Tonight, Ross Ohlendorf went out and made it clear why people like me who say he'll probably end up in the bullpen in the long run might be entirely full of crap. On most nights, it seems like he lives and dies by his fastball/sinker/whatever and his off-speed pitches are secondary pitches that he has very little faith in to get hitters out. Tonight, he mixed in his breaking pitch (Bob Walk and Greg Brown called it a curve but it shows up as a slow slider on Pitch FX) and changeup in beautifully with his fastball, catching Cub hitters off guard the whole game in seven shutout innings. I was particularly impressed with the velocity change between his fastball and breaking pitch (about 10 mph), which really seemed to disarm hitters on more than one occasion. The last time I remember him mixing his off-speed stuff in so well was his early season start against the Marlins. If he can do this more consistently, we really might have something in him that we didn't count on.

Ted Lilly was almost as good as Ohlendorf, but Freddy Sanchez had a great game with two RBI hits and scoring the first run from second base on a strikeout/wild pitch in the fourth. The bullpen was great as well, with Grabow getting two big strikeouts after a rare Jack Wilson error really put him in a pinch int he eighth.

In the end, I know a lot of players are upset over the Morgan trade and to be honest, I would be too, if I was in their place. Nothing quite heals that pain like a nice, easy shutout win, though. Remember that there was a point in time where people were upset that the Penguins traded Colby Armstrong because he was Sidney Crosby's best friend on the team and supposedly a great clubhouse guy. I know this situation isn't exactly the same, but man, doesn't that seem silly now?

The 24-man Pittsburgh Pirate roster takes the field tonight against the Chicago Cubs. Ross Ohlendorf goes against Ted Lilly as the Pirates try to keep going in what's gotta be a pretty rough stretch for the guys on the field. I certainly like the Morgan trade and what it does for the organization, but seeing your friends traded can't ever be easy.

Anyways, if you're looking for Morgan/Milledge stuff, it's all down below.

I see that the trade is confirmed now, so I thought I'd share my thoughts quickly before the gamethread goes up. What this trade comes down to is this: a rebuilding team can never turn down a trade that offers a net talent gain as big as this one does for the Pirates. I'm not trying to knock Nyjer Morgan here, either, but Morgan is what he is; he's a great defensive player that doesn't offer much at the plate. In left field, that's not really an option for any team. Some people will try to spin this trade as speed for power, but Morgan's speed on offense is incredibly overrated. His OBP hovers around .350 and he's been thrown out in 10 of his 28 stealing attempts.

Lastings Milledge is a risk for any team at this point. He's hit OK in his Major League career, but questions about his attitude have overwhelmed everything. The thing to remember is that if he turns out to be a bust and we give up on him in two years, we still ventured very little to get him here in the first place. Morgan isn't a long-term starter in left field; he was fun to watch, he was funny, and he probably would've been awesome to grab a beer with, but he wasn't a long-term answer. Milledge, quite simply, might be, and that's a risk that we have to take.

For everyone that's worried about Milledge's character, remember one of the most crippling moves that Cam Bonifay made as a Pirate. He called Jose Guillen up way too early, got frustrated when he was immature, and shipped him out for cents on the dollar. Eventually, he became a solid every day player. Milledge is easily as talented as Guillen was and we're on the receiving end of the deal this time. Now, instead of being the future of the Mets or the savior of the Nationals, he can slide into Pittsburgh behind Andrew McCutchen and Pedro Alvarez in the spotlight. The Pirates will give him a chance to play and he's not going to be expected to save the world here.

Maybe Milledge will be a star and maybe he won't, but I'm glad that we're the team that's going to find out.

Link. Updates posted here if they come.

Quick updates. I'm getting a lot of traffic, so I'll post the link to what I wrote over the weekend about this deal; I like it if it happens. And if you're looking for up to the second information, keep an eye on the PBC blog and make sure you're following both Dejan and Ed Price (shameless fellow FanHouser plug, I know, but Price is usually all over stuff like this) on Twitter.

