About an hour ago
Ben Cherington has been consistent with his message that the Pittsburgh Pirates need to “be aggressive and focused about adding talent,” which is a polite way of saying that the organization is bereft of it.
The Pirates general manager also hasn’t been shy about implying that anyone and everyone is available for trades — save, perhaps, third baseman Ke’Bryan Hayes — to accomplish that goal.
So, that should have softened the blow of the Pirates trading their lone player with an All-Star appearance, first baseman Josh Bell, to the Washington Nationals on Christmas Eve for a pair of pitching prospects.
It didn’t, of course, even though Pirates fans had been forewarned around the trade deadline. Maybe that’s because they still haven’t recovered from the Pirates dealing their best players the past two winters, trading Gerrit Cole and Andrew McCutchen in January 2018 and Starling Marte last January.
Not only did Cherington have to deliver a difficult message to Bell, one year removed from a 37-home run, 116-RBI season, but to a frazzled fan base that views every deal as a salary dump by a penny-pinching owner.
“Likely won’t be the last one. There will probably be more,” Cherington said. “I’m not saying that to predict anything, that’s the realization, that’s where we are.”
1. Talking timing: If trading Bell was inevitable — and it should have been viewed that way when the Pirates didn’t sign him to an extension after his breakout 2019 season — the question is whether they did so a year too late.
Cherington was asked that very question, given that Bell was entering his second year of arbitration eligibility and due a raise from his $4.8 million salary. Bell has flashed the power potential the Pirates desperately need but is a career .261 hitter who struggled as designated hitter and is a defensive liability at first.
“In the last few weeks, certainly, our focus has been on examining our current player group, where we are with them, what time we have left and what potential paths we can take, whether that’s keeping someone, whether that’s exploring trade or, in some cases over time, I’d hope and expect that that will also include extending guys, too. That will be a part of it, too,” Cherington said.
“In this case, we just looked forward. We tried to look at, ‘OK, what are the potential paths we can take with Josh?’ And compare that to what was on the table currently. We weigh all those factors as best we can. We weigh the different possibilities, what might happen months from now, a year from now, two years from now, etc. Weigh all that in, compare that to what was on the table now and make the best decision we can. I guess I would just say that we weighed all of that. We weighed all of those factors and felt like this was the right decision for the Pirates.”
You have to wonder whether previous big-player trades factored into the timing. The Pirates traded Marte for a pair of promising 19-year-old prospects from Arizona, who got a diminishing return when they dealt Marte to Miami at the deadline last summer.
When the Pirates traded Cole to Houston, they got three players with major-league experience in Musgrove, Colin Moran and Michael Feliz but the Astros protected their top prospects. Sending McCutchen to San Francisco proved to be the better deal, getting reliever Kyle Crick and outfielder Bryan Reynolds in return.
2. Crowe’s Nest: The Pirates attempted to put a positive spin on the trade by noting that Bell fetched a pair of top-10 prospects from Washington. The flip side? In September, MLB.com ranked the Nationals as having the worst farm system in baseball.
If there was an adverse reaction to the Bell trade from baseball fans, it’s that one of the prospects in return is a 26-year-old right-hander who struggled in his first stint in the majors.
Wil Crowe was Washington’s No. 3 prospect (and a top-six prospect every year since being drafted out of South Carolina in the second round in 2017). But he was 0-2 with an 11.88 ERA and 2.64 WHIP in his first three starts last summer, allowing 11 earned runs on 14 hits and eight walks with eight strikeouts in 8 1/3 innings.
Cherington said Crowe will compete for a spot in the starting rotation, another not-so-subtle hint that a pitcher will be next to be traded. With Mitch Keller likely the lone untouchable in the rotation, that means the Pirates could soon bid farewell to Jameson Taillon, Joe Musgrove, Steven Brault or Chad Kuhl.
All four are arbitration-eligible, and it’s hard to imagine the Pirates extending any of them when all four have dealt with arm or shoulder injuries over the past year.
“We’ve had a lot of dialogue with teams about a lot of players across our roster, not just pitching, but look, it’s no secret: There are guys that if you’re a team that’s in a different position than we are, that they’re going to have interest in,” Cherington said. “We’ve had a lot of phone calls, and we’ll see where those lead, but I will just say that in order to accomplish our goals, which is again to build a winning team and sustain that in Pittsburgh, we’re going to need to continue to focus on accumulation of talent and then development of that talent, and that comes from all different avenues, but trade is one of them, and this is the time of the year where those conversations happen, so we’ll continue them.”
3. Leaning right: In the year since Cherington joined the Pirates, they have acquired eight right-handed pitchers who now are ranked among their top 30 prospects by MLB.com.
However, there’s not a lefty pitcher in the top 30.
That’s not by design.
