Seeing the Pirates in contention this year is awesome. It’s been a lot of things to a lot of people — affirmation of fanhood for some, a reason to watch baseball again for others — but mostly it’s just been fun, which isn’t a word usually associated with Pirate baseball. I want the Pirates to win this division more than I want anything in sports besides the Pirates winning the World Series, and I hope they do whatever they can to do it this year.
Here’s the thing, though. I never want to go back to a hopeless, endless streak of losing seasons. Earlier today on Twitter, I said that if you could promise me a World Series this year but that it would be followed with an 18-season losing streak after it, I wouldn’t take it. The Pirates can’t go back to being hopeless losers that don’t have a chance and that you can’t even envision having a chance. All of the goodwill they’ve built up this season, all of the new fans they’ve recruited and the old fans they’ve brought back, all of it would vanish and it would hurt more a second time around.
The Pirates’ choice isn’t between this year and the next 18, of course, but the reason the Pirates even got to the situation they were in when Neal Huntington and Frank Coonelly took over after the 2007 season is because no one that ran the club between 1993 and 2007 had any kind of vision whatsoever. The Pirates can never, ever lose sight of next year, whether next year is 2012 or 2014 or 2020. The second they do, they risk going back to where they were.
That’s not to say that they shouldn’t try to contend in 2011: they absolutely should. If you’re in first place on July 19th, you’re a contender and you owe it to your players and fans to behave like one. They shouldn’t be ruling anything out, but guys like Joel Hanrahan and Paul Maholm would make attractive trade targets right now and they’re almost certainly going to be untouchable because of their importance to the Pirates. Fringe prospects like the Double and Triple-A pitchers and maybe guys like Jordy Mercer or Matt Hague would be untouchable in the past because the Pirates needed to cast as wide a net as possible, but they should all be considered trade bait right now in 2011.
But the front office also owes it to the team and to the fans to not compromise the long-term vision just because they’re in contention a year or two earlier than they expected. This 2011 team was built with a long-term vision in mind, and it was a vision that included Starling Marte and Jose Tabata and Jameson Taillon and Stetson Allie and (to some extent) Gerrit Cole and unless they’re given a very good reason, they can’t compromise that vision. Exceptions exist to every rule, of course (ohhhh man, Colby Rasumus, if the Cardinals are serious about trading him and don’t mind giving the Pirates the NL Central title for a few years), but they’re pretty rare.
I suppose what I’m really saying is this: the Pirates should be considering everything at this trade deadline, and the future is still an important part of everything, no matter how much we fans are all focused on 2011.
