Wow. I've never seen the Pirates' management hierarchy explained so clearly:
McClatchy makes the baseball decisions. I became much surer of this over the past year. The Nuttings trust him implicitly to oversee moves made by the baseball operations staff and to do things like hiring Jim Tracy or extending Dave Littlefield's contract...
Littlefield decides what to do with the money allotted to him. The major-league payroll and development money -- not the same thing, necessarily -- are placed in his hands. Thus, if you have a complaint -- as so many do -- about why so much more of it goes toward one-year rentals rather than building up a sound developmental system, this is where to aim it.
Wow. So it's Littlefield's fault.