Offseason baseball Thread

All due respect to McCutchen, he isn't even on the level of pre-PED Bonds. McCutchen won one MVP award during his time as a Pirate and led the league in OPS once. His career high in OPS is .953.

Bonds led the league in OPS his last three seasons in Pittsburgh. That included a 1.080 OPS in 1992, the first of 14 consecutive seasons with an OPS above 1.000. In that final season as Pirate, he also led the NL in total bases with 204,walks with 127 and runs with 109. He hit 34 home runs and stole 39 bases. He won his second MVP in three seasons that year, and he was robbed in 1991.

I get what you are saying, but the gap between those two is very large.

 

Great stuff. Thanks for posting it.

I read that one right after Buster Olney's take on the McCutchen trade, specifically the reaction of media and fans in Pittsburgh.

Fans may never forgive Pirates for trading Andrew McCutchen

He seems to put much of the blame for criticism from the fans on bad luck. The Pirates had bad luck during their playoff run, so they didn't get to a World Series. He argued that fans would be more accepting of the current fire sale if they had a championship.

He is right, to a point. That would have earned the team a long leash with the fans, but the fans aren't wrong to be furious. McCutchen was the star. He was sold as the first real elite Pirate since Barry Bonds, the guy the team would keep because they locked him up long term rather than allowing him to reach free agency. This was the guy they were supposed to get to root for without waiting for some bigger market to steal him away.

Maybe that's where that parallel with Bonds going to the San Francisco fits in, just that the Bucs are losing their guy to the Giants again, but the players are very different.

It seems like this was the step to far for fans who were patient even as the team refused to add needed help during the three-year playoff run, instead choosing to sell off talent along the way to keep the payroll low. The Pirates also went on about getting a high price for McCutchen when they talked trade last year, asking for elite prospects like Lucas Giolito and Victor Robles. What they got was a hard-throwing 25-year-old who can't find the plate and an outfield prospect who was ranked No. 5 in a very weak Giants system.

Pirates fans know enough to realize that not only did the team trade its best player and its best starting pitcher, it didn't really get great returns on either. They sold low on Cole and McCutchen and it shows.

 

I never meant to say they were equals; agreed far from it. Just some parallels.

 

Make the met s an offer on Bonilla. I bet Pittsburgh can get him back cheap, and the mets would likely be willing to eat some salary.
Point is, sometimes saying goodbye is the right move, and making the fans happy is the wrong one. Ask Jason bay and joe Mauer.

 

This is a fair point, but OOP does have an awful lot of history on his side (I actually think they made out pretty well in the Cole trade, but not sure there's much in the Cutch trade to be happy about).

 

The history is exactly my point. If the Pirates hadn't failed for over two decades due to bad management, the financial limitations on small markets in baseball and terrible ownership, I'd probably have a different view. If they hadn't made so many cost-cutting moves when the team had a three-year run of playoff appearances, I'd probably have a different view. But this is just more of the same from the Pirates.

Regarding what they got in return, the Cole trade wasn't awful, but he's also a lot more valuable than McCutchen right now. He is younger, cheaper and two years away from free agency. My issue with Cole is the timing. They sold low. They weren't going to be a playoff team this year even with those guys, but they could have waited for Cole to rebuild some value.

Now if Cole continues the trend from last season, they made the right move. If it was a better organization that didn't have a history of constantly taking the cheap route, I'd trust that they saw something that told them he was not going to rebound. But the Pirates don't deserve that trust.

 

I agree the Pirates don't deserve your trust, but Cole's 2017 season, after a 2016 campaign in which he experienced elbow problems, makes me think they were probably better off unloading him when they did.

Having watched a bunch of Musgrove's starts last season, I think if he can put it all together, he'll be a 9 or 10 K/9 guy with a 3.20 ERA or less for the foreseeable future. Anything they get out of the other prospects will be a bonus. It's pure speculation, of course, but Cole's arm is worrisome enough I think the Pirates did well to get Musgrove-plus.

 

That was my point about selling low. Given the year he had in 2017, the value the Pirates got in return makes sense. I don't think a better offer was coming. That's why I think it was a bad time to trade him. If there is an injury to the elbow and they are covering it up, that's pretty much the only way the timing makes sense from a baseball standpoint. But it wasn't a baseball decision. It was a money decision. The Pirates were on the borderline of trying to build around what was left of their core or going back into purge/rebuild mode and the latter puts more money in Nutting's wallet. That's how the decision was made.

Once that move was made, it was easier to justify selling off McCutchen. The only surprise was that Nutting actually showed up at the press conference. Of course, he wouldn't admit that trading the guy he had often said should be a Pirate for life was about money, but that organization has been lying about its priorities for decades. That's why I feel confidence characterizing these moves that way. We've got many years of evidence to back it up.

