Chris Capuano will sign with the Dodgers for two years and $10 million, Jim Bowden reported today. Capuano was somebody that I think a lot of us were hoping would end up with the Pirates. You can see that that's a very reasonable deal and as a lefty that can strike guys out, he's something the Pirates don't really have right now. 

I'm not really sure what the club's goal is with the rotation this winter. As near as I could tell, they didn't even express a ton of interest in Capuano (I'm wrong here, the Pirates were apparently involved in the bidding), who would've been a nice fit and a decent value even at, say, $7 million a year instead of five. This rotation needs help, and the guys that they seem most likely to sign right now (Francis and Cook, the ex-Rockies) won't give the help they need. Hopefully, Huntington's got something else up his sleeve for next week's meetings. 

Possibly in that vein, Rob Biertempfel tweeted today that the Bucs are interested in Wei-Yei Chen and Tsyoshi Wada. Chen is the more interesting of the two to me. He's Taiwanese and the Pirates have actually established a bit of a presence in Taiwan over the last couple of years, signing a handful of teenagers from the island. I can't find much information about his 2011 season, but in August of 2010 Patrick Newman said he had "NPB's top power lefty arsenal," with a low-90s fastball and a high-80s slider. I'm not sure that's still true as his K-rate plummetted in 2011 after a drop in velocity, but if the Pirates think he's healthy he's definitely worth a look. Wada's older (he'll be 32 before opening day, Chen will be 27 in July) and more of a soft-tosser and from reading about him I kind of get the feeling that he might have some trouble transitioning to MLB. Either way, it is nice to see the Pirates show some international interest this winter; they've made some big strides in the Latin American market, but the club hasn't done much on the other side of the world. As near as I can tell, the only Major League leve talent that they've brought in directly from Japan is Masumi Kuwata, who was 39 and very clearly past his prime when the Pirates had him in 2007 (hat-tip to Bucs Dugout for the FanGraphs links)

The Miami Marlins signed Heath Bell to a three-year/$9 million deal last night. This is patently ridiculous: Bell is 34 years old, he's coming off of a year in which his strikeout rate took a nosedive and his peripherals indicated pretty strongly that his saves and ERA were a mirage, and he's a huge man that's probably more likely to plummet from usefulness rather than slowly decline. 

This is the latest in a line of ridiculous closer contracts that have been signed this winter, and with every one the response from me and lots of other Pirate fans is this: "Trade Joel Hanrahan." While I think that the Pirates should be shopping Hanrahan right now and at next week's winter meetings, I think that in the off-season it's often easy to assume that every move takes place in a vacuum and it's often pretty easy to get your perspective on these kinds of things mixed up. 

Consider this: if you were the fan of a team that had a fair amount of money to spend and a GM that overvalues closers (note that this comprises a huge portion of the league), would you rather see that GM spend $27 million on three years of Heath Bell, or trade two decent-to-good prospects for Joel Hanrahan? The money is one thing. It might keep you from spending it somewhere else in a year or two, it might force a trade you don't like somewhere down the road. But the prospects? They're gone and they're not coming back. In the winter when there are always plenty of free agent closers, doesn't it make more sense to overpay a closer in terms of money rather than in terms of prospects? During the season as the trade deadline approaches is a different story, but over the winter I wonder how many teams would be willing to overpay for a closer in terms of prospects compared to teams willing to overpay for a closer in terms of money. 

This sort of situation exists with everything during the offseason. When Ramon Hernandez signed with the Rockies for less money than Rod Barajas signed with the Pirates (though with a guaranteed second year instead of an option), there was some backlash on the Pirates for moving so quickly to pick up an inferior catcher. It's true that that's what happened. There's a lot more to consider than just "Barajas or Hernandez," though. At the time the Pirates signed Barajas, the old CBA was in effect, meaning that to sign Hernandez the Pirates would have to give up their second-round pick in 2012. Barajas had a couple of other offers on his table, meaning that if the Pirates didn't move quickly he might've ended up elsewhere. And who knows how willing Hernandez would've been to play for the Pirates? If it cost the Rockies -- who have a better chance at making the playoffs in 2012 and 2013 than the Pirates do -- $6.5 million over two years, maybe it would've cost the Pirates $9 million. Maybe Hernandez would've told the Pirates he wanted to wait for the new CBA on the assumption that the penalty pick would be dropped for him (it was), specifically to see who else would be interested. Maybe while the Pirates waited for all that to play out, Barajas signs with the Dodgers and then they don't get Hernandez anyway, so they end up with Mike McKenry catching. 

