By Gene Collier, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
http://www.post-gazette.com/sports/
Two words for Pirates management this morning: Ramiro Pena.
That's whom they ought to have been targeting this week in tropical Indianapolis, the site of baseball's annual Winter Meetings, which have long since become the December marketplace where the Pirates reliably maneuver just carefully enough to achieve their unique equilibrium -- modest profits from an acutely substandard product.
Yes, it's all perfectly legal.
Ramiro Pena makes the major league minimum: $400,000.
He's a perfect fit.
With all the resources available within what Bob Nutting once called the best management team in all of baseball and maybe in all of sports (and certainly the best in the 100 block of Federal Street), somebody has to have a cell phone number for Ramiro Pena, likely the most underrated utility man in all of Monterrey, Mexico.
Oakland Athletics' Bobby Crosby rounds third after hitting a home run in the second inning of a baseball game against the Kansas City Royals Sunday, Aug. 9, 2009, in Kansas City, Mo. (AP)
I only offer this suggestion in response to the club's pursuit of Bobby Crosby, the American League Rookie of the Year in 2004, when he hit 22 homers. The fact that he has hit about 22 since has not deterred your Buccos. All right, he has hit 39 in the past five years, but let's not be persnickety.
Of all the personnel strategies initiated by the Pittsburgh Baseball Club over the past 17 years of win avoidance (this being the start of year III of five-year plan IV), none smells so strongly of abject surrender than management's stated reason for wanting Crosby, a shortstop with more than a million bonus points as a platinum member of the frequent-guest program of the American League disabled list.
The Pirates want Crosby, again by public admission, to push their starting shortstop, who, if you haven't noticed, is Ronny Cedeno.
After arriving from Seattle at the end of July in the trade that sent shortstop Jack Wilson and starter Ian Snell to the Mariners, Cedeno put the finishing touches on a season in which he hit .208 in 105 games, had more strikeouts than hits and walked 19 times in 376 plate appearances.
If you went to the plate 376 times without a bat, you would walk more than 19 times.
Defensively, Cedeno was by turns brilliant and inadequate.
And yet Pirates manager John Russell, explaining to the Post-Gazette's Dejan Kovacevic the need to "push" Cedeno, said, "It's just consistency. Ronny has so many tools, as we saw, but he needs to maintain his concentration. You got the sense that he wasn't always locked in."
Hmm.
Isn't it bad enough that your starting shortstop, whom you're paying close to $1 million, can't always be bothered to, you know, pay attention, or is it far worse that the solution to this problem is to acquire another substandard shortstop that you hope will spur the starting substandard shortstop to previously unscaled heights of near adequacy?
Seriously. Can we pretend this is the big leagues?
Either push Cedeno off the plank, or please, give me Ramiro Pena.
Pena played in 34 games in the majors last season at shortstop, starting only 11, but the shortstop he was "pushing" had 212 hits, scored 107 runs, stole 30 bases, whacked 18 homers, batted .407 in the World Series and wound up on the cover of Sports Illustrated as its Sportsman of the Year.
Oh, yeah, Derek Jeter really got pushed.
The Pirates are awaiting the results of a physical on Crosby before handing him potentially $1.5 million to make sure Cedeno pays attention. Crosby's attention span apparently isn't an issue, but his 18 extra-base hits in 238 at-bats don't figure to keep Cedeno up at night.
For real fan-base buzz, the Crosby deal, should it happen at all, won't compare to the earlier acquisition of psychotic Japanese second baseman Akinori Iwamura, who said through a translator after being dealt from Tampa Bay to Pittsburgh: "Hopefully, we can go to the playoffs next season."
You don't normally regard translators as a mischievous lot, but, really, who did they tell him he was traded to?
On the always humorous Rule 5 issue, Pirates general manager Neil Huntington seems to have waffled a bit this week on whether the club would be interested in tomorrow's Rule 5 draft. The past two brought Evan Meek and Donnie Veal, and Huntington said he might be interested again if there is another pitcher available. That's good. There's nothing the club can use more than a marginal reliever who can't get any innings and won't develop as a result.
Not to be critical.
Gene Collier can be reached at gcollier@post-gazette.com. More articles by this author
First published on December 10, 2009 at 12:00 am
No comments:
Post a Comment