This morning, @WalkoffHBPRyan asked me and a few other Pirate bloggers on Twitter why the general response to the Pirates’ deadline day moves was more or less lukewarm:
@rumbunter @rtjr @whygavs anyone else surprised by the media's lukewarm to negative reception to Pirates trade deadline moves?
— Harry Winks Fan Club (@WalkOffHBPRyan) August 1, 2015
I tend to tackle all acquisitions by the Pirates at this point from the angle that they’re a good front office and that they don’t acquire players without reason, but of the five players acquired by the Pirates in July, two of them seem like solid upgrades at places where the Pirates needed them (Aramis Ramirez, who everyone has already forgotten about as a deadline acquisition, and Joakim Soria), while three of them (Joe Blanton, Mike Morse, JA Happ) are uninspiring fringe players that everyone absolutely has the right to be skeptical of. I have a sneaking suspicion that the Pirates like Blanton and he’s going to be better than most people are expecting, but the Morse pickup sounds like it was a, “Hey, what the hell, we’ve got this Pedro Florimon roster spot that we could toss him into and see if he can do what we wanted Corey Hart to do” acquisition, whereas Happ was pretty clearly a late reaction to an injury, which is never a great situation to fall into late in the season.
All of that being said, I think that putting the focus on Blanton, Morse, and Happ over Ramirez and Soria is putting the focus in the wrong place. Assuming that Ramirez’s bat heats up, he both provides the Pirates with help in a place where they badly needed it and will need it for the next month, and he’ll give the team much more dimension once Josh Harrison returns from the disabled list, as that will create a situation with a decent right-handed bat bench and free Harrison up to spell Walker or Polanco vs. tough lefties. I’ve written about Soria quite a bit already; having four relievers that you aren’t afraid to turn to late in the game is a pretty fantastic place to be in, because that allows the Pirates to shorten the game and take some pressure off of their rotation.
Happ is probably the best solution the Pirates could come up with in a late-breaking and unfortunate circumstance. I think that 48 hours ago Neal Huntington would’ve told you that their best bet to help the rotation at the deadline would’ve been remodeling the bullpen a bit into something that oculd better shorten games for their starters (which they did), and then with less than 24 hours to go they had a starter implode and land on the disabled list. Over at Bucs Dugout, Charlie sums up the reasons that the Pirates didn’t go out and get a big name starter pretty well. The pitchers that made the most sense for the Pirates simply didn’t move at this deadline. Happ is, at the least, a known quantity for the Pirates that can soak up a few starts while Burnett is on the disabled list with reasonably predictable results. Had the Pirates not acquired Happ, their only real option to replace Burnett right now was Radhames Liz. Liz has been excellent in Triple-A, but obviously has a different big league track record. You could look at Happ as the tortoise to Liz’s hare: sometimes all you want is a starter that can make three starts and give you a low four-something ERA. Happ hasn’t been all that good lately, but that’s traditionally what he’s been. Now, the Pirates at least have Liz as a fall back for Happ, which is better than having Liz and no fall back at all.
As for Morse, I think I’d take Neal Huntington’s comments about him at face value. He’s probably going to slot into Pedro Florimon or maybe Travis Ishikawa’s roster spot, which makes him pretty much the last position player on the roster, either way. He’s hit well in the past, and he can play first base, which means that the Pirates have at least someone to give a shot to at first against lefties other than Pedro Alvarez or Sean Rodriguez. He can’t actually be worse against lefties than those two have, and he can’t be much worse than Corey Hart was, so it’s worth a shot. Josh Harrison will be back in a few weeks, which will give the Pirates more right-handed bench depth. When that happens, the Pirates can evaluated Morse, decide how they want to use Harrison and Ramirez, and maybe even go after Mike Napoli, who will almost certainly have fallen through waivers and not landed anywhere else. If he hits, great, the right-handed first base problem is solved. If he doesn’t, the club will certainly have other options in a few weeks.
In the end, I think that Eno Sarris’s write-up of the Pirates deadline is pretty accurate. The Pirates just weren’t in the same place as the Blue Jays (a talented team that’s outside of the playoff picture but in a division ripe for the taking) or the Astros (in a division race with the Angels). The Pirates are obviously a good baseball team (34-18 in June and July), but they went into the trade deadline looking like a good baseball team destined to play in another Wild Card Game, and they were going to come out of it looking the same way almost no matter what they did. In that situation, directly addressing a couple of needs and making a few other, smaller moves to shore up depth is probably what we should have expected.
Photo by Joe Robbins/Getty Images