I'm not trying to necessarily defend bad decisions here, just giving a friendly reminder that there are two sides to everything and that in many cases, the Pirates are going to be viewed as baseball's leper colony until they turn things around. 

Lyle Overbay hit a combined .234/.310/.360 with the Pirates and Diamondbacks next year. He only hit nine home runs all year. The Diamondbacks apparently want to bring him back for another year. 

Of course, the D'Backs will almost certainly finish with a better record than the Pirates in 2012 and the Pirates are playing Clint Barmes more than $10 million over the next two years. So maybe the joke is on me.  

Every year around this time, the BBWAA releases its annual Hall of Fame ballot. This accomplishes a few things: everyone starts talking about guys that are still on the ballot that deserve to be in the Hall, everyone starts dissecting the serious new candidates, and everyone looks at the down-ballot guys that aren't likely to even get a vote and wonder exactly how the BBWAA picks the cutoff between who gets on the ballot and who doesn't. 

This year's biggest head-scratcher for me? Tony Womack. Tony Womack of the career OPS+ of 72, the career OBP of .317, the career bWAR of 1.2. Tony Womack was traded five times in his career for seven players. Of those seven, only Jason Boyd and Matt Duff played in the Majors. His career accomplishments amount to this: he lead the NL in stolen bases from 1997-1999 and he got the game-tying hit off of Mariano Rivera in the 2001 World Series.

Tony Womack: potential Hall of Famer. 

The Pirates signed Nick Evans to a minor league deal last night, according to the New York Daily News. Evans has played bits and pieces of the last four seasons with the Mets as a utility first baseman/corner outfielder with very little power. That doesn't sound terribly exciting, but Evans does have a respectable .295/.360/.489 line against lefties, with six of his eight career homers coming off of southpaws despite having a few more PAs against righties (222 to 195).

All this really means is that Evans isn't a terrible insurance policy in the event that the Pirates can't go out and find an everyday first baseman this winter and that Matt Hague isn't ready for the big leagues. Neither of those scenarios are a stretch, so even though Evans isn't terribly exciting he's probably a nice guy to at least have around in camp. If worse comes to worst, he'd make a nice platoon partner for Garrett Jones at first base and could potentially even spell Alex Presley occasionally against tough lefties in the outfield. 

Jen Langosch, on the Pirates' Winter Meetings agenda: 

The club's top priority is finding a first baseman, as the Pirates' only current internal options are Garrett Jones and Matt Hague. There would be significant risk going into 2012 with either as the team's everyday option. Jones has never hit well against left-handed pitching. Hague, on the other hand, has yet to make his Major League debut.

There's nothing technically wrong with this, of course, as first base is a position that the Pirates seriously need to upgrade, but it does imply that the club's top priority is not improving the starting rotation. The starting rotation that is currently comprised of James McDonald, Jeff Karstens, an injured Charlie Morton, Brad Lincoln, and Kevin Correia. 

The Pirates have showed some interest in upgrading their rotation, though to this point the only name I've seen them attached to is Aaron Cook. I've got a gut feeling that doing nothing at all might be preferrable to signing Aaron Cook. 

Keith Law set the Yinzernet on fire this afternoon by suggesting that the Pirates would consider trading Andrew McCutchen if they get an offer that blows them away. He didn't say that the Pirates were shopping McCutchen or hoping to trade him or anything like that. He said that they'd do what any team in their situation would do with an elite young player that has a ticking arbitration clock without an extension: they'd listen to offers and probably reject 99.9% of them. 

Still, the reaction to Law's blurb was pretty predictable: some Pirate fans were angry on the assumption that it's already time to start selling to the highest bidder, some were scared, some shrugged it off the way I have on the assumption that the Pirates are probably at least a couple years away from realistically looking to shop him at the very earliest. Tim is right in pointing out that in order to trade McCutchen at this point in his career, the Pirates would have to more or less go to one of baseball's best minor league systems and name their top five prospects for it to be a fair deal. The sorts of GMs that get those types of prospect stashes aren't the sorts of GMs that trade them away.

