Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
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Tuesday, August 05, 2008
With their trades late last month of Jason Bay, Xavier Nady and Damaso Marte, the Pirates cut payroll by about $3 million for the final two months of the season. The total salaries for 2008 for Bay, Nady and Marte came to about $11.5 million. All three were replaced by players making the major league minimum or close to it.
The savings for 2009, with Bay and Nady off the roster (Marte never was expected back), will be about $13 million.
All of which means the team should be able to come to terms with Pedro Alvarez, their No. 1 draft choice. With this unexpected windfall, there is no reason for the Pirates not to be able to meet the demands of Alvarez's agent Scott Boras. The Pirates knew going into the draft Boras was the most demanding negotiator in sports, and often asks for the outrageous. Now the Pirates, with the money they cut from payroll in these trades, have the wherewithal to comply with his demands.
Pedro Alvarez, Vanderbilt
Team president Frank Coonelly will insist none of the recent deals was about the money and they were made to build a better baseball team. We believe him. We don't think Coonelly would have taken the job under the financial restraints of the past. But judging from the e-mails coming in, many fans do not believe him. There are many people out there who think these are the same old Pirates -- unloading players as soon as their salaries reach a certain level and making certain payroll stays on the low side of $55 million.
That's not an unrealistic belief. The case certainly could be made that these trades were economically motivated. After all, the Pirates are a worse team today than they were before the trades and in all likelihood will be a worse team next year. Why does a team purposely get worse unless it's for financial reasons?
We believe -- although we don't agree with his strategy -- general manager Neil Huntington made these trades to improve the team in the long term. Whether that happens remains to be seen.
In the best analysis we've seen of the Pirates trades, Jayson Stark of ESPN.com wrote: "... the word we heard used most to describe the Pirates return in these two trades was 'quantity.' Which isn't always a compliment."
The really, really annoying aspect of the trades was the insistence of some -- both pundits and apologists -- that since the team wasn't winning with Bay and Nady trading them was the right thing to do. That's the height of convoluted thinking. Such reasoning suggests Bay and Nady were the reason the Pirates were losing. The exact opposite is true. The team was almost winning because of Nady and Bay. They are not losing ballplayers, they are winning ballplayers and the fact that they now play for two of the most successful franchises in baseball is the ultimate proof of that.
The Pirates gave up two middle-of-the-lineup bats and one of the top left-handed specialists in the game for prospects. While they increased depth -- whoopee -- they lowered payroll and hope.
The Pirates could quiet many of their critics by signing Alvarez, and the sooner the better. Maybe he could get in a couple weeks of minor league ball, and accelerate his development, if a deal is reached this week.
As we wrote in this space last fall, the only downside of the widely hailed departure of the Dave Littlefield-Kevin McClatchy management team was that urgency was gone from the team's need to get better. The new management team, with new contracts in place, had the luxury of taking its time in reshaping the Pirates, and that's what they're doing.
But there should be an urgency to sign Alvarez, a third baseman with a power bat. If the Pirates don't sign him and they accept a high first-round draft choice next season as compensation, well, that surely would be reason to think nothing has changed. The public would have every reason to believe last year, when the previous management team passed on Matt Wieters (batting .354 with 21 homers and 70 RBIs on the high Class A and AA level this season) in the first round and selected Danny Moskos (7-7 with a 6.38 ERA in high Class A) is standard operating procedure for the organization.
Signing Alvarez is the best way management can show doubting fans it's serious about putting a winner on the field and that owner Bob Nutting is not just in the baseball business for the profit that can be made.
If the Pirates can't sign Alvarez, here's the question fans will be pondering on the eve of the trade deadline in 2010: What kind of prospects will the team get for Nate McLouth and Ryan Doumit?
Bob Smizik can be reached at bsmizik@post-gazette.com.
First published on August 5, 2008 at 12:00 am
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