I've already written quite a bit about Erik Bedard, both below and at the beginning of November, but now that it looks like a deal is happening I want to give the lefty his own post. You can check out his career stats here and get into the nitty-gritty here at FanGraphs, but basically Bedard is a fastball/curveball guy that can get a lot of swings and misses when he's healthy. The problem is that he's so very rarely healthy that he just signed a one-year deal with the Pirates. 

Without Paul Maholm, the Pirates' rotation entering this off-season was paper-thin. James McDonald and Charlie Morton, the only two pitchers that offer any sort of upside for the Pirates over their 2011 performances, both have their flaws without even considering how Morton's hip injury will affect him for 2012. Behind them, the rotation is mostly a mess of low-upside guys like Jeff Karstens and Brad Lincoln, no upside guys like Kevin Correia, and complete question marks like Rudy Owens, Jeff Locke, and Chris Leroux. That's why I hated letting Maholm walk so much: because the Pirates mostly have nothing, and Maholm is definitely something, even if he's a bit pricey for a known and unimpressive quantity. 

That means the Pirates have to do two things with their rotation this winter: add talent and add innings. The Pirates got plenty of innings last year from decent starters, and as a result the rotation was greatly improved over the 2010 edition. That said, there wasn't a ton of talent in the Pirates 2011 rotation and that certainly showed through at times. Swapping Jeff Francis with Paul Maholm doesn't really fix that problem, even if it more or less replaces the innings without sacrificing a ton of performance. Hoping that a rotation that couldn't really strike anyone out repeats itself as an effective rotation is a pretty dangerous bet for a team like the Pirates to make. 

This is exactly why Bedard makes sense for the Pirates: he gives them something they don't have at all, if he's healthy, and spending money on this sort of risk is a better use of funds than signing another Kevin Correia. Bedard will probably get hurt at some point in the year, but even 130-150 innings from him will make the rotation much better than it would be without him and if he can postpone that injury until late in the year, the Pirates might be able to flip him for some value at the trade deadline. If he's not healthy, well, he'll still probably be as valuable to the team as Correia for about the same price. It's a risk, but it's one worth taking if the Pirates had any intention of making their rotation better in 2012. 

That said, it'd be foolish to think that Bedard completely fixes the depth problem the Pirates have in their rotation. The Pirates are paying solely for Bedard's talent: actually relying on him to throw more than 100 innings is probably foolish. A McDonald/Bedard/Morton/Karstens/Lincoln rotation early in the year could pretty quickly turn into McDonald/blech/meh/yikes/ew with injuries and poor performances. Which means that I wouldn't be surprised if the Pirates went out and tried to pick up one more starter, likely a guy like Jeff Francis, just to put in the rotation with the idea that he'll eat some innings up and give a relatively stable performance, Maholm-style. With Bedard in the mix, Francis becomes a bit more palatable (to me) because the Pirates aren't really looking to him for anything more than innings. 

I don't know if that's what the Pirates are thinking at this point, but I guess it wouldn't surprise me. Either way, Bedard has the ability to make the Pirates a lot better, and that's not something that can be said of most of the signings we're used to seeing the team make. That alone makes it worthwhile, even with the unignorable injury risk.  

Marc Brassard of Ottawa's Le Droit just tweeted this: Érik Bédard, de Navan, va signer un contrat d'un an pour 4,5 M $ plus primes avec les Pirates de Pittsburgh ce PM, a appris le Droit. My french is rusty (translation: I took spanish in high school, I speak no french) roughly translates to "Erik Bedard, of Nevan, will sign a one-year contract for $4.5 million, plus incentives, with the Pittsburgh Pirates, le Droit has learned."

Le Droit is, per Wikipedia, the only francophone newspaper published in Ontario, which is where Bedard, a Franco-Ontarian, is from. Which is to say that I know nothing about it and so I can't say for sure if this is a reliable report, but there's plenty of reason to think that it is. 

If it goes through, this will be very good news. Will update as warranted.  

Big thanks to the Blitzburgh Blog for passing this along. 

UPDATE: Tim Dierkes says he's confirmed it.

With the addition of Jose Morales, the Pirates currently have a hilarious six catchers that are somewhere between the Majors and Triple-A, not counting actual prospect Tony Sanchez. They are, in alphabetical order, Rod Barajas, Jake Fox, Eric Fryer, Jason Jaramillo, Mike McKenry, Morales, and Wyatt Toregas. I have never seen such an acumulation of mediocre-to-sub-par catching talent in one place in my entire life and now the only thing I can think to do is to rank them all by offense, defense, scrappiness, and intangibles.