The summary of the summary here is that the Pirates aren't shopping Andrew McCutchen. They're not going to trade him this winter because they almost certainly can't get fair value for him short of Alex Anthopolous or Josh Friedman losing their minds. They're willing to listen because sometimes GMs lose their minds and so long as you're a 90-loss team, you can't afford to ignore anything. This is not news to anyone that follows the Pirates, but most people don't follow the Pirates and so it's being trumped up like big news. 

Even the mention of trading Andrew McCutchen gets my gears turning about the future of the Pirates, though, and so what I'm wondering right now is this: should the Pirates be shopping Andrew McCutchen this winter or in the nearish future? 

BLASPHEMY!

I know, right? But let's walk through this. 

Try to imagine the Pirates being good in 2012. OK, now try to imagine it without the following words and/or phrases: "miracle" and "if Pedro Alvarez pulls things together." Now try to imagine it. It's not very easy. Try to imagine the Pirates being good in 2013. Now, try it again without the two key phrases. A little more likely, perhaps, but still not easy. If we go to 2014, things get downright plausible even without Alvarez: Cole and maybe even Taillon should be up, Starling Marte should be up and adapted to big league pitching, maybe even a little more help will be on the way at that point. There are still things that need to come together, but on November 28th, 2011 it doesn't seem ridiculous to suggest that the Pirates could be contenders in 2014. This is not idea, but I guess it's progress. 

Andrew McCutchen will be a free agent after the 2015 season. The problem with that isn't that it's so near that the Pirates' inability to extend him to this point should be panic-inducing; it's that it's awfully hard to think that the Pirates will contend with what they currently have in their system before 2014, at which point the Pirates will have to be seriously considering what to do with McCutchen if they haven't signed him to an extension by that point. 

So I guess what I'm thinking is this: if the Pirates can't extend McCutchen and they're going to be trading him in 2014 or 2015 and they're probably not going to be contending before about that point anyway, why not trade him now or next season or after next season? They'd get a heck of a whole lot more post-2015 support out of a McCutchen trade that netted someone three years of Andrew McCutchen instead of a trade that gives someone half of that at the most. 

This is an incredibly dangerous way of thinking, of course. The Pirates kind-of-sort-of contended in 2011 with basically no Pedro Alvarez or Jose Tabata and a Neil Walker season that left things to be desired. If the Pirates can cobble some pitching together in the next month or so and have some young players make progress and Albert Pujols and Prince Fielder leave the division ... anything is technically possible. It's not likely by any means, I don't think, but it is possible. It's not possible without Andrew McCutchen.

The Pirates have had 19 consecutive losing seasons and this management group has had four of them now; it's not really fair of them to ask the fans to concede 20 and 21 well before either of those seasons start, no matter how long of a shot things are at this point. If the right offer were to come along in the next 16 months, though, the Pirates would be awfully hard-pressed to ignore it. 

Jim Callis tweets new news about the CBA that's even more depressing than what we learned last week: 

If you don't sign a pick, you lose his cap value. You can't not sign [your first round pick] and spend his money elsewhere. 

As Charlie points out, this is basically a hard slot. Which leaves considerably less room for creativity than the initial idea of a pool of money to be spent on your first ten rounds worth of picks does. This sucks.

With the winter meetings just about a week away, we've entered the first big off-season lull. There's not much that's going to happen in the next seven days, I don't think, though there are a few odds and ends to pick up that I missed over the Thanksgiving holiday. 

The Pirates offered Derrek Lee arbitration on Wednesday, but not Chris Snyder or Ryan Ludwick. That's all pretty predictable stuff; Lee is the only one of the trio the Pirates would have any reason to want back and he's also the least likely of the three to accept. Assuming he signs elsewhere, the Pirates will get two compensation picks (one for Lee, one for Doumit) in the 2012 draft before Type B compensation goes away forever.

In the same vein, the Cubs offered Carlos Pena arbitration, but Jon Heyman says he's unlikely to accept because he wants multiple years. The "he wants multiple years" part is why the Pirates should be staying away here, in my opinion. 