DK UPDATES: Sean Burnett and Joel Hanrahan would be included. Not official yet, but sounds awfully close.

2:43- That last post by DK has been updated to say that the trade is agreed to in principle. I have to go to the airport to pick up my brother, so I won't be around a computer for a couple hours. If this does happen, I'll honestly miss Morgan; he was an awesome guy to have around from a fan's perspective. That said, he's almost 29 and the situation the Pirates are in dictates that they have to roll the dice on Milledge, I think. I'll have a much longer take later.

I have to run to a seminar, but DK is reporting that the Pirates shipped Eric Hinske to the Yankees this morning for Eric Fryer and Casey Erickson, with Garret Jones replacing Hinske in Pittsburgh (minor league stats at the links). I'll try to add some more to this later.

UPDATE: This isn't a bad deal for us. I think Jones and Hinske are basically a wash, and while Fryer and Erickson aren't prospects, Fryer did kill the ball in the Sally League last year (as a 22-year-old, which is a year old for that level), and Erickson has good K/BB levels, but gives up a ton of hits. You're not getting real prospects in return for Hinske, so if Huntington sees anything at all in these guys that intrigue him, it's not a bad deal.

Playing on the theme that I've been trying to follow with Nyjer Morgan and Zach Duke and the Pirates' defense of late, Wilbur Miller writes at Only Bucs today about how valuable Jack Wilson is to the Pirates and that they should probably consider keeping him around. He also does a nice breakdown of where the Pirates' defense improved this year, pointing out that much of the improvement has come in the outfield, which I'm mentioning because it reminded me of this post I wrote over the winter and now I wish I'd hammered away at that point a little more, because it would make me look a lot smarter today.

Ridiculous self-involvement aside, I don't actually disagree with Wilbur's opinion on Jack, but it raises a lot of questions that I don't have answers for and that I think are worth asking. Specifically, I wonder where the balance between offense and defense is for a team like the Pirates. Right now, we're playing a Morgan/McCutchen/Moss outfield that is way, way worse at the plate than the Bay/McLouth/Nady trio was at this time of the year last year, but way, way better in the field.

This year's Pirates, while not a contender by any means except for the nature of the NL Central this year, are a much better team at this point in the year, despite what the record might indicate. We're currently 35-41, while last year we sat at 36-40 through 76 games. This difference is that this year's Pirates have scored 334 runs and allowed 330, while last year's club had scored 370 and given up 413. As Wilbur points out, the improvement of the pitching staff, both in players that are pitching better and players that no longer pitch for us, is a big reason for this improvement, but the defense has certainly played a hand. What's interesting to me is that the defense has only played as big of a hand as they have because of the style of our current pitching staff.

Let's assume for a second that the Pirates' current run differential is indicative of the sort of team they actually are at the moment. This is a big leap; we don't know how the pitching staff will hold up over a whole year, we don't know how Andy LaRoche or Andrew McCutchen will fare over a whole year, we don't know how the two young catchers will hit over a full year. It's still a leap we'll take for the purpose of this thought experiment. We'll assume that right now, exactly as configured (including Ryan Doumit on the DL), the Pirates have the talent of (take a deep breath) a .500 team. We can theoretically bring this whole team back man for man next year, save Adam LaRoche, who can be swapped out for Ryan Doumit at we'll assume a negligible effect to the team (they're very similar hitters in terms of OPS+, LaRoche is better in the field but that probably matters very little at first base).

How far can they ride this exact group of guys? Where is there room for improvement? We'll say that Andy LaRoche might improve as a hitter at third base, so we could pick up a few runs there. Andrew McCutchen might improve in center field, but it's unlikely that his total performance over the year will outweigh what he and McLouth have done combined thus far in 2009, because of his hot start. Brandon Moss can probably hit better in right field, and the bullpen might be a little better with Chavez and Meek being a year old, Dubee being involved, and dropping one of the starters to the 'pen when Brad Lincoln arrives, which should strengthen the rotation.