 

Spoken like a fan of a tean that never has to do this stuff.

You have to put the moves in context, Guy. Even the Bonilla deal has to be put in context. It would have been fine if they weren't coming off two NLCS appearances and they didn't also trade a 20-game winner in his prime (John Smiley) for prospects that same offseason while also failing to even try to sign Doug Drabek or Barry Bonds to extensions. The real end came when Bonds and Drabek left a year later, but that team was being torn apart by the pocketbook well before the end.

That's what happened during this most recent run of playoff appearances, too. Instead of adding the parts to try to put themselves over the top, the Pirates were cutting payroll even as attendance rose and they increased ticket prices.

The trades of Cole and McCutchen also point out a part of the problem for smaller markets that is often forgotten. When they do move top players, they don't get fair value. The high-revenue franchises know all they have to do is wait and the price in talent will come down.

Franchises like the Yankees and Dodgers don't have to sell guys like Cole or McCutchen for less than full value. Remember when the Pirates were asking for elite prospects for McCutchen? Sure, it took a year, but they didn't get close to that type of return.

The Yankees' idea of frugal would be if all they did this offseason was trade for the reigning National League MVP and his massive contract in a trade that was a clear salary dump by the Marlins.

 

No, I root for a team that handed you Drabek and Brian Fisher (my favorite player at the time) for Rick Rhoden.
I get the frustration of rooting for a team with a cheap owner, but there are frustrations in the other direction as well. The Arod and Sabathia extentions were terribly frustrating (he's going to opt out after giving you most of his prime years, exempting you from his decline years? Where do I sign up!).
But besides that, each move should be evaluated in context. If you only have the payroll for x number of big contracts, be careful giving them out and cash in on the player when you can. I think part of the reason you're finding these annoying is because Cole hasn't developed as we all thought he would, so you say they're selling low - or they think he is what he is and now is when they can someone to bite on the upside. McCutchen too has started to decline, but if they had sold at his peak for better prospects when they were contending,that would have annoyed you too. And you would be right then as well.

 

No, they are selling low. They were two years from free agency, so there was time for him to rebuild value. This was financially-driven and we know that because we put it in the context of everything else the Pirates do.

Here's the thing. Your complaints about the Yankees are related to bad baseball-driven decisions. They chose to trade Drabek and Fisher (along with Logan Easley) for Rhoden because they thought it would help their team. They chose to give those extensions to Rodriguez and Sabathia. Those were all bad baseball decisions.

Bad decisions by teams are part of the game. I can live with those. If my team sucks because they did something stupid, or many things stupid, I stick by them. I didn't become a Pirates fan when they were good in the '70s. I did it when they sucked in the '80s. I was too young to appreciate the Steelers in the '70s and really became a serious fan while they were mediocre in the '80s. I joke about being like every Penguins fan who was around in the '80s, not caring about hockey until Mario Lemieux arrived, but really that just happend to fall into the time in my life when I fully embraced being a sports fan.

I've said for years that baseball teams' fortunes are decided by front office competence, market size/potential revenue, the commitment of ownership and luck. That is why the NFL is better. Success and failure is based primarily on making good decisions and luck. The commitment of ownership and market size/potential revenue are greatly muted as factors in team success. Sure, it can be a factor with organizations like the Bengals, but even cheap owners are forced to spend and every team has a fair shot to succeed.

For over 20 years, the Pirates had the first three factors (competent front office, revenue and ownership) working against them, sometimes the fourth. They will always have potential revenue working against them and the Yankees will always have that in their favor. Pittsburgh's situation is made worse because they haven't had ownership that was committed to winning in a long time. Sure, there were times when George Steinbrenner got in his own team's way, but you've never seen a time when Yankees ownership wasn't committed to winning.

That is why it is challenging for you or any other fan of the Yankees to truly get it. That is why you think the Yankees mucking things up through bad baseball decisions is somehow equivalent to the Pirates failing because they are at a huge financial disadvantage and their owner cares more about padding his wallet than properly financing his team.

I think I've used the Monopoly analogy here before. I always loved playing that game as a kid, but it only works because everybody gets to start with the same amount of money. Let one of the players start with four times as much as everybody else and eventually it makes things a lot less fun. The other players lose at least some of their interest because it sucks to play against somebody who always has a built in advantage. They can even fuck up badly and still win by buying their way through mistakes. The player with the extra money either realizes his victories are somewhat hollow because he didn't fully earn them or convinces himself that the game was somehow fair.

In the case of baseball, I simply lost interest. I still watch, but I really only care what my fantasy team does. When it comes to the actual games, my heart just isn't in it any more.

 

Yikes ...