Besides whatever happens with Pedro Alvarez, maybe the most important thing for the Pirates this spring is how quickly Charlie Morton recovers from his hip injury. By all accounts, he seems to be ahead of schedule on his rehab and he pitched in today's B-game at Pirate City. Kyle McPherson, Rudy Owens, and Gerrit Cole are pitching as well. Tim Williams is at Pirate City liveblogging, so it's worth your time to head over to his site and check it out.
With Andrew McCutchen under contract for the forseeable future, eyes have understandably turned towards Neil Walker. In terms of service time, Walker's got 1+ years of big league service, but that "+" is big enough that he'll almost certainly be a super two after 2012. That means he'll go to arbitration a year early and end up with four years of arbitration instead of just three. If the Pirates are going to sign him to an extension, this means it'll probably happen either this spring or in the immediate aftermath of the 2012 season, so that the arbitration process never really starts with him.
In the wake of McCutchen's deal yesterday, Walker told Michael Sanserino that he wants to stay in Pittsburgh but that he also wants a fair deal. I suppose the implication there is that he won't take a "hometown discount," which is fine because I think that his hometown status is actually one of his stronger bargaining chips. MLB Trade Rumors took a look at what Walker might command if he were to sign an extension and figured that it'd take somewhere around $20 million to buy out his four arbitration years and in the $8 million neighborhood for every year after. Instinctively, that strikes me as just about right and I'll always default to what Tim Dierkes thinks in a situation like this one.
The bigger question, though, is the one that Chris Mueller asked me when I was on his show discussing Andrew McCutchen's contract last night (convienient podcasting link here, for those who missed the interview): Why should the Pirates want to extend Neil Walker? Is the only reason we want him extended because he's from Pittsburgh? The basic answer I gave was that Walker's a useful player and that getting some kind of payroll certainty for all of these young players as they reach arbitration is a non-insignificant thing for the Pirates. That's certainly true, but that's the sort of answer that I feel like as a TA, I'd mark down for partial credit and then underline the part of the test instructions that say, "Please provide the best answer to each question."
The reality for Walker is that if he wants an extension now, he's going to have to sign for less than he probably thinks he's worth. Even though the team knows his arbitration years will start in 2013, they've got him under control for five more years and I'd have to think that they just want to see more of him before committing any kind of serious long-term money to him. Remember that just a few years ago in 2009 he was almost completely lost at the plate in Triple-A with a .311 OBP and that in 2010, he was a man without a position in spring training before his bat came around. His glove in the infield is still a question mark, even though he pretty clearly made some big strides at second base last year, and he struggled at the plate for big chunks of 2011.
This isn't to call Walker's usefullness into question: FanGraphs had him as a three-win player last year and Baseball-Reference had him down for 2 1/2 wins. At FanGraphs, that makes him the ninth most valuable second baseman in the big leagues and the fourth most valuable in the NL. That's a good player, that's a guy worth having in the lineup every day, that's a guy worth extending. That's not an All-Star, though, and given Walker's age, not really a player that I'd consider a building block.
