Remember when re-signing Doug Mientkiewicz was the most important thing since ever? Fun times.
I generally try not to call out people for things they said seven months ago. I've certainly said my fair share of things that turned out to be wrong, or silly, or irrelevant in retrospect. Every baseball writer has, and it's good to be forgiving, because predicting what's going to happen in a baseball season can be an almost comically inexact science.
The furor over Mientkiewicz, though, was so amazingly shortsighted that it deserves to be mentioned again, just so we don't go through it again in a few months with some other player. The entire 2008-2009 offseason was dominated by talk about how important it is to re-sign Doug Mientkiewicz and how important it was to not trade Jack Wilson. We talked about those things at least once a week.
Mientkiewicz has done nothing, and although neither team could have known it at the time, if the Pirates had kept the Dodgers from signing him, the Dodgers would probably still have Delwyn Young. But hey... veteran leadership!