Everyone In Unison: Pirates Likely To Be Quiet At Deadline

After a weekend mostly spent away from the computer, I came back aiming to write something big yesterday, but there was surprisingly little news. By this point in July, the Bucs are usually heading loudly toward the trade deadline, but this year there's almost nothing. I'm going to chronicle the deadline pretty seriously over at SB Nation Pittsburgh, with the aim of going into a bunch of detail here if anything appears to be imminent or actually happens. I started the thread over there yesterday, though, and the only real "news" is that Dejan Kovacevic, Jenifer Langosch and John Perrotto all piped up to say it's pretty likely that very little will happen.

The reasons are obvious - most of the Pirates' veteran acquisitions have been bad. And there's no real reason to rush into trading any of the players who have played well, mostly because the Pirates can control their rights for a couple years or more, but also because there's much less need for the type of prospect the Bucs were able to acquire in the deals they made last year - you know, the interesting, Grade-B level starting pitching prospect. There are enough interesting arms to fill out the rosters of Bradenton and West Virginia for the next couple of years, and that will be doubly true once the Pirates finish signing their pitching-heavy 2010 draft class. The sorts of hitters the Pirates might be able to get for the talent that's available are mostly of the Josh Harrison variety - intriguing, but not really anything to build your franchise around.

This isn't to say that the Pirates should rest on their laurels, because plainly there's lots of work to be done in the minors, but there are now enough vaguely interesting prospects in the system for the Bucs to take advantage of the opportunities that minor league playing time creates. What the Pirates really need now is impact guys, and they're unlikely to get any of those in trades. So the only player who's likely to be moved is Octavio Dotel, whose market value as a "proven closer" (TM) likely exceeds his immediate value to the Bucs. 

-P- By the way, Ray Oaks has a good feature over at my other site about the beginning of the Pedro Alvarez era and the end of the Andy LaRoche era.