The difficulty in working out an extension is just that we don't really know enough about Neil Walker as a Major Leaguer to accurately project what kind of player he's going to be going forwards. He's obviously better than the guy we saw flounder at Triple-A in 2009, but it's not clear just how good he is. Is he the player that we saw through 2010? Was his improved plate patience that he occasionally flashed throughout 2011 something that will continue to grow? Were his struggles in May and June and August of last year indicative of something more ominous coming? Where did his early-season power surge come from last year and where did his it go after May? In short, it's possible that Walker could develop into an Ian Kinsler-like hitter (probably with less home run power), because we've seen flashes of it since his call-up. It's also possible that the inconsistencies we saw in 2011 are something he won't ever get past and that that level of performance represents his ceiling. I'm not saying that an extension is impossible here, just that at this juncture in his career it's likely that Walker thinks of himself in the Future All Stare Second Baseman role and wants to be paid accordingly, while the Pirates would probably want to be more conservative until they see more from him
To bring it all the way back around, though, there is a good reason that the Pirates should sign Walker to an extension before the 2013 season, and that's his status as a super two. Four years of arbitration means that his salary will eventually escalate pretty high, and Walker strikes me as the type of guy that could end up being overvalued by the arbitration system. Because Walker has solid pop and because the Pirates have some hitters that could potentially be effective top-of-the-lineup guys (Jose Tabata, Alex Presley, Starling Marte -- note that there's some projection involved here, too), I could see him batting third and racking up RBIs, despite not really improving on his performance from 2011. If that keeps happening, I could see the arbitration system paying him quite a bit more than he's worth, which could create some difficult decision-making for the Pirates. Walker is obviously popular with Pirate fans and I'm not here to argue that he should or shouldn't be; he's a good player and he's a hometown guy, of course he's popular. I will say that while I'm all for this front office's emotionless approach to just about everything, I'd be awfully careful to avoid a situation where Walker's arbitration number gets high enough that the team needs to consider trading him, even though he's a productive every day player. That's where the benefit of a Walker extension this spring or next fall really comes it; it keeps Walker from getting into a Garrett Jones situation where he's obviously useful, but his usefulness will be outweighed by his price within a year or two of arbitration.
All things considered, I expect the Pirates will extend Walker unless something goes terribly wrong for him in 2012, I just think that it won't happen until maybe November or early December. That will hopefully give the team another 150 games worth of data to figure out what kind of player Walker is and what kind of player he'll be, and that sort of knowledge is invaluable in determining what he's worth.
I don't really like writing about spring training games, especially when I can't watch them. There's so much that happens that just doesn't mean anything that writing blog posts feels like an exercise in futility to me. I don't mean anything against the guys that recap spring training games; it's just not something that I like to do.
THAT SAID, the Pirates/Orioles game was on MLB.tv tonight since the Orioles televised it on MASN and I watched quite a bit of it and so I have some random observations. Some of them are related to the game, some of them aren't.
I'll be honest; ever since Rob Biertempfel's report last week that the Pirates were working on an extension with Andrew McCutchen and that McCutchen was looking for a deal in the neighborhood of the deals received by Justin Upton and Jay Bruce, I've been expecting a deal to get done. I understand the need to negotiate, but if the Pirates had let a deal go unsigned with McCutchen making reasonable demands I would've been pretty upset and angry.
Still, when I saw the tweets start coming across at midnight last night that the Pirates and McCutchen had actually agreed to a deal, I got a jolt of electricity that I'm completely unaccustomed to as a Pirate fan. Andrew McCutchen is the Pirates best player and most valuable asset and now, the Pirates can keep him in Pittsburgh until 2018. Having a minor league system full of prospects is an important thing for the Pirates; having Andrew McCutchen signed into his free agency years is huge. Prospects are an unknown quantity, McCutchen has almost three years of good-to-great big league performance under his belt. In every year, he's improved a different part of his game. He's only 25. He's undoubtedly the Pirates' best asset and now they have him locked up.
One of my favorite aspects of this deal is the commitment that it requires from both sides. That seems like an obvious statement when we're talking about 6-7 years for the player and $51.5-$66 million for the team, but I mean on an even deeper level. The Pirates have been saying since even before McCutchen arrived in 2009 that they were going to be willing to break out the checkbook when the young players on the team warranted it. There was no real reason to not believe them -- they've certainly kept their word when it comes to spending on the draft and spending internationally -- but there was also no evidence to back them up. McCutchen is the first real star that this management team has had from the beginning of his career, the first real test of the promise to pay to keep young players in Pittsburgh beyond their league-mandated six years. When it came down to it, the Pirates could've tried to use McCutchen's age relative to Bruce and Upton to negotiate him down. They didn't. They came through.
