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Pirates Reportedly Decline Options On Chris Snyder, Paul Maholm, Ronny Cedeno and Ryan Doumit

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The news is going to come fast and furious from around MLB today. Tony LaRussa's retirement will be the front page headline, but the Pirates have decisions to make. Both the Trib and Post-Gazette are reporting the Pirates have decided not to pick up Chris Snyder's option. This isn't a surprse--can anything they do today actually surprise--but the tenor makes it sound like the Pirates are also not interested in bringing Snyder back at a reduced salary. That may be just me incorrectly reading the tea leaves, but that is my impression. UPDATE: Rob Biertempfel is also tweeting the Pirates have also informed Paul Maholm they will not pick up his option. UPDATE 2: The Pirates have officially announced they have also declined the options on Ronny Cedeno and Ryan Doumit (as well as Maholm and Snyder). The Cedeno move is a mistake, in my opinion. UPDATE 3: Jen Langosch tweeted (and cocktails noted in the comments) that NH has said the lines of communication are still open with all four players. However, comments from Maholm and Doumit suggest they are ready to move on. I would expect Cedeno is as well. UPDATE 4 By Charlie: For whatever it's worth, my take on this is here. I really hope I'm pleasantly surprised by this offseason, but I have little faith that I will be. I don't really understand the Cedeno move, since his option was cheap and he'd be very nice to have around as a utility infielder even if the Pirates grabbed another shortstop on the free-agent market. (He only would have cost $2.8 million, effectively, and the Pirates paid $4 million for two years of Ramon Vazquez, so it isn't as if such an expenditure would have been unprecedented, nor should it has been.) But losing Cedeno isn't necessarily a disaster, since there will be at least a couple reasonable free agents available. The Maholm move is disheartening, for reasons we've already discussed many times. I don't mind letting Doumit and Snyder test the waters, given the prices of their options, but I certainly hope Neal Huntington has a plan to find a new catcher.