Let's go to the list! 

1. Rod Barajas

• Offense: 2 (relative to baseball in general), 7 (relative to the field). Barajas's offensive value mostly relies on the fact that he can occasionally hit home runs. PNC Park will almost entirely neuter this ability. But he's still better offensively than just about anyone else on this list! 
• Defense: Let's be honest, I don't know the best way to truly characterize catcher defense and you don't, either. All indications, though, are that Barajas is pretty good, both in the traditional ways that you can measure catching defense and the new ways to look at things like blocking pitches in the dirt. The Pirates have a pretty progressive statistics component to their front office, so I'll tell myself that he scores pretty highly. 
• Scrappiness: As a guy that played for both the Mets and Dodgers, he is barred from being referred to as "scrappy" under the Small Market Scrappiness Agreement, which first came about under during the resolution of the 1994/1995 player's strike. 
• Intangibles: The Pirates are paying him $4 million. That makes him go #1 if only for my sanity alone.  

2. Eric Fryer

• Offense: incomplete. Fryer has a career minor league line of .281/.372/.427, which is pretty good for a catcher, but he didn't get above Advanced-A until last year, when he was 25. He's barely got any experience above Double-A and he cratered in Triple-A last year after a brief stint with the Pirates. He can take a walk and he showed some power with Altoona last year, but his age at the level and the fact that he always seems to be blocked means that he's pretty much impossible to judge. 
• Defense: Same thing applies here, but everyone that's watched him play raves about him. 
• Scrappiness: He's from Ohio. OHIO. The name Eric Fryer just sounds scrappy. 
• Intangibles: Nicknamed Fryerbot by the McEffect last year, which is awesome. Young enough that he might not completely suck. I like him. 

3. Don Slaught

• Used to have an awesome mustache, was a glove-deficient line-drive machine.
• My nickname in the machine pitch league when I was eight was Sluggo, because I was our catcher and I was a line drive machine. I don't know if I was actually a line drive machine, but I tell myself I was. I probably wasn't: there was no base stealing allowed in machine pitch and since I was an eight year old and this was way back in the day at Hermitage Little League when there was no bridge between machine-pitch and Little League, which meant that there was a lot of nine and ten-year olds in machine pitch, they probably just stuck me there because they needed a catcher and called me Sluggo because I liked it and they were trying hide the fact that they were burying me on the field. 
• I might actually rather have the 2011 version of Don Slaught, whatever that entails, than anyone else on this list from this point onwards. To be fair, though, I was always a big Don Slaught fan. 

4. Mike McKenry

• Offense: In his early days in the minors with the Rockies he showed some decent pop and his minor league lines indicated at least an ability to take a walk. A relatively robust strikeout, total, is probably a decent indicator that he's unlikely to do much better than the .222 batting average (his BABIP last year with the Pirates was a dead-average .290), which means he won't hit much in the Majors. He did have that homer off of Marmol, though.
• Defense: Not enough of a sample size to really judge his advanced stats from last year, though his minor league reputation is strong. He was obviously better than Ryan Doumit, for what that's worth (NOTE: that's worth nothing). 
• Scrappiness: Mike McKenry is so scrappy (How scrappy is he?) that the Pirates are considering re-writing the team history books to refer to Phil Garner as "McKenry Iron." Mike McKenry is so scrappy (How scrappy is he?) that he could be a punt returner/wide receiver/running back/defensive back for the Patriots. Mike McKenry is so scrappy (How scrappy is he?) that people just assume that he was a punter for Nebraska. 
• Intangibles: Greg Brown loves him so much it makes my head hurt. But to counterbalance that, I started calling him Scrappy Doo last year and then he said on the scoreboard that Scrappy Doo is his favorite cartoon. Which means he might be a WHYGAVS reader. I'm sorry for all the mean things I've said about you, Mike. You're a much better catcher than I ever was. I was a Ryan-Doumit-level defender behind the plate after Little League, if we're being perfectly honest. Except that I could always throw out base stealers pretty well. 

5. Jake Fox

• Offense: He has 20 career big league homers, which I can tell you without even a Baseball-Reference search is more than everyone else except for Barajas on this list combined. Depending on how Fryer's career plays out, that will likely still hold true in 2050. But more seriously, the dude is like Brad Eldred. He can hit home runs, but he will strike out. 
• Defense: Calling what he does defense is akin to calling baseball hockey.
• Scrappiness: Guys with some pop that strike out a ton aren't generally allowed to be called scrappy under the Dave Kingman Corollary. 
• Intangibles: Played well enough in 2006 to convince some Cubs fans he was good, then hilariously dashed their hopes. 

