With tonight being the deadline to tender arbitration-eligible players contracts, the Pirates and Brewers have swapped Jose Veras and Casey McGehee, two guys who seemed like likely non-tenders before midnight (it was first reported by the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel's Tom Haudricourt, but it's been quickly confirmed by the teams).
It's ... an interesting swap, to say the least. Veras was simply going to be the odd man out in a Pirate bullpen full of right-handed options with the emergence of guys like Chris Leroux and Jared Hughes and maybe even Bryan Morris last year. The Pirates seem intent on tendering contracts to Jason Grilli and Chris Resop before midnight tonight, so paying Veras was something they probably weren't going to do.
McGehee took forever to slog his way through the Cubs' system without ever really impressing anyone, then was claimed by the Brewers off of waivers after the 2008 season. He exploded in Milwaukee in 2009, hitting .301/.360/.499 with 16 homers in 394 PAs. He followed that up in 2010 with a .285/.337/.464 line. He hit 23 homers and drove in 104 runs, which won him the "Brewers MVP" award, even though his triple-slash line left quite a bit to be desired. He then completely tanked in 2011, hitting .223/.280/.346. You will likely hear people make something of his 63 RBIs, as if being able to drive in runs with guys like Braun and Fielder and Weeks and Hart hitting in front of him makes him a good hitter, but you should ignore those things because McGehee was miserable in 2011.
That said, this seems like a decent risk to be taking, especially since they were about three hours away from getting nothing at all for Veras's beautiful curveball. McGehee has at least hit a little bit in recent history and he gives the Pirates quite a bit of flexibility in the infield. He can play third if Pedro Alvarez tanks again, he can play third if Pedro Alvarez hits well and can't play defense, he can function as an acceptable utility guy that we know has hit in the Majors in the past, unlike Josh Harrison and Yamaico Navarro, he could probably play first base if it came down to it.
All of this presupposes that he'll bounce back at least a little in 2012, which isn't a given, but I suppose getting a guy that's under 30 (McGehee turned 29 in October) with a bit of upside is better than nothing at all.
Umm, wow. Holy crap. I don't even know what to say. The NL Central is gonna look awfully different pre-June in 2012.
no commentsOne of my all-time favorite Partial Season Pirates, Octavio Dotel, signed with the Detroit Tigers today. That gives him an MLB-record 13 career teams and since he seems to be happy about it, I'm happy for him. I'm so happy for that I made a Sporcle quiz honoring his achievment and wrote a longer post about it over at the Outside Corner.
I'm not sure if I actually care about this, or if I'm really bored on Friday afternoon.
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.
With the Winter Meetings wrapping up now that the Rule 5 draft is over, we can probably assume that the Pirates are dont making moves, at least for the next few days. So, for now, let's take a breath and count the players that the Pirates have added to the 40-man roster since the regular season ended:
- Erik Bedard
- Jeremy Hefner
- Rudy Owens
- Duke Welker
- Justin Wilson
- Rod Barajas
- Clint Barmes
- Matt Hague
- Jordy Mercer
- Yamaico Navarro
- Gustavo Nunez
- Starling Marte
- Nate McLouth
Less than half of those players were added from within the organization to protect them from the Rule 5 draft. And I'm almost certain the Pirates aren't done yet. This is going to be a heck of a different roster when 2012 begins.
no commentsThe Pirates made a few selections in the Triple-A phase of the Rule 5 draft today, and a couple of them are interesting picks worth keeping an eye on. The most interesting one is Aaron Poreda, who you may recognize as the White Sox' first round pick in the 2007 draft and a main component of the Jake Peavy trade in 2009. He's since completely lost his control in the Padres' system, but he's a big lefty capable of huge strikeout totals. That makes him probably worth a roll of the dice, even if fixing him is likely a very long shot at this point. The Pirates have had quite a bit of success in the past curing young pitchers with control problems, so why not give it a shot, you know?
They also picked up two more catchers (!), Francisco Diaz from Philadelphia and Charlie Cutler from St. Louis. Diaz doesn't seem all that interesting, but it looks to me like Cutler can hit a bit, though he only played 72 games in 2010 and 69 in 2011, which probably indicates some injury problems.
You can check out the full Rule 5 results here: for what it's worth Baseball America calls Gustavo Nunez "one of the highest profile players" drafted this year and they say that he "has a better chance to stick than most Rule 5 picks."
Albert Pujols is an Angel for the next 10 years, for the price of $250-$260 million. I'll be happy that he's no longer in the division to terrorize the Pirates, but I can't pretend like I'm overjoyed to see a great player leave the team that made him great. The Angels also signed CJ Wilson today, which means that they spent more than a third of a billion dollars on baseball players in one day. Good thing that baseball reined in spending by fixing big bonuses in the draft.
