The Pirates Acquire A.J. Burnett. Do I Like This Deal?

you saying something about this before…if it’s the comment I’m thinking of your neighbor (or brother or friend or something) makes fried chicken that Cutch really likes. At one such chicken-eating extravaganza McCutchen confided in your source that he will never resign with Pittsburgh because he wants to play for the Yankees. If this is the case, I can’t disagree more strongly. First of all, McCutchen would not put it out there that he will not stay with his current team any longer than he has to because he wants to go to (arguably) the most hated team in every small market in America. More importantly if the money and years are right, I truly believe a deal gets done. Pro baseball is a business. These guys aren’t fans the way all of us are. Maybe he did grow up loving the Yankees (so did Cole BTW) and all things being equal, he might like to put on pinstripes before his career is over. However, he would not reject a smart business deal just because he wants to stand in the same sun-soaked centerfield that was once covered by Brett Gardner.

The Pirates want 1 or 2 free agent years which means Cutch still would hit free agency at 30 or 31 and could still sign a mega-deal. McCutchen wants to be paid like a star and it’s likely that the final two years of that contract would pay him as much or more than he’d get in the first couple years of any free-agent mega deal. The Pirates should not just buy out McCutchen’s arb years now because that takes all leverage that they could have away from them in negotiations to keep him past 2015. To get something like this done, the Pirates are probably going to have to put together some kind of deal resembling the contracts Markakis, Upton, Bruce and CarGo have signed. If that’s on the table it will get done.

There are a lot of wannbe GMs and scouts running around quoting stats other than the obvious in-order to make a player look better than he really is

Do you really think W-L record and ERA are better indicators of ability than things like K/9, FIP, and xFIP? Just because W-L is easy to track and has been around forever means it’s even the slightest bit useful for predicting future performance and evaluating talent level. Think for a moment about how context dependent W-L and ERA are. If you have reason to believe they don’t tell the whole story, why is using something else somehow deceptive (i.e. used “just to make the trade look better”)?

You can use whatever stats you want other than win/loss and ERA, but you can’t hide the loss in velocity, and you can’t hide the fact that he’s not the dominant pitcher he was when he was given that contract.

We’re paying him less than half of that contract and we’re not paying him to be the pitcher he was when he signed that contract. We’re paying $5 mil next year for him to eat innings, stabilize the rotation, and (in my mind at least) basically fill the Maholm role for $4 mil less with arguably better upside.

Anyone who thinks the comparisons to Morris and Casey are not valid is only delusional.

Come on, man, you can’t just insult people! That doesn’t help the debate. Do you have any evidence to support that? I’d contend that Morris was being paid $10 mil/yr and had posted three straight seasons with fewer than 6 K/9 and fewer than 1 WAR. Burnett is making way less, has been more productive over the last few years, AND there are reasons to expect him to improve given the fact that his HR problems could be cured simply with the move from the AL (B)East to the Pujols-Prince-and-Braun-(for 50 games)-less NL Central and a more neutral park. I just don’t see any comparison other than that they were both older pitchers at the time of the trade.

Simply put, if the Yankees thought Burnett could still help them win, they wouldn’t have been so eager to get rid of him, and they certainly woudln’t have settled for two lower level prospects in return.

Or maybe they had a crowded rotation and wanted to slash some salary for luxury tax/signing a DH purposes? They didn’t want to spend $33 mil over the next two years on a guy they might not even have a place for. Trying to lose a large portion of his salary while acquiring two even marginally interesting minor league players was obviously a very appealing option and thus the decision to move him, in and of itself, says nothing about his value to the Pirates at $13 mil over two years.