The Pirates’ winter-long quest to find a left-handed hitting first baseman finally came to an end yesterday evening, when the team announced that they’d signed John Jaso to a two-year deal. Jaso has spent most of his career catching and DHing with the Rays and A’s to this point, but he’s had enough serious concussion […]

Since the Charlie Morton trade almost a week ago, we’ve all been wondering who the Pirates would sign/acquire to fill the hole that Morton’s exit created in the rotation. Today, we get our answer:

The Pirates announced tonight that they’ve acquired corner infielder/outfielder Jason Rogers from the Brewers in exchange for both outfielder Keon Broxton and minor league pitcher Trey Supak. Rogers was fairly impressive in his first expanded run of playing time with the Brewers last year, hitting .296/.367/.441 with six doubles, two triples and four homers, one of […]

This shouldn’t be surprising news, as it’s been rumored for almost the entire length of the off-season, but

In the immediate aftermath of the Neil Walker trade last week, I wrote that I thought that a straight comparison of Walker to Niese was not necessarily a fair assessment of the trade. Walker, after all, will be replaced on the field and in the lineup by (mostly) Josh Harrison, while Niese will be filling […]

In a little bit of a surprising move, the Pirates traded Charlie Morton to the Phillies

The Pirates just announced this afternoon that they’ve signed reliever Juan Nicasio to a one-year deal (they’ll retain the right to offer him arbitration in 2017, since he’s a Super-Two), and this is about the most Pirate-Like signing I can imagine them making this winter. Nicasio struck out exactly 25% of the hitters he faced […]

At some point very early on in Neil Walker’s career, I think when he hit his first career home run to flip a 2-1 Cub lead into a 3-2 Pirate lead in the eighth inning of a pointless game against the Pirates and Cubs in June of 2010, it dawned on me how cool it was […]

As the Neil Walker trade talks heated up and eventually boiled over this afternoon, I suddenly saw a lot of Pirate fans on Twitter saying that they felt like the Pirates were “playing for 2017.” I wondered out loud where that idea had started (I’ve been keeping up with trade rumors this week, but not […]

As seemed apparent earlier today, the Neil Walker trade market developed very quickly this afternoon:

And finally on Wednesday of Winter Meeting week, we have some news that’s at least Pirate-adjacent, if not directly Pirate-related (other than rumors, I mean). The Cubs won the Ben Zobrist sweepstakes last night, which both means that the Pirates have to deal with Ben Zobrist next year and that the teams that didn’t get […]

We’re about to head into the after-dinner portion of the first day of the 2016 Winter Meetings, so I guess this is the latest possible moment to write a preview post about the Pirates at this year’s meeting. There have been plenty of rumors regarding the Pirates already — we know that

The Pedro Alvarez era in Pittsburgh has ended. The Pirates decided to non-tender Alvarez as last night’s midnight deadline to make offers to arbitration-eligible players approached, meaning that Alvarez is officially a free agent. Besides Alvarez, the Pirates also non-tendered Jaff Decker while offering contracts to each of their other arbitration-eligible players. There was a […]

Let’s start with apologies: since the Pirates were eliminated from the Wild Card Game, I’ve been working on both submitting a paper so that I can finally finish grad school, and writing my thesis for a thesis defense that is in the near future. The MLB off-season is mostly dead until the winter meetings, anyway, […]