in the lineup for a year before passing judgment.

And perhaps Jose Tabata is not a headcase. I’d like to think that the best thing for him was to get out of the Yankee organization.

We got a bunch of young guys in the trades. Some will pan out, some will not. It will be interesting to go one-by-one next October and discuss who progressed, and who regressed.

One thing is for sure in my mind: We had almost nothing in the organization before the moves, but now we have several arms with some upside, and a couple position players who were highly regarded in their organizations before hitting some bumps this season.

There’s at least a little something to be positive about now.

My whole point is that we need to give the players we got more time before doing too much evaluation. Let’s look at the guys we got from all angles after they’ve had a full year in the Pirate organization.

Maybe Karstens and Ohlendorf will only turn out to be “roster fillers,” but neither has had much MLB service time to this point. We’re not even sure of what roles they will fill at this point. I think Ohlendorf is better suited for a relief role, and Karstens might do a pretty good pre-2008 Josh Fogg impression, and I’m not so sure that would be all bad, either.

What makes you so sure that D. McCutchen has more upside than Karstens and Ohlendorf?

Let’s see Jose Tabata show up in shape and have a big year at AA and AAA before getting too worked up about him as well.

( Bryan Morris appears to have a nice arm-a reconstructed one at that, so let’s see him get through spring training, after finishing 2008 with arm soreness, before we get too excited about him. )

The A’s are a really bad comparison for DK to make for the Pirates. The reason for this is because 1) The A’s have more talent in their organization especially in regards to pitching. 2) In reality, the A’s were not that far out the race last year until they dumped Harden. 3) The Angels are falling apart due to it being reup time for roughly their entire team, and they actually didn’t help themselves by signing Teixiera, another expiring contract. Beane sees an opportunity here to make a run at the division title and if it does not work out they can do what they always do, get great value for top players if they trade Holliday.

The bucs on the other hand have no pitching whatsoever, were nowhere near competing last year, and does not have a regressing division so, ot would be imprudent to follow the lead of the A’s.

I don’t feel I’m rushing to judgement on Karstens or Ohlendorf. Both had uninspiring records that preceded them. If either of them, over a full season, approaches a winning record with an ERA under 5, I’ll feel good about them.

In looking back, I see that Karstens’ overall stats weren’t horrible. However, after his first two games, he was pretty bad, including a 6.25 ERA. A guy with his stuff or lack thereof can’t get away with a 1.34 WHIP, IMO. Just 23 Ks in 56 IP doesn’t leave much margin for error, especially with the Pirate defense. If he’s someone who has to rely on defense for outs, he’s of no value to the Pirates now. As for Ohlendorf…yikes. A 1.80 WHIP even with supposed blow away stuff conjures up images of JVB.

McCutchen’s only narrow bit of upside is that he’s younger, not by the calendar (all three are within a month or so of each other), but by experience, meaning he’s had less time in the minors to flesh out a defining record.

My excitement with Tabata is that, having seen him play, I believe he’s an electric talent. What he makes of it remains to be seen.

To take it back up to the high-altitude view:

I think the Bay trade looked pretty good at the time, but “pretty good” is a relative thing. The smart money said Bay was going to be a key component of Boston’s stretch drive, regardless of how he matched up to Manny. That’s the wrong comparison. You knew the Sox were getting a major contributor. Us, on the other hand… LaRoche seemed to be the prize, but whether or not he got jerked around in LA, and whether or not it was a small sample size, his track record was not good in the Majors.

So we had LaRoche, and we had as much reason to think he’d blossom as we had reason to think that he would suck beyond almost all human comprehension in every facet of the game, including effort. (Sorry, I don’t like to level that charge at people whose life’s work it is to play sports, but I sat right by Andy in that famout LAD game that Dejan said was one of the worst of the year, and Andy mailed that one in, for my dough.)

That left us with us with:

Moss, who projected to be a warm body (just);

Hansen, who had no control (we knew this at the time),

and Morris, who was intriguing, but like Andy L, has as much chance to be a dud as he does to be a success.

That’s pretty good, but the fact that that’s “pretty good” is more a reflection on what passes for “pretty good” than on anything objective. We got that hash — not my feared “bunch of rummies,” that was the Nady trade (so far, and thinking only of the pitchers) — for a guy who helped Boston win games. In October.