 6. Jason Jaramillo

• Offense: Once hit a home run at a spring training game I was at. 
• Defense: Good, I guess?
• Scrappiness: Was acquired in a trade for Ronny Paulino, the least scrappy player in Pirate history. That gives him a scrappiness boost. When you consider that he's a Quad-A catcher, that makes him pretty scrappy.
• Intangibles: Lots of Pirate fans to pronouce his last name phoenetically, which drives me insane.

7. Jose Morales

• Offense: His major league numbers are, to this point, better than either McKenry's or Jaramillo's. It's an awfully small sample size, though, and his minor league numbers (.286/.341/.383) are bad. Also, he's played parts of ten seasons in the minors. That's never good. 
• Defense: On one hand, I say to myself that his defense must be good, because why else would he still be in baseball? On the other hand, he's listed as a C/1B, which is usually a sign of a catcher that can't catch. I know this because when I was 14, my coach moved me to first base because I couldn't really catch. 
• Scrappiness: Mostly, scrappiness is code for "untalented white guy." In order to combat this form of institutional racism, I will refer to Morales as The Scrappy Jose Morales, should he ever make the team. I mean, all Quad-A/aspiring back-up catchers who rely almost entirely on defensive reputation have to be scrappy, right? What else do they have?
• Intangibles: I don't know enough about this guy to honestly make a judgment.

8. Wyatt Toregas

• He wasn't a Pirate for a while, but now he is again! I just used an exclamation point in a sentence about Wyatt Toregas. This post is draining my sanity.

9. Brian Jeroloman

• Would be ranked higher due to his purportedly strong defensive abilities, but is no longer a Pirate because the Blue Jays re-claimed him on waivers like two minutes after the Pirates claimed him the first time. If the Pirates should ever re-acquire him, his nickname will be Hot Potato. 

While all of the baseball world had their eyes glued on Albert Pujols last night, the Pirates kept doing their own thing virtually undected by the rest of the baseball world. The best news, I thought, to come out of last night was Nick Cafardo's tweet that the Pirates are interested in Erik Bedard. Bedard is exactly the sort of high-risk/high-reward starter I want to see the Pirates after this winter. He'll always be an injury risk, but when he's healthy he's probably better than anyone the Pirates have in their rotation and the injury risk is the only thing that gives the Pirates a shot at him. 

In case you're not well-versed on Bedard lore, he was a promising young pitcher with the Orioles that had a huge breakout year in 2007, which resulted in the Mariners paying a king's ransom for him that winter. He spent most of his time in Seattle injured, suffering a torn labrum in 2009 that caused him to miss all of 2010, but he came back pretty strongly last year, making 24 starts and striking out 125 hitters in 129 1/3 innings to go with his 3.62 ERA for the Mariners and Red Sox. 

The danger, of course, is that Bedard is the sort of pitcher that when you see he pitched 129 1/3 innings, you say to yourself, "Hey! He was pretty healthy last year!" and really, that's not really impressive at all. He'll be 33 before the season starts, and so even with a pretty healthy year in 2011 behind him, he remains an injury risk. Still, he's a talented guy and he showed last year that he's still a talented guy, post-labrum surgery. A move to the NL could help him, and PNC Park is pretty friendly to left-handed pitching. I'm not convinced that Bedard would be all that interested in pitching for the Pirates since the Red Sox grabbed him at last year's deadline, though it's possible that other teams may want him on an incentive-laden deal and the Pirates could reel him in by guaranteeing him more money. It'd be risky to guarantee Bedard, say, $5 million, but honestly, I think that'd be a better use of funds than spending it on Aaron Cook. Still, I don't have my hopes up. 

The Pirates are also apparently moving close to a deal with catcher Jose Morales, according to Ken Rosenthal. Morales will be 29 before the season starts and he was drafted by the Twins in the 3rd round of the 2001 draft, spending his whole career there until moving to Colorado's organization last year. He's played 96 big league games over parts of four seasons and he's got a .289/.365/.344 line at the plate. My assumption is that it'd be a minor league deal, and then Morales would compete with Mike McKenry and Jason Jaramillo and Eric Fryer to be Rod Barajas's backup, which seems fine to me. It looks like he can at least take a walk now and then and his batting average isn't terrible, so I'd be perfectly fine with him backing up Barajas instead of McKenry or Jaramillo while we wait for Fryer or Sanchez to emerge. 

