Stupid stupid stupid

Yesterday, Dave Littlefield showed an amazing grasp of the fundamentals of baseball. Freddy Sanchez has a higher batting average, on base percentage, and slugging percentage than Joe Randa. He's much younger, cheaper, and plays at least equal defense to the old guy. Thus, Freddy Sanchez should probably start. Today things go in the complete opposite direction as a source close to the team reveals to Dejan that the Buccos are planning on trying to extend Casey past this year. This is incredibly stupid and very, very shortsighted, as most of what Littlefield does is. Some reasons why:

• Sean Casey is an old 31. He suffers lots of "freak injuries." That's just a term that means he gets hurt in situations that other people don't. If we're going to commit a considerable amount of cash to Casey, we'd still likely need to pay for a decent backup. And by decent, I'm going for "better than Daryle Ward."
• There will be no hometown discount for the Pirates. Casey didn't want to come here for a reason, he's 31, he's not going to have a long career (see above) and he's never really won much of anything. The Pirates can blab about "hometown discount" all they want, but his agent will play us just like Bill Mueller's agent did this offseason.
• He doesn't hit when he's hurt, which is always. After a hot 8 at-bats back from his back injury, he's been terrible. Last year he was terrible as far as lumbering first baseman go (OPS under .800) and he played most of the year with various injuries.
• In fact, now that we're on OPS, he's only had one year over .800 since 2002.

I could go on to bring Craig Wilson into this, but that's not even the point really. Of course, Wilson is at least Casey's equal with a glove at first base and is a better hitter in just about every aspect of hitting, minus batting average, plus he's two years younger, likely much cheaper, and probably less likely to get hurt. But like I said, that's not the point (though it helps), the point is that signing Casey does nothing to solve the Pirates problems long term, and it likely does nothing in the short term either. I like Sean Casey, I think he's a great guy, I realize that he makes Pittsburgh proud. But he made the city proud when he was in Cincy, and he'll still do it if he plays somewhere else next year.