Even at the time, you can sort of see where people might think “let’s keep the really good players that we don’t absolutely have to trade, if we’re going to get what has a fair chance of being crap in return” I’m not saying it’s the winning argument, but I think it’s available. (And it’s been given some respect in this post and the comments, which I think butresses the point.)

This seems to be where all the action is!

From my moniker – 37&Gone – you can tell that I’ve been a Pirates season ticket holder for 37 years, but I’m done. I just can’t take another dosage of clueless management.
I can’t endorse, by purchasing tickets, the Pirates’ philosophy of forcing us to watch players go thru growing pains only to trade them when they get to be polished ballpalyers and get crap in return like Andy LaRoche, Craig Hansen, Armando Rios, Ryan Vogeldoodle, Frank Brooks, Jose (the strikeout machine) Hernandez, Bobby Hill, Matt Brubeck, on and on and on.
Let me respectfully explain where you go wrong, Charlie.
Let me illustrate why teams who care about winning like the Astros do well, and the Pirates are looking at, in the least, 20, 21, 22 straight losing seasons.
Come back with me to the weekend of July 26-27, 2008.
We were 1/2 game behind the Astros in the standings. We needed pitching because we were watching the likes of Useless Herrera and John VanBatting Practice.
Houston needed pitching, too. Houston went out and got Randy Wolf and LaTroy Hawkins, no Hall of Famers, mind you. You know what we did.
On Sept. 8, just six weeks later, the Astros were 18-1/2 games ahead of us. THey made up 18-1/2 games and their best player, Lee, was out.
We’re stuck in this hopeless spiral of grabbing other teams farm-system discards in the hope that we can catch lightning in a bottle some day.
The Pirates insist on taking one step forward and two steps back. Instead of keeping building blocks, they rip down the whole building!
If the Pirates want to emulate another organization, tell them to take a walk down Gen’l Robinson Street and talk to the Steelers. The Steelers don’t panic and trade a person halfway through their walk year and gather crappy draft picks.
If a Steeler leaves for free agency, they take the money they offered the person they lost and spent it on somebody else.
Yes, I know the NFL has a salary cap, but 27 of the 30 MLB teams also have a de facto salary cap – otherwise known as a budget.
The Phillies won the NAt’l League East in 2007 and lost a big producer & solid fielder in Aaron Rowand. The Phillies then took trhe money the allotted for Rowand and spent it on Brad Lidge.
The last I looked, the Phillies and the Steelers were doing pretty good.
The Buccos? The only question in 2009 is what day will we lose our 100th game!!

the astros didnt acquire latroy hawkins and randy wolf because they’re committed to winning. they did it because ed wade is a moron. getting those two players cost wade what little high-end talent he had left in the minors, which he will pay dearly for in the next few years (assuming he keeps his job)

the difference between houston and pittsburgh is mostly that houston kept their two best hitters for the whole season, because pittsburgh was more concerned with trading their best players for prospects (what houston should be doing) while they were at their peak, as opposed to maybe getting lucky and winning 80 games.

you obviously dont understand this business called baseball. i’ll gladly take those season tickets of yours.

Charlie says:

… the Pirates are trying to trade for prospects not to take advantage of market conditions, but because they have to.

It’s clear that the Pirates need to acquire talent any way they can and rebuild the farm system from the ground up. Nevertheless, trading for prospects is an unreliable and, in this climate, somewhat unavailable avenue to the franchise. The “prospects” they can trade for are mostly B-list guys and future complementary players. These aren’t the guys that the Pirates “have to” get in order to become competitive once again… and this leads me to Dejan, who says:

And again, I repeat: Keeping Bay and the most of the rest of the current team would not have had to come at the expense of the other stuff the Pirates wanted to do, from Latin America to the draft to building up the system, so long as those remained funded properly.