The Astros finally fired Ed Wade last night, now that their sale to Jim Crane is complete. The Astros are leaving the division and I don't really bear them a ton of ill-will, so I don't begrudge them a decent GM, but the Ed Wade Era in Houston has consistently been one of the funniest running subplots in baseball and I'd be lying if I said I wouldn't miss it a little bit. As Dejan Kovacevic pointed out on Twitter last night, Neal Huntington is now the second-longest tenured GM in the NL Central behind Doug Melvin.

Jane: That's not fair, daddy. Lilly got a mango pop and I didn't get one.

Louie: Yup.

Jane: Well that's not fair.

Louie: I don't even know what that means.

Jane: Why does she get one and not me?

Louie: 'Cuz she's a separate person from you. You're never gonna get the same things as other people. It's never gonna be equal. It's not gonna happen ever in your life, so you might as well learn that now, OK?

Let's lay it out: baseball's new CBA is not good for teams like the Pirates, who've focused all of their resources on rebuilding through the draft. There certainly seems like there will be some allotment for the teams at the top of the draft to spend more than teams at the bottom, which may mitigate things a bit, but it will certainly prevent a team from spending the way the Pirates or Nationals did in 2011 and it'll probably rein the Pirates in at least some from the way they've been spending over the last few years.

The initial reaction yesterday, from me and from just about everyone, was that this thing will be a disaster for teams like the Pirates. It's true that it might be, but it's also true that if bloggers are trying to find loopholes, the Neal Huntingtons out there certainly are, too, and the smart GMs will likely find a way. Teams will probably have to find a way to improve their scouting departments and the way they evaluate amateurs (meaning that the draft is an inefficient process, even for the teams that reap the most benefits from it) and the teams that make bigger strides will probably draw an early advantage. The teams that it'll be the biggest disaster for are the teams that will refuse to adapt: the teams that are the quickest to adapt will probably find a way, even if those teams have limited funds like the Pirates. 

Having the advantage that the Pirates had in the draft taken away from them stinks, but it's not really what bugs me about the new system (to be fair, what really bugs me in this whole thing beyond baseball is the way that the kids from the Dominican Republic and Venezuela are getting screwed). What really sticks in my craw about this is that I can't look at the new draft rules as an attempt to keep the smaller market teams from finding success. 

Look, I'm not stupid. I understand that the Pirates do less for Major League Baseball than the Yankees and the Red Sox. I understand that they draw fewer TV viewers, that the bring fewer fans into parks, that they sell fewer t-shirts, that they spend less money on free agents. If the Pirates disappeared tomorrow, baseball would functionally be the same. If the Yankees disappeared tomorrow, baseball would become soccer in terms of national profile. I know this. The abstract concept of sports, though, doesn't really work when you apply capitalism to it because they're about sports and not business. Small teams need to have at least something resembling the same chance as big teams, which is why salary caps and luxury taxes and such things exist in US sports. Otherwise, why care about the Pirates? 

In the last ten years or so, the smaller teams have figured out how to exist: because they have less money to spend, it's easier to cast a wide net on amateur players and develop that talent. They've had some success, too, and seeing the Rays make the playoffs three times in four years in the American League East gives hope to teams like the Pirates. But every time the Rays make the playoffs, the Yankees or Red Sox don't. And when the teams with huge fan bases don't make the playoffs, TV ratings suffer and baseball is weirdly obsessed with them, despite there being a million better indicators of the game's health. 

Major League Baseball can say that this is about making sure the best players are drafted in the right place and making sure that money is spent on big league players instead of amateurs, or however they want to justify these new rules, but as the fan of a small market team all I see is an attempt to cut the small markets off at the knees. It hurts the Rays, who build through the draft. It hurts the Rangers, who've spent a ton of money in the international markets. I do believe what I wrote above -- that smart small market teams will find a way even if it takes a while -- but any time you narrow the playing field the way this new CBA does, you tilt it back towards the big markets. Baseball knows that, because that's what they want. And that's what hurts the most as a fan of the Pirates.

Baseball can't come out and say that they don't want a team like the Pirates in the World Series because they think it'd be bad for business, but they don't really have to. Their intent at this point is clear.