Ray Searage helped make Edinson Volquez a rich man: Jon Heyman reported this afternoon that the Royals have signed Volquez to a two-year/$20 million deal. I am of two minds about this deal. My first thought is that I’m happy that the Pirates didn’t give this sort of deal to Volquez. I’m relatively certain that his 2014 was a mirage and while I have a lot of confidence in the Pirates’ defense (or in the Pirates’ analytics team to position their defense properly, at least), there’s just nothing anywhere that suggests that the “good” 2014 Volquez is any closer to the real Volquez than the “bad” Volquez that pitched from 2009-2013. Let someone else overpay him in the future for what he did in the recent past.
On the other hand, baseball’s post-winter meetings trade and free agent markets have moved quickly and there’s no indication anywhere that the Pirates want any part in it. I still wonder about their plan at first base (that’s a post that’s coming soon), I still worry about the depth of the rotation, and I still have a general unease that suddenly it seems like there’s a pretty good chance that the 2015 Pirates will look a lot like the good-but-not-good-enough 2014 Pirates, minus Russell Martin. I’m sure that I’ll say over and over again in the next few months that the best places for the Pirates to improve are all with internal player maturation (Cole, Polanco, Marte) and I do realize that that’s the honest truth of the Pirates current situation and it has been since the moment the season ended. Still, I dunno, it feels like stopping here would leave an awful lot of uncertainty headed into next season, and while the Pirates overcame a similar uncertainty last year, I was hoping that that sort of thing wasn’t going to be an every-year event.
