trade? The Tigers paid quite a bit to get Doug Fister and David Pauley. Teams clamored around Wandy Rodriguez but didn’t want to pay his full salary. What was Paul Maholm worth to a contender? Chris Resop? Jose Veras? For the whole of the Neal Huntington era, the only way to pull decent prospects in a trade deadline move was to deal with a team like the Yankees or Dodgers that either didn’t care about the future or didn’t think about it. In the past week, teams have been giving up prospects left and right to make their moves, which drove the market up on marginal guys like Jason Kubel and Carlos Pena and Josh Willingham and left the Pirates either scavenging for guys like Lee or dumpster diving for guys like Ludwick.
Don’t get me wrong: the Pirates are just 4 1/2 games out of first place with plenty of games against the Cardinals and Brewers down the stretch to matter. They’re overmatched, but they’re not impossibly buried. Acting like a buyer without digging deeply into the farm system, trying to shore up the holes that they had and hoping for the best is an acceptable course of action in this situation. It’s a long-shot, sure, but sometimes a long shot is your only shot.
Still, I can’t help but weigh just how long of a shot this is against what the Pirates could’ve gotten by trading assets away now. Is this essentially a drive for 82? Is that best for the long-term future of the franchise? Was it done to pacify the huge influx of fans with the worry that it was hard enough to get fans to the park before the team traded away productive players while in the middle of a nominal pennant race? Was it done to keep the team from being absolutely hammered by the national media that suddenly adores them? Do any of these factors besides the how the team develops in the long-term really matter?
I don’t know the answers to any of these questions. There would certainly be an outrage among a sector of the Pirates’ fan base had they traded Maholm and Hanrahan and who knows who else over the weekend and some people may have felt so betrayed that they would’ve been harder to lure back to the ballpark a second time. The Pirates do need a larger season ticket base and they’ll likely sell more tickets this off-season, even if they fall out of contention in the coming weeks. And the team would’ve been absolutely ravaged on MLB Network and ESPN for selling while still technically in contention and the Pirates’ run as everyone’s second favorite team would probably be over.
Again, I’m not sure the Pirates did the wrong thing here by trying to do what they can do to stay at least on the fringes of contention. There are off-field benefits to this strategy that could help the team in the long-term and with some (OK, most likely a lot of) luck, maybe they fall backwards into a playoff spot. But as the guy that’s always said that being a viable long-term contender is more important than winning 82 games, I can’t help but watch this team get shelled by the Phillies and Cardinals and see how far they really are from contention and wonder if a team that needs bats in the minor leagues and can always use more minor league arms wouldn’t have been better served by restocking the cupboard one more time.
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