Junk like this just drives me crazy.
For most of this offseason, Littlefield has focused on LaRoche, the Braves' 27-year-old first baseman who hit 32 home runs last season. He has done so to the point of telling agents who represent hitters through free agency that the Pirates will make no move until they know for certain if they can land LaRoche...
Got that? Littlefield won't make any moves until he knows whether he can get LaRoche, and he probably can't get LaRoche because he won't trade Duffy. Littlefield has been completely paralyzed this offseason, and the reason why is apparently because Chris @#$* Duffy is so incredibly important. Why a 26 year-old with a blah minor league pedigree, a record that demonstrates questionable commitment to baseball, and a .700 career OPS should be so important as to completely derail an entire offseason is completely beyond me. By the way, that last bit of non-logic about "creating two holes to fill one" shows that the Pirates would agree with the narrator in the poem "Smart" by Shel Silverstein:
...[T]he sides have exchanged other proposals, with Atlanta's wish being Gonzalez plus another player, possibly center fielder Chris Duffy. The Pirates' position on that, as one team official put it, was that "we'd be creating two holes to fill one."
My dad gave me one dollar bill
'Cause I'm his smartest son,
And I swapped it for two shiny quarters
'Cause two is more than one!
So here are the two holes Littlefield doesn't want, at closer and center field.
'Cause I'm his smartest son,
And I swapped it for two shiny quarters
'Cause two is more than one!
O O
And here's the hole Littlefield would rather have, in the middle of the lineup:
Me, I'd rather worry about the two little holes, but unlike the narrator in the poem, I'm not, you know, "Smart."