In one of the more personally amusing incidences of online post-scheduling this winter, I wrote a preview of the Pirates’ off-season for The Hardball Times that went live on Wednesday morning, hours before the club finalized a contract with Nate McLouth, signed Erik Bedard, and traded for Yamaico Navarro. These sorts of things are unavoidable, of course, but it’s quite amusing to be because in re-reading the entire piece this morning, I’m not entirely sure if it makes me come off as prescient or short-sighted.
That’s because I spend the bulk of the article more or less bemoaning the Barmes and Barajas signings and worrying that the Pirates will plug their remaining holes at first base and in the rotation in similar, lateral fashion, but then close with this:
Pittsburgh won 72 games in 2011 and entered the offseason with a ton of holes to fill after declining Maholm’s, Doumit’s and Cedeno’s options. They’ve worked on remaking the roster, but Barajas and Barmes are hardly the players who are going to transform the Pirates into contenders. They still have work to do, especially in the rotation, and they have both the payroll flexibility to add free agents and some assets to trade, depending on the route they want to go.
Most likely, though, the Pirates are simply working this winter to provide a decent framework in hopes that the young players who failed to step forward in 2011 finally do so in 2012 …
It’s easy to get caught up in the The Pirates were a 65-win team masquerading as a 72-win team and they dropped Maholm and Doumit and Cedeno and if they don’t get X WAR from their catcher and X WAR from their shortstop and X WAR from their pitching acquisitions and X WAR from first base, they’ll be lucky to be a 70-win team again and man, those wins aren’t coming from Barmes or Barajas and now they’re interested in Francis and Cook and … thinking during the offseason, while losing sight of the real goal of the offseason.
The real goal is that second sentence that’s clipped up there: to create a team around McCutchen and Walker and Tabata and Alvarez that can succeed if the young players flourish. It’s what they tried to do last year and to the front office’s credit, it worked for part of a season. They took a rotation that was just completely awful in 2010, added James McDonald last in that season, rebuilt Charlie Morton from the ground up, signed Kevin Correia, and went into spring training with seven pitchers they were relatively confident in. When Brad Lincoln got hit by a line drive in spring training and Ross Ohlendorf hurt his shoulder, they didn’t have to trade for Hayden Penn or Dana Eveland and they didn’t have to call up Brian Burres or Chris Jakubauskas. Jeff Karstens ended up being a better band-aid than anyone could’ve expected, but the reality is that the Pirates weren’t trying to go into 2011 with the Phillies’ rotation. They were trying to go into it with a rotation that could give them five or six innings and turn a lead over to the bullpen three or four times a week.
That was what they got from that rotation, more or less, and for a while they got even more than that and they rode that to first place along with a superstar first half from Andrew McCutchen. The Pirates got pretty much nothing from the position players they added last winter, though, so the whole thing inevitably collapsed on itself because Pedro Alvarez and Jose Tabata were hurt and not producing and Neil Walker faded early and Andrew McCutchen faded late and it all went up in a massive tower of flames so blinding that it wiped that weird, cautious optimism of June and July completely from memory.
What else can you do but learn from your mistakes? As I wrote on Wednesday, the Pirates built a rotation in 2010 that turned out to have depth, but not a ton of talent. There just wasn’t any way that they could sustain what they did early in the year. With Ohlendorf pitching (and not pitching) his way to a non-tender, Maholm leaving, Morton’s hip injury, and slow development from Lincoln, Owens, Locke, Morris, and Wilson, that creates quite a problem for the Pirates and it’s why I’ve thought that the rotation is one of the Pirates’ biggest concerns this winter. So what have the Pirates done? They went out and got Erik Bedard, who brings talent that’s currently unmatched in their rotation. If that’s the only move they make, I don’t know if it’ll be enough, but they’ve been conntected to a lot of pitchers this winter and that makes me think that maybe they’re not done at one. They appear to be interested in two pitchers who’ve had success in Japan, and I’m guessing that they’re still in on Jeff Francis, who can at least eat up some innings if health isn’t an issue. Nothing’s done yet, of course, but we could be looking at a huge rotation makeover this winter that results in James McDonald and Charlie Morton being the third and fourth best starters instead of the first and second.
If that is, indeed, Huntington’s plan for this offseason — and remember that it might not be and that I’m just reading between the lines here — it would certainly cast Barmes and Barajas in a new light. If the Pirates are overhauling the rotation, they don’t necessarily need improvement over last year from Barmes and Barajas, so long as they get players better than Mike McKenry and Chase d’Arnaud. They’ll still need improvement from Alvarez and Tabata and preferrably Walker, but they were always going to need that to have any sliver of hope in 2012.
It’s possible the Pirates are done wheeling and dealing for the winter, of course, in which case their success would be hinged on Bedard’s health, Barmes, Barajas, Nate McLouth, and whatever Yamaico Navarro becomes. That could obviously be another ugly off-season for the Pirates. The point, though, is that it’s hard to judge any off-season moves in isolation. It’s always a larger project. Seeing the Pirates go hard after Bedard and extrapolating from there has shifted the way I’m thinking about this winter quite a bit. Let’s see how things go from here.
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