It's easy to say that this deal is a no-brainer for the Pirates, but let's not pretend like the club isn't assuming some kind of risk here. The last young player the Pirates signed to a long extension into free agency years was Jason Kendall in the winter of 2000. It's easy to say with hindsight that it was an awful deal and the Pirates should've known better and it was just another example of Cam Bonifay being awful at his job, but that wasn't the truth in 2000. When Kendall signed, he was heading into his 27-year old season and in his five big league seasons he hit .314/.402/.456. The most similar player to him through the age of 26, according to Baseball-Reference, was Hall of Famer Mickey Cochrane. He was a legitimate hitting machine and he was a catcher. Obviously catchers have durability problems and the Pirates failed to acknowledge that, but Kendall's long descent down into mediocrity and beyond has clouded everyone's memory of his early years. From 1998-2000, Kendall slugged .479 and was on a 39 double/15 homer per 162 games pace. He was a much more complete hitter than the punch-and-judy leadoff guy that we all remember from 2001-2004 or the absolute void of offense everyone else remembers from Oakland, Chicago, Milwaukee, and Kansas City. Shortly after Kendall signed his extension, he tore a ligament in his thumb, tried to play through it, and was never the same offensive player ever again. His extension is remembered as one of the worst deals in team history, and it exists as a cautionary tale for small market teams everywhere about locking up too much money in any one player.
The same thing could happen here. A large portion of McCutchen's value is tied up in him being a center fielder, but if everything goes according to plan he probably won't be a center fielder starting in 2013 or 2014 because Starling Marte will have moved him over to left field. That's fine; his bat has enough pop and he's well-rounded enough that it can play in any outfield position. We've already established that having a good glove in left is a necessity for the Pirates in PNC Park. Carl Crawford (particularly in his time with the Rays, of course) is a great example of a guy with traditional "center field" skills that has plenty of value as a left fielder. Even if the risk is small, there's still a chance that his power doesn't develop the way it seems like it's going to at this point and the Pirates end up with less than they've bargained for in a key offensive position. It's obviously a risk I think is worth taking, but it's a risk for the Pirates nonetheless.
On McCutchen's side, he's now almost certainly assured that if he becomes a legitimate superstar (something that's probably as likely as not at this point) that he won't hit the free agent market until after his 31-year old season. That means he gets one big contract and that there's a chance it'll be a Jason Bay big contract instead of a Carl Crawford big contract. Obviously McCutchen will still be far richer than most of us could ever be in our wildest dreams (heck, he'll probably make more money in his career than most of us will in ours combined), but he is making a sacrifice to -- as far as he can tell today -- remain a Pirate for nine years instead of six. By all rights, he could've asked for more money than Bruce and Upton got (he's been better through his first 2+ years than either of them were), but he didn't. Obviously he gets some assurances out of the deal (he's now a rich man, no matter what happens, even if he has a career-altering disaster), but it's hard to see the terms of this deal and not conclude that McCutchen wants to be a Pirate. Think of all of the Roy Oswalts out there that have dismissed the thought of being a Pirate out of hand and now consider that a guy with his whole career ahead of him is choosing to stay with the Pirates for longer than he has to. The only reason that happens is if he thinks there's a reason for him to stay.
Part of the reason I'm excited today is purely selfish. I love watching Andrew McCutchen play more than any player on the Pirates since pre-injury Jason Kendall. Seeing him fly around the bases or close a huge gap on a fly ball or stick his foot in the bucket and yank a home run into the left field bleachers with one swing and drive a ball into the right-center cap with another, these are all things that make me catch my breath when they happen in a game and they're all rolled into one player. If Andrew McCutchen played for another team, he'd be one of the guys in the league that I actively seek out to see play in person, in the same way that my dad would always make sure to get Expos tickets from his season ticket draft in the early days of PNC Park just because we both wanted to see Vlad Guerrero play. As a Pirate fan, we have more time to watch him today than we did yesterday. In itself, that's a great thing.