“I promise you, we didn’t set out a year ago just to accumulate right-handed pitching,” Cherington said. “That’s nowhere written in our plan. We did set out a year ago to accumulate as much player talent as we can. It just so happens that the opportunities have been a lot of right-handed pitching. It’s just the way it’s fallen.”
What is intentional is the stockpiling of young pitchers, as Cherington said the Pirates want to have 30-40 talented arms in their system to build a team that can become a sustained winner.
The Pirates acquired Brennan Malone (No. 8) in the Marte trade, drafted Carmen Mlodzinski (9), Jared Jones (14) and Nick Garcia (19) in June, added Jose Soriano (22) and Luis Oviedo (21) through the Rule 5 Draft and Crowe (17) and 19-year-old Eddy Yean (7) in the Bell trade.
That’s in addition to 2019 first-rounder Quinn Priester (4), their top pitching prospect, and a pair of righties that Baseball America ranks as top-10 prospects in Cody Bolton (6) and Tahnaj Thomas (7), who was acquired from Cleveland in the Erik Gonzalez trade.
The good news? All are 22 or younger.
The bad news? Almost all of them are at least a couple years away from reaching the majors, meaning the Pirates are at least a couple years away from contending.
4. Shipping off: For all of the outcry over the Pirates trading Bell, the harsh reality is they were the worst team in baseball this past season and aren’t going to raise payroll after losing millions.
The truth is, their highest-paid players haven’t performed to expectations. Chris Archer was a total bust. Gregory Polanco has been a disappointment. And Bell has been wildly inconsistent, even in the best season of his career.
Bell followed a monster May 2019 (.390, 12 doubles, 12 homers, 31 RBIs) by batting .208 in June, .218 in July and .233 for the second half.
An MLB scout said in October the Pirates needed to “tear it down to the studs,” suggesting the Pirates should be willing to trade everyone but Hayes and pitcher Mitch Keller.
Bell was their best commodity.
“Moving Bell, you know what the reaction is going to be because that’s the way they’re wired, to take on Nutting every time he makes a trade,” the MLB insider said. “You have to make that statement to your fan base: We’re doing it and we’re going to do it right. It’s going to be painful but this is where we need to be.”
The Pirates are making that statement. Cherington is willing to blow it all up, so brace yourselves for the eventual trades of Musgrove, Brault, second baseman Adam Frazier and others. The Pirates are investing with the intention in building a winner from within, restructuring the minor-league system with the hirings of John Baker and Josh Hopper in player and pitching development.
“For those of us in baseball operations, that’s what we wake up thinking about every day, like, how do we build a winning team and one that can be sustainable? Because, at the end of the day, that’s what Pirates fans care about more than anything else,” Cherington said. “Certainly, being honest about that and expecting a level of effort towards that. For everybody that works for the Pirates and our players, too, we certainly expect that. In order to build that winning team that our fans deserve, it’s going to require making some decisions like this along the way to give ourselves a chance to build enough talent to do that. This is one of them.”
5. Key to future: Cherington was well aware that trading Bell would be emotional for everyone involved, especially doing so on Christmas Eve and for a pair of pitching prospects.
Yet Cheringotn hedged when asked if he was prepared for an “emotional fallout” from Pirates fans, who were drawn to Bell’s broad shoulders, big bat and easygoing smile. He was the Pirates’ most popular player and only All-Star, a switch hitter who appeared custom-made to hit at PNC Park.
“Emotion, yes. Fallout, I don’t know,” Cherington said. “Emotion, yes, because I understand Josh is a likeable guy, a likeable player and he did a good job in a Pirates uniform. I personally really like and respect him.
“I guess what I would say is I think more than anything else, I believe what Pirates fans want is a winning team more than they want to root for a single player, even one who is a really good guy and a good player. If we think about that, that’s how we see it.”
That’s where the Pirates, from owner Bob Nutting to the front office, just don’t understand Pittsburghers. Fans are attached to their star players, especially those who embrace the city. The Steelers kept Troy Polamalu and Ben Roethlisberger. The Penguins kept Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin.
The Pirates haven’t had a player spend his entire career with them since Willie Stargell, who died on the day of PNC Park’s first home opener in April 2001.
Pirates fans are more likely to wear to games the jersey of Roberto Clemente and Bill Mazeroski, investing in nostalgia instead of players who never make it to a second contract.
If the Pirates are going to ask their fans to focus on the future, it’s imperative they give them someone to focus on.
They have an opportunity to hit a home run with the No. 1 overall pick in the 2021 MLB Draft, whether it’s a pitcher like Vanderbilt’s Kumar Rocker or a position player like high school shortstop Jordan Lawlar, but their impact is years away.
Signing Hayes to a long-term deal before the season would be a signal that the Pirates view him as the franchise cornerstone and give the fan base someone to rally around as they rebuild.
Kevin Gorman is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact Kevin by email at [email protected] or via Twitter .
Categories:
Pirates/MLB | Sports