It looks like Nate McLouth's return to the Pirates is all but a done deal, as Ken Rosenthal is reporting tonight that the two sides have agreed to terms and only a physical separates this deal from completion. If McLouth hadn't once been a Pirate, I doubt this move would garner much interest. With Xavier Paul gone, the Pirates only have three big league outfielders and since Alex Presley is a bit of an unknown quantity and since Jose Tabata tends to get hurt a lot, they need someone else until they're sure Gorkys Hernandez is ready. Nate McLouth is "someone else." He had a couple good years a couple of years ago and he's been awful lately, but PNC Park can be friendly to lefties and he only just turned 30 and it's a one-year deal, so there's not really anything to get worked up over. 

Of course, McLouth is more than just some guy because he's an ex-Pirate. He was sort of the face of the "This Front Office Has No Clue What They're Doing" movement during the late Littlefield era when the Pirates couldn't find him regularly playing time in 2006 or early 2007. He had a fantastic breakout year in 2008, when he lead the NL with 46 doubles, hit 26 homers, put up an .853 OPS, and won a Gold Glove that people are still debating in Pittsburgh. He started 2009 out looking like he was going to follow up 2008 with a strong year, then was dealt to the Braves in what was probably the most shocking move of the Neal Huntington era. Now, he's back. This is very weird. 

Let's begin here: you cannot understate how bad Nate McLouth has been in his last two years in Atlanta. In 2009 and 2010, he's hit a combined .210/.322/.328. He's got just 10 homers and 24 doubles and three triples in 166 games/609 plate appearances. That line makes him pretty damn similar to Xavier Paul, though he certainly has more extra base power (his slugging percentage is lower because his batting average is so low) and he does draw more walks. Regardless, he's been really, really terrible with the Braves. 

So why bring him back? I think there are at least a few possible answers. One is that for all of his struggles, he wasn't a terrible hitter against right-handed pitching last year. He hit .251/.372/.372 against righties, with all four of his homers and eight of his 12 doubles. Again, not great stuff, but if Tabata gets hurt again, a McLouth/Gorkys Hernandez platoon in right field might at least make a functional baseball player. That would be better than anything Xavier Paul or Matt Diaz offered last year. Presumably in a bench role, Clint Hurdle will be able to keep McLouth away from tough lefties the way he did with Garrett Jones last year and by simply doing that, McLouth's numbers should improve a bit. 

The second reason is that being back at PNC Park will probably be beneficial for him, too. If you check McLouth's home run tracker from 2008, most of his homers were pulled straight down the right field line. PNC's ten feet shorter in right than Turner Field, and Turner gets a lot deeper quicker in right center than PNC does. McLouth obviously doesn't have the same power he did in 2008, but being in PNC should at least help him maximize what he's got left. 

Let's not kid ourselves: McLouth isn't ever going to be the player that he was in 2008 again. He shouldn't be a regular starter for the Pirates under any circumstance that doesn't involve an injury. When it comes to fourth outfielders, though, it's a one year commitment, he should be very cheap, and there's at least some reasons to think if he's used properly he could see a bit of a bounce back in 2012. Really, I don't hate this move as much as I thought I would when word of it first leaked out a couple of days ago.

Rob Biertempfel tweets today that the Pirates are "[moving] closer" to signing both Nate McLouth and Wilson Betemit. As long as McLouth is in on a one-year deal, I have no problem with him being a fourth outfielder and maybe even spelling Jose Tabata from time to time, both in hopes of keeping him healthy and giving the Pirates the occasional platoon advantage. (UPDATE: Looks like this deal really is close, as per everyone else that covers the team)

Betemit would really only make sense as Pedro Alvarez Insurance. Given that we've seen the Pirates interested in Ian Stewart and Mark DeRosa this winter, it's clear that they want some form of contingency in case Alvarez comes to camp out of shape or in case he never starts hitting again. Betemit's been pretty decent as a part-time player in Kansas City and Detroit the last two years, hitting .290/.359/.479 with 21 homers and 42 doubles in 674 PAs.