When the Pirates traded Nate McLouth in 2009 to make room for McCutchen, one of the things that was said ad nauseum both on this site and elsewhere was that it was a deal the Pirates had to make because the next Pirate playoff team was going to have Andrew McCutchen on it, but it wouldn't have Nate McLouth. As time has moved on and the front office's rebuilding plan has taken some detours, I was starting to wonder if that would be true. With Gerrit Cole not arriving until sometime in 2013, at the earliest, and Jameson Taillon probably being either on the same schedule or behind a year, I started to wonder if hoping the Pirates would be a true contender before McCutchen hit free agency was a realistic dream. Now, the window will stay open for a little longer. Now, we know that the front office is willing to put their money with their mouth is beyond the draft.
It's true that this is the sort of thing that the Pirates have to do to stay competitive, but that doesn't make this sort of extension an uncertainty. The Pirates and McCutchen made it happen, though, and now it's time to focus on what's important: making sure that Andrew McCutchen sees the playoffs in a Pirate uniform.
From Michael Sanserino at the PG:
Source: #Pirates and Andrew McCutchen agree on a 6-year contract worth $51.5 m with a club option for $14.75 m.
— Michael Sanserino (@msanserino) March 5, 2012
When word leaked out earlier this week that McCutchen's camp was looking for a deal in the neighborhood of the deals that Jay Bruce and Justin Upton have, I figured that had to be a good sign. McCutchen is worth that kind of money; frankly, the Pirates would have to be pretty hard-headed and tight-fisted to try and haggle him down from that level and really, my biggest question for a while has been if McCutchen wanted to sign this kind of deal. The fact that he was willing to sign away two years of free agency meant that the Pirates pretty much had to match his asking price, so long as it was reasonable.
A few days later and now it looks like they will. Sanserino's report pegs the deal at almost exactly the same as Upton's and Bruce's, but the Pirates managed to get an option year as well. We already knew that McCutchen would be a Pirate through 2015, now we've got certainty for 2016 and 2017, too. It's hard to see how this is anything except great news.
Really, this is what McCutchen is worth, and the Pirates are giving it to him. We've seen the Pirates come through on their promise to spend more on the draft, but seeing them commit real money to real big leaguers is really, really good to see. Honestly, it's more relieving than anything. Even without one pitch thrown in the 2012 season, 2015 has been blinking in big red numbers in my head. Will Cole and Taillon be ready by then? Will Bell? What if we get to 2014 and we still don't know exactly what we have in those guys and other prospects? Would the Pirates have to trade McCutchen then? Would they have to consider it sooner?
Now, we know they've got a couple more years. Let's hope that the Pirates make the most of them.
UPDATE: Here's the full PG story, from Sanserino and Bill Brink. And here's the FanGraphs analysis, which includes the phrase, "Pittsburgh fans, dance in the streets."
Yes, we'll all be sick of spring training games by Monday. But not yet. Pirates and Blue Jays play today at 1:05 in Dundein. The audio is available on the Pirates' website.
Let's go Bucs.
(image courtesy of @bwzimmerman)
Spring training games start tomorrow, which means that we're at an exciting but excruciating juncture of the off-season. It's almost time for baseball to start and there are some things to watch during spring training games, but really what we've got now is a month of people fine-tuning before the real start of the season in April. For the Pirates' part, there aren't many things of importance at stake this spring. Their entire outfield is set, almost all of their starting infield is set, three-fifths of the rotation is set and the other two spots will be determined by injuries that shouldn't have long-term consequences either way, not performances. That said, there are a few things of import going on this spring, so let's talk about the things that I'm particularly interested in seeing shake out before the season begins.
1. Pedro Alvarez
This is one of those situations where I know we're looking for something, but I have no idea what that something is, exactly. Spring training stats don't mean anything, so a bad spring for Alvarez could be fine if he's working on something and improving as March goes along. By the same token, a great spring for him could be meaningless if he's feasting on Double-A fodder and just sticking balls high into the currents at McKechnie. I don't know what I'm really looking for here, just something. To see him jump all over a first pitch fastball and destroy it. To see him keep his hands back on an 0-1 curveball and hit it 500 feet if its a hanger. Something. Anything.