IMO, the Pirates will only be able to restock the system in any meaningful way through several years of good drafts and successful international signings. Flipping Jason Bay for a handful of prospects wasn’t going to get it done. Comparing with the development timeframe of the Rays’ current roster, I don’t expect to see an actual competitive team at the major league level for at least five years, and that may be a best case scenario…

and speaking of scenarios, Charlie (and most of the commentariat that believes Bay had to be traded) seems to have expectations for the worst case scenario for Jason’s next four years… yes, he had knee problems… yes, he had a down year… yes, he has old player skills and yes, he’s entering the traditional decline phase of one’s career… nevertheless, Bay’s 2008 looked a lot like his 2004 and 2006 seasons, which were both quite good… even if he starts to decline in a year or two, he has plenty way to go before he becomes a burden… and heck, promote mccutchen, move nate to left and bay to right, and the OF defense should be better all-around, no?

It’s also easy to gloss over the point, but I think it’s worth reaffirming that there is real value in fielding a competitive team while this rebuilding takes place. We can sneer all we want about how keeping Jason Bay or adding Adam Dunn will only add three wins or whatever… I dunno about you, but all else being equal, I’ll take those extra three (or maybe four!) wins… Who knows? Maybe good fortune shines its light on this miserable franchise and they even crack .500… no, it’s not a goal, but it sure would be a welcome change of pace…

I may as well note that I was one of the weird few who liked the nady trade and disliked the bay trade at the time… nady/marte were playing over their heads, bay was right at his established (healthy) level… both returns looked one big guy and three lottery tickets, only tabata looks like a young grady sizemore, while laroche is perhaps a young mike lowell? and I thought the return for bay should have been greater, especially since the pirates had no pressing need to deal him… (admittedly, uniting the brothers laroche also smacked of a PR move to me)…

Some Pirates pitchers were underperforming, yes, but an even bigger problem was that their defense was giving them nothing to work with.

WTF? I mean, really. First of all, count it up – about 20 games last year featured the starter getting absolutely lit up. Not because Bay’s range is limited, but because Yoslan Herrera, Matt Morris, and JVB aren’t major league pitchers; we had 23 starts by guys who had no business in a Pirates, much less MLB, uniform. And that doesn’t include Karstens’ or Ohlendorf’s starts, nor Gorzo’s repeated failures (was his 1 BB/INN ratio in April the fault of the D?)

Furthermore, when you actually look at ground ball ratios, there’s no particular pattern – Maholm’s and Herrera’s are almost identical, which suggests pretty strongly that the Pirates’ D was not the defining characteristic in their relatives pitching performances. Furthermore, our worst 2 regular starters (Gorzo and Snell) had low ratios (close to 1) – which isn’t a good sign for the pitcher, but sure as hell indicates that it wasn’t primarily the D hurting them.

Now, a poor D is a bad sign if you’re looking to the future – it’s not something to build on – but it’s almost completely irrelevant to 2008’s pitching performances.

Why not trade McLouth, Maholm, and/or Doumit?

First of all, there seems to be a very strong feeling here that they are mediocre players having their career seasons (maybe not Maholm). Second of all, their value is sky-high right now. Third of all, we only have them until 2011. 2009 will be the worst season of the last 16, with or without them. 2010 could, if everything goes right, see the Bucs back at .475. And now you’re left with one year to hope that everything comes together before you blow up the team again. What’s the point? Trade some or all of these guys now, get a half dozen legit AA and AAA prospects, and you’re on the same timetable, but with a much bigger window for actually winning.

This post is a defense of the Bay trade, but I’m really curious to see a serious discussion of the original Q. The questioner keys in on what I have always thought was the key insight of Beane, which is finding the systematically undervalued players, not obsessing over one particular type of player, regardless of how he’s valued. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read and heard people insisting that the only way to win is with the type of players Beane was finding 10 years ago, which completely misses the point of Moneyball (if you don’t get that, I have some Collateralized Debt Obligations I’d love to sell you).

So is it true that FAs are undervalued in this market, and prospects overvalued? Jack WIlson is a problematic trade piece, but I can’t help but think that the decision to sign Everett – Jack Wilson without the bat – is a sign that teams would rather pay a bit less for a worse player than give up any prospects. Now, that may be a wise decision for the team keeping the prospects, but it suggests that teams trying to get prospects should recognize that they’re getting poor value.

To Huntington’s great credit, he seems to recognize this – he didn’t give Jack up for nothing, and he came very close to keeping Bay when no one was offering enough. But is the corollary that we should be looking for FA bargains (maybe reclamation projects, like Hamilton, or guys coming off injuries – something high upside, not just Wigginton types who, at best, win you a couple games this year only)?