He's a switch-hitter that beats up on right-handed pitching, which I guess might make him an option at first base, as well, should Alvarez establish himself and the team elects to non-tender Garrett Jones (Jones is suspiciously missing from the list of Pirates that will be at PirateFest, though obviously he might have some other kind of obligation preventing him from attending). The danger is that his glove is pretty notoriously bad at third base and I doubt it'd be an upgrade at first, where he doesn't really enough to justify a ton of playing time. Regardless, I think Betemit's a useful bench piece and a better option behind Alvarez at third than Chase d'Arnaud or Josh Harrison, so he'd be a nice pickup on a short-term deal. 

This is a few days old, but Mark Simon at ESPN identified Nick Evans as a potential "under the radar asset" due to his very strong glovework at first base. Keep this in mind when you read that Neal Huntington is saying that the Pirates might not even look for a first baseman if they can't bring Derrek Lee back. Jen Langosch, meanwhile, says that Lee will likely turn down arbitration to wait and see how the Pujols/Fielder situations play out. 

At Bucs Dugout, Charlie has a nice piece about the tone of off-season discussion as it applies to what the Pirates are doing this winter. 

This is still scuttlebutt at this point, but it looks like the Marlins have offered Albert Pujols a 10-year deal. If that's the case, that's where he's going to end up. And if that happens, I'm going to hate the Marlins more than any team in the National League.  

There's not much going on on the Pirate front tonight, but John Perrotto has tweeted a few updates about the Pirates that help clarify a few things we've already heard. He says that the Pirates' interest in Nate McLouth is because they want him to be a fourth outfielder and because they're not certain Gorkys Hernandez is ready for that role. That's about what I figured when I first read about the Pirates' interest in McLouth last night. It makes sense to want to see Hernandez for another year at Triple-A before bringing him up and McLouth wouldn't be the worst bench option in the world. It'd also give the Pirates room to trade Hernandez to anyone looking for a young, defensively sound centefielder, but that's neither here nor there. 

Perrotto also confirms the Bucs' interest in Mark DeRosa, which was first reported by Ken Rosenthal. It doesn't sound terribly likely he'll end up with the Pirates, though, because the Pirates want him on a minor league deal to provide competition for Pedro Alvarez, but DeRosa isn't interested. That dovetails pretty well with what Neal Huntington told the press today about having a contingency plan in place in case Pedro craters out again. Given DeRosa's recent injury problems, I wouldn't give him more than a minor league deal, but if the Pirates got him for that little it'd be hard to complain about it. 

That's about all for the night, and if anything it's more confirmation that there's not much exciting that's going to go on on the Pirates' side of things this week. 

The Pirates are one of the teams interested in free agent lefty Jeff Francis, says Jon Morosi, and now we have our first nugget of depressing information from Dallas! I actually thought Francis would've been worth a flier last year, when there was some uncertainty as to how he was going to recover from his shoulder surgery and there was a chance that he'd be able to recover some of his pre-injury form. 

Instead, he signed with the Royals, his strikeout rate dropped to Zach Duke levels (4.48 K/9), and his average fastball velocity plummeted to under 85 mph. Which is to say that he'd probably be able to get some ground balls and eat up some innings at above-replacement level, but I don't think I'd count on him for more than that. I'd take him over Aaron Cook, if we're ranking the players Clint Hurdle is attempting to acquire in his hostile take over of the Pirates front office to recreate the worst National League pennant winner in recent history without any of their good players, but I'm not sure I'd be willing to say much more than that. 

Here's a list of exciting things the Pirates might do in Dallas this week:

1. ... 

And here's a list of things the Pirates might actually do in Dallas this week:

1. Acquire Nate McLouth.
2. No, seriously, Nate McLouth. I mean, I guess Nate McLouth would be better at being Xavier Paul than Xavier Paul was and maybe a return to PNC would help him find his power stroke again. Probably not, though. Nate McLouth kind of sucks now.
3. Trade for Ian Stewart as a depressing form of Pedro Alvarez Insurance. 
4. Have Derrek Lee turn down their arbitration offer. 
5. Make a Rule 5 draft pick that will almost certainly make no impact on the 2012 team. 
6. Issue a statement about the Miami Marlins, saying that the way that they've basically blackmailed their fans into buying them a new stadium and MLB into paying their bills with revenue sharing money so that they can now go ahead and buy a World Series will "literally take the sport down." Actually, if this happens it would be exiting. And they should definitely do it.

As usual, I will be spending most of my non-sciencing moments trawling the TwitterNetz for the latest in Pirate-related developments, rumors, rumblings, etc., and will do my best to get them posted here as quickly as possible.