If we make all of those assumptions as well as the assumption that no one falls off in any way (and be sure that these are a lot of huge assumptions) it's probably not out of the question that the Pirates could make a crazy, Rockies-in-2007-esque run to the playoffs next year by getting hot at the right time. I'm not saying this is going to happen or that I expect it to happen, but I suppose if it did I would be saying things like, "crazier things have happened."

More than likely, next year's Pirates will be very similar to this year's Pirates, better than the Littlefield era efforts, but still a flawed team that relies heavily on pitching and defense to get by. The leaves us with the questions that necessarily have obvious answers. Where do you go to improve this team first? What positions does offense take precedence over defense at? The pitching staff, while better this year, still has room for improvement. Do you improve the pitching with guys like Lincoln, hoping that a staff that gets more strikeouts will rely less on defense? That's actually a pretty standard model for building a team, which means that it wouldn't be nearly as cost effective as trying to exploit an undervalued niche, like defense is like now, to gain an advantage. Of course, in two years, defense won't be undervalued and something else will. Rebuilding a baseball team is not easy.

Ian Snell wants you to know that when he specifically pointed out things that Eric Kratz did that he liked on Sunday and made veiled references that those things weren't done so well in Pittsburgh, he didn't actually mean any insult to the Pirates' catchers. Because he's never, ever made it seem like he thought a catcher was to blame for one of his bad outings. Snell's agent would also like you to know that he thinks Neal Huntington is a swell guy doing the best he can out there.

If this were a crappy reality show about ruining raising a family, we'd be barrelling towards a "Very Special Episode" in the near future.

I am suddenly strongly regretting my decision to use my "we just got dominated by a good pitcher" post on Greinke yesterday. Where Greinke was good yesterday, Harden was absolutely dominant today, suddenly reminding everyone of the guy the Cubs got from the A's last July. We must of course consider the the opponent when discussing his dominance, but he looked really good tonight.

On the positive side of things, I thought Zach Duke pitched very well tonight and certainly didn't deserve to get saddled with a loss. Andy LaRoche also added two hits and seems to be coming out of a long dry spell with five hits, including two triples and a double, all of which were to the opposite field and hit off of the wall, in the last three games after hitting .212/.295/.282 in June before these three games. Nyjer Morgan also rapped out three hits and actually has his OPS over .700 now.

On the negative side, it seems pretty clear that hitters have a book on Andrew McCutchen now and he's probably going to struggle over the next few weeks. He did manage a single tonight, which was his first hit since his walkoff against the Indians last Thursday, but he looked a little overmatched at the plate tonight for the fourth game in a row. This is in no way a criticism of him, but this is how things work with a 22-year-old making his first run of any sort in the big leagues. I'm interested to see how he handles this first stretch of adversity, just like I'm interested to see if Andy LaRoche can really pull himself out of an extended slump during the season. These are the important things in a season like this for the Pirates.

After nearly a full day of talking about Ian Snell, we've finally got a baseball game to discuss. The Cubs come in to PNC tonight for an early-week three-gamer and here's a funny stat: if the Pirates sweep this series from the Cubs, they'll be ahead of them in the NL Central standings. There might be a better chance of that happening than you think; the Pirates are 21-14 at PNC this year while the Cubs are 14-24 away from Wrigley.

Zach Duke gets the start tonight and I think with a win tonight, he starts to solidify his hold on the Pirates' All-Star slot this year. Rich Harden, who's having a bizarro year this year (he's healthy hasn't had any arm trouble, but not any good) goes for the Cubs. Looking at the Cubs' lineup, with Milton Bradley and Geovany Soto struggling mightily, Ryan Freel in center, and Gregor Andres Blanco at second base, well, I can't believe this was my pre-season World Series pick.