With less than 30 hours to go until the trade deadline, the Pirates have been very quiet. They announced that Joe Blanton trade at about 12:30 last night when no one was paying attention, but before that they hadn’t been attached to any specific player or rumor since the rumor that they were “working on a trade” for a reliever shortly after the Aramis Ramirez trade went down (for the record: that player could not have been Blanton, as Blanton was only recently DFA after the Zobrist trade, which happened after that rumor).
Lack of smoke does not necessarily mean lack of fire, of course. The Travis Snider trade came entirely out of the blue a couple of years ago — I remember seeing on Twitter that Snider had come out of the Blue Jays game at the time, flipping over to the game and hearing the announcers speculate a trade, thinking, “Geez, he’d be a guy I’d like to see the Pirates end up with, too bad they weren’t interested,” and then finding out he was a Pirate. They were incredibly silent during the Jung Ho Kang bidding process. They weren’t officially ruled out, but they weren’t on anyone’s list of potential destinations for Kang, either. On the other hand, they were rumored to be attached to every starting pitcher last year and we even got a relative good idea of what they had offered for David Price and what they weren’t willing to part with, so Huntington’s ability to operate in obscurity is probably as much tied to the teams he’s negotiating with as it is to him himself. If you do want to play this game, though, one team that’s likely to be very active as a seller in the next day that has had relatively few solid rumors attached to them to this point is the Padres, so my hunch would be that if Huntington’s operating in relative obscurity that it might be with them. The Indians kind of fit here, too, since there wasn’t much word about their activity until their trade with the Cardinals for Matt Holliday Brandon Moss (duh, I’m an idiot, prior error preserved to emphasize this point) broke this morning.
The one place we do have a bit of smoke, I guess, is with Mike Napoli, who fits a very specific Pirate need (right-handed first baseman) and who the Pirates have been rumored to be interested in. I’m not wild about Napoli quite yet, because I suspect that trading for him would require the Pirates to eat a lot of salary and doing so with Napoli would limit their flexibility to do the same in a trade for a player that could contribute more to the team than a part-time first baseman and bench bat. I’m as scared as anyone of the Sean-Rodriguez-or-Pedro-Alvarez-against-Bumgarner-in-the-Wild-Card-Game scenario, but given the amount of money that would change hands in a Napoli deal, I’m guessing that it would amount to the Pirates’ main deal at the deadline. I’m not sure that their main focus should be on upgrading for a very specific scenario that might not even occur.
I don’t know what that leaves us with, to be honest. I hate speculating in the absence of any information (it’s a pretty easy way to get people riled up over nothing), and the Pirates are in a pretty difficult sort of limbo at the moment. The reality is that they’re almost certainly good enough as is to win a World Series, since they have three good starting pitchers, a few good relievers, and a solid core to their lineup. As we saw last year, it doesn’t take much more than that group of players heating up in October to do something unexpected. That doesn’t mean that they’re the favorites, of course, it just means that they’re close enough to be consequential, should they make the playoffs. They’re also far enough back in the NL Central right now that it would take more than could possibly be acquired to get them past the Cardinals at the trade deadline (meaning a Cardinal slump and good performances from players already in Pirate uniforms, not that it’s impossible). What you’re really doing at the trade deadline is strengthening yourself for the season’s last 60 games; any player you will acquire will have a bigger effect there than he will in the 20 playoff games that you might play (this is why it makes sense that the Blue Jays are going hard for it: they’re just out of the playoff picture right now with a basic core talented enough to make a difference once they’re there). Once you’re at that point at which you can say that you’re built well enough to really roll the dice in the post-season crapshoot and that it would take some serendipity to win the division even with solid trades that upgrade positions of need, how much should you be willing to pay for those upgrades?
That’s a rhetorical question, of course, and it’s also probably a philosophical one without much of a real answer. The Pirates obviously have places they could stand to get better. First base in general, beyond just a platoon guy like Napoli is one, the rotation is another, the bullpen is a third, and a left-handed bench bat is a fourth. Putting better players in any of those roles could create a situation that pays off for the Pirates in a narrow playoff sample, but then, sometimes you stick Travis Ishikawa in the outfield in the NLCS for lack of a better answer and watch him hit a series-clinching walk-off home run. Those sort of results aren’t probable, but then, in baseball, most results like that aren’t probable, no matter who creates them. The playoffs are a dice-roll, either way, and the most you can ever do at the trade deadline is to try and slightly improve your odds.
All of which is to say that the trade deadline is a truly torturous week in which doing nothing probably doesn’t hurt your favorite team as much as you want to think it will, even though it feels absolutely awful as its happening.
I still hope the Pirates trade for a starting pitcher, though.
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