2. The last two roster spots
This one will relate back to #1 and the team's confidence in Alvarez. If we do some quick math, the club will probably open the season with five starters, seven relievers, three starting outfielders, two catchers, we know who three infield starters will be (Walker, Barmes, Jones), and we can probably put Alvarez into the fourth spot. Nate McLouth and Casey McGehee almost certainly have bench spots locked down, which brings us to 23 players. One of the final two spots will go to a utility player that will almost certainly be Yamaico Navarro, Chase d'Arnaud, or Josh Harrison. Harrison can't play short, so it'll probably be Navarro or d'Arnaud. I'm a little interested to see Navarro play, just to be able to take stock of what the Pirates have. If he gets a spot over d'Arnaud, is it because the Pirates want d'Arnaud to get regular time in Triple-A or because they don't think he's a big league player? Who gets the last roster spot? Do the Pirates carry five outfielders or will they stick with four because Garrett Jones is on the roster? Who would the fifth outfielder even be at this point, Brandon Boggs? If Nick Evans or Matt Hague make the roster with McGehee and Alvarez, should we read that as a low level of confidence in Alvarez? Obviously we won't see everything that goes into these decisions, but at least the spring training performances and how the Pirates are using these players should let us take some stock into what the team is thinking and how they're evaluating their own players.
3. The right-handed relief logjam
If the Pirates are taking seven relievers north with them, we can be certain that two will be lefties (Tony Watson and Moskos/Slaten/maybe Jo-Jo Reyes). Joel Hanrahan is a lock for one of the five right-handed spots and Jason Grilli and Chris Resop are awfully good bets, too. With AJ Burnett likely not coming back until March, we can put Kevin Correia into a rotation spot, which means that either Brad Lincoln or Dan McCutchen will take a long relief spot. That leaves one bullpen spot for Evan Meek, Chris Leroux, and Jared Hughes. Is Meek healthy enough to make the team? Does Chris Leroux have a leg up because he's out of options? Will the club use Watson or Leroux or maybe even Hughes, all of whom started in the minors or in winter ball, as the long relief and let McCutchen go? That last idea makes sense to me, and at this point I think I'd take Leroux and Hughes (who I like quite a bit and see as the dark horse to win the "Who will replace Joel Hanrahan after he's traded to the Red Sox on July 31st" sweepstakes that will unofficially be taking place this season) north and leave Meek behind. It's also possible that Burnett's injury and the state of Morton's recovery might make the Pirates put together a bullpen that keeps as many arms in-house as possible. They'd have to DFA McCutchen and risk losing him if he doesn't make the team, so they might wait until Burnett and Morton are healthy to do something like that.
4. Are we seriously going to be doing this Kevin Correia thing again?
All I'm saying is that if I were making the decisions, I'd be very seriously considering eating Correia's salary and putting Lincoln in the rotation until everyone's healthy. It's possible we end up with both guys in the rotation anyway if Morton's not ready to go on Day 1, but yeah, I'm not sure how long I'd be sticking with Correia if he looks the same this spring as he did last July.
A.J. Burnett has been diagnosed with an orbital fracture of his right eye...He will undergo surgery tomorrow in Pittsburgh.
— Pittsburgh Pirates (@Pirates) March 1, 2012
Are you serious? Being a Pirate fan is the worst.
THE WORST.
AJ Burnett bunted a ball into his eye socket this afternoon while taking part in Clint Hurdle's annual bunting tournament.
AJ Burnett bunted a ball into his eye socket this afternoon while taking part in Clint Hurdle's annual bunting tournament.
AJ Burnett bunted a ball into his eye socket this afternoon while taking part in Clint Hurdle's annual bunting tournament.
AJ Burnett bunted a ball into his eye socket this afternoon while taking part in Clint Hurdle's annual bunting tournament.
This is A Thing That Actually Happened. This is A Thing That Can Only Happen to the Pirates. This is A Thing That I Actually Kind of Expect to Happen to the Pirates.
There's no actual indication as to how bad the injury is. The story linked above makes it seem like he was up pretty quickly and laughing about it, but he's also going back to Pittsburgh for further evaluation.