Sarcasm aside, both of these moves are interesting to the Pirates because it makes it almost certain that Kendrys Morales will either be traded or non-tendered and since the Angels have Wilson, Jered Weaver, and Dan Haren, there's a good chance that Ervin Santana will hit the trade market as well. If Morales is healthy, he'd be a nice fit at first base for the Pirates with (I think) two years of arbitration left and his injury concerns may make him a bit cheaper in a trade, though his availability and the other dominoes falling at first base may change that quickly. The Pirates would likely have to move quickly on him, though, which means no more waiting around for Derrek Lee. Mark Trumbo is probably an option, too, but given that he's young with a ton of control left and that he's basically got Brad Eldred's profile at the plate (his minor league OBP is just .330, his OBP last year was a paltry .291), I'd guess he's going to cost more on the trade market than he's worth to a team like the Pirates.
Santana, meanwhile, would just be a solid pitcher to pick up at a fairly reasonable cost ($11 million this year, $13 million option next year) to plug into the rotation/trade at the deadline. I wouldn't give up much in the way of prospects for him, but David Todd's idea of dangling Joel Hanrahan ... well, it can't hurt to ask, right?
As it turns out, the Pirates released Ross Ohlendorf last night to create a space on the roster to make a Rule 5 pick today, not to make room for Yamaico Navarro. The roster spot for Navarro will apparently be cleared sometime this afternoon.
The draft is in about five minutes. I'm busy this morning, but I'll try to get this post updated as quickly as I can. Until then, you can check out Vlad at Bucs Dugout's great preview of the draft because the Pirates' pick will likely come from his list of players.
UPDATE (10:12)- The Pirates picked Gustavo Nunez, a shortstop from the Tigers organization that Baseball America calls a "highly skilled defender with a highly questionable bat." They just missed Pedro Ciriaco so much! They also apparently lost Brett Lorin to the Diamondbacks, which is a little disappointing, but not really all that surprising.
ANALYZING UPDATE: I'm not sure I understand this pick a whole lot. Nunez is 23 and only just made it to Double-A part way through 2011. He had a decent line at Advanced-A this year (.304/.368/.431), but he was pretty brutal there in 2010 as a 22-year old, hitting .222/.263/.281. He was also pretty rough at Double-A after his promotion in 2011, hitting .215/.282/.289 in 34 games. He shows flashes with the bat from time to time that might make him a bit more interesting if he were already in the organization, but I find it hard to believe the Pirates are going to be able to hide him on the 25-man roster all year with Clint Barmes and Yamaico Navarro and Chase d'Arnaud and Jordy Mercer all being more deserving of playing time at this point.
When the news broke this afternoon that the Pirates were no longer in on Wilson Betemit and that they'd made their roster moves to accomodate Erik Bedard and Nate McLouth without releasing Ross Ohlendorf, my gut feeling was that it was a sign that there was another move in the offing. It turns out that was a good instinct: the Pirates traded Brooks Pounders and Diego Goris tonight to Kansas City for infielder Yamaico Navarro, and it appears that the corresponding move to create space on the 40-man will be to release Ohlendorf.
Navarro's just turned 24 and he's spent a bit of time in the big leagues with both the Royals and Red Sox in 2010 and 2011. The Pirates interest likely comes in the form of his decent walk-rate and .430 minor league slugging percentage, even though his big league numbers aren't great. He does indeed have an interesting minor league profile and you can see why a team in search of a utility guy would be interested in him over, say, Wilson Betemit. I honestly don't know much about Navarro, but my gut reaction is that if the Pirates are going to acquire a utility guy, I'd rather have a 24-year old with some potential than another re-tread. To be honest, I need to do some more reading on Navarro before I really make any sort of judgment here.
On the other end of the deal, Pounders is a tough pitcher to peg. The Pirates picked him out of high school in the second round of the 2009 draft, when he was billed as a big guy without an overwhelming fastball, but with much better secondary stuff than the average high schooler. He pitched well with West Virginia this year, but it was mostly in relief. As far as I've read, I don't think he's done much more than crack the low-90s with his 6'4"/260ish pound frame, which may be why he's on the list of pitchers to be dealt. To be honest, there's going to be a huge logjam of pitchers in FSL Bradenton when the 2012 season opens and Pounders is way, way down on that depth chart (he's behind, by my calculation, Cole, Taillon, Cain, Von Rosenberg, Fuesser, and Dodson, just off the top of my head, though I guess Cole may start 2012 in Altoona), so it makes sense that he'd be the one to be traded for some big league depth. I will, however, miss having a player named "Brooks Pounders" in the Pirates' system.
I've got a busy end of the day here, but there are a few things we need to catch up on here:
Rob Biertempfel tweets that the Pirates are out on Wilson Betemit, which means that the utility infield job is still open. Ian Stewart, here we come!
Meanwhile, the addition of both McLouth and Bedard means the club has two roster spots to open up and so they've DFA'd both Jason Jaramillo and Pedro Ciriaco (I'm having trouble figuring out exactly who reported this first, but it's all over the place by now). I'm pretty surprised to see that Ohlendorf wasn't one of the people DFA'd, because I'm almost positive he'll be a non-tender in the coming days or weeks. It's possible he'll be removed to make room for a Rule 5 pick at the end of the meetings. In any case, it's odd that they'd DFA these two with the non-tenders coming up, so maybe we should read this as a sign that more moves are coming in the near future.
What a day, huh? I guess I was wrong when I said the Pirates wouldn't be doing much at these meetings.
