The winter meetings ended in an insane flurry starting at or around the time Pirates finished the Antonio Bastardo trade on Wednesday. The Dodgers and Marlins both went completely nuts remaking their rosters, the Reds traded away 40% of their rotation (on the bright side they kept Mike Leake, but on the bad side they also kept Johnny Cueto), presumed potential Pirate targets Brandon McCarthy and Justin Masterson both signed (McCarthy with the Dodgers, Masterson with the Red Sox), Ervin Santana signed with the Twins for four years and $54 million and that coupled with McCarthy’s deal (4/$48) turned the Francisco Liriano contract into a heist, and, I don’t even know if that scratches the surface. From late Wednesday afternoon until early Thursday afternoon, we had maybe the craziest 20-24 hours of baseball transactions I can remember.
While all that raged on, the Pirates didn’t really do much of anything besides lose Andy Oliver to the Phillies in the Rule 5 draft. After the Bastardo trade, I started to wonder if the Pirates were done for the winter. They addressed the rotation with Liriano and Burnett, they found a catcher, they worked on re-making the bullpen, both with Bastardo and with various arms they’ve found all over, they’re pretty close to the $90 million payroll that they said was their goal. They are, more or less, about where they ended last off-season. On paper, they don’t look quite as strong as the Pirate team that closed out 2014 — they’ve lost Russell Martin and it seems crazy to think that Josh Harrison will be a borderline MVP candidate again — but it’s also not difficult to imagine that they could be even better than last year’s team with the right performances from Gregory Polanco and Starling Marte and Pedro Alvarez and Gerrit Cole and Jameson Taillon and Nick Kingham.
If this is where the Pirates do more or less finish their work for the off-season, that will leave us with the same old conflicted mess of questions. What do you want the Pirates to be? Do you want them to turn into the Reds? Because the Reds barely won anything with that group of players and now it looks like they’re disassembling. Do you want them to sell out the system like the A’s did this year at the trade deadline? Because the A’s and Pirates went home at the same point in the playoffs. How do you get from “pretty good” to World Series? Is it any more than luck? Can it possibly be anything more than luck after what happened with the Royals this year?
I didn’t have answers to those questions last year, and I don’t have them this year. I don’t really suppose I will at any point. What I will say, though, is this: I’m not entirely sure the Pirates are done for this winter. While yesterday’s transaction mania was raging on, there were two little bits of Pirate news that filtered out. One is that the Marlins are interested in trading for Pedro Alvarez to play first base and that while the Nate Eovaldi part of that first tweet is ridiculous (at least for a straight-up trade), there’s definitely at least some interest from the Marlins there. The other bit of news, which should come with a grain of salt since it’s BURIED in a Winter Meetings recap story from Tom Singer (actually, there are two grains of salt in that sentence), is that the Pirates were interested in Brandon McCarthy right up until he signed with the Dodgers. This is interesting because McCarthy signed after Liriano, which means that Huntington might not be completely satisfied with where the rotation is right now.
I understand that I’m more or less The Blogger Who Cried More Starting Pitching at this point, but, well, I’m also not ready to concede that the Pirates have enough starting pitching. A rotation of Cole/Liriano/Burnett/Locke/Worley strikes me as adequate at this point. Cole is a bit of a wild card since he didn’t make a big step forward last year, Liriano is a bit of a wild card because he’s Francisco Liriano, Burnett is old, Worley is interesting enough for a back-end starter, and still can’t really trust Jeff Locke at all for any extended stretch of time. Help might be coming in the form of Charlie Morton, Jameson Taillon, and Nick Kingham, or it might not. For various reasons that I’m sure we’ll get into in the coming weeks and months, I have my concerns about all three of those guys. I think that the Pirates can probably get away with this rotation and that the potential even exists for it to be very good by the end of the season, but, well, think back on the 16 mostly ugly starts made by Wandy Rodriguez and Brandon Cumpton in the season’s first half and find the Pirates two extra wins. I completely understand that it’s more important to be at your best in August and September than it is in April and May, but that’s the difference in the NL Central right there.
Obviously trading Alvarez or signing McCarthy would’ve been big, Liriano-signing-level moves. I don’t think the Pirates necessarily need one more big move this winter; I’d honestly feel better just knowing that they had one more talented arm to throw into the mix of guys that might help them at some point in 2015 (I will, again, say that Kris Medlen makes sense to me if his TJ recovery is going well enough). I suppose at this point that I’d just read the Alvarez and McCarthy rumors as signs that maybe the Pirates aren’t quite done yet this winter, and I think that that’s encouraging.
