I’m a day behind on this story, but I think it’s an important one to weigh in on. Yesterday Bob Nutting talked to Rob Biertempfel at the Trib, saying that he’d like Andrew McCutchen to be a Pirate for a “long, long time” and Biertempfel’s sources indicated that while the Pirates are not actively engaged in extension talks with McCutchen, that the team would be willing to go to “great lengths” to keep him in black and gold.
I’m going to be up front here: this story immediately sends my insides churning. There’s no easy way to talk about this: McCutchen is straight up one of the five best players in baseball, and you could make a pretty strong argument that no player means more to his team than McCutchen does to the Pirates, given where the Pirates are now and where they were a few years ago. It’s almost impossible to talk about what he means to the Pirates right now because the hyperbole used would seem like overkill but ultimately probably fall short of accurately describing McCutchen. There is a part of me that wants McCutchen to be a Pirate for forever, because what Pirate fan in their right mind wouldn’t want that?
Of course, there’s a different part of me that knows that the Bucs Dugout post about this is dead-on balls accurate. The Pirates have McCutchen signed through the prime of his career right now, as with the option they have on his current deal he can’t become a free agent until after the 2018 season, at which point he’ll be 32 years old. Any extension talk means paying McCutchen $25 million+ for his age 32-35 or 36 seasons, and that sort of decision-making is what gets small market teams into deep holes. Back in 2010, it seemed unthinkable for Albert Pujols to play anywhere but St. Louis. The Cardinals drew a line, though, and it’s hard to imagine them being where they are right now with $30 million tied up in a declining player like Pujols.
This is the worst. I understand the realities of baseball’s market imbalance and I’m happy that the Pirates are finally becoming a team that can walk the small market tightrope well. But I hate that that means that keeping a player like Andrew McCutchen in a Pirate uniform indefinitely is likely bad business, I hate the divide that talking about this frankly creates among the fans, and I hate the system that means that it’ll likely be some other team will reward Andrew McCutchen for what he’s done in Pittsburgh because the chances the Pirates can adequately do it themselves are slim. There are many ways that small market teams can keep themselves afloat and compete with baseball’s big-market titans, but this sort of thing really isn’t a place that they can, and it sucks.
This is life, though. As much as I’d like to tell you that the thing to do is to sit back and enjoy this Pirate team that’s in front of us in 2015, if the Pirates are going to extend McCutchen it’s much more likely to happen now or next off-season than it is as his free agency date draws closer. I suppose the best we can do is this: the fact that we’re approaching this cross-roads with McCutchen is a good thing, because it couldn’t happen if the Pirates weren’t any good at baseball.
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