A way for DL to impress me

The main topic of today's Pirates Notebook is the Pirates' need for a left handed masher. The Pirates' inability to find one of those is kind of curious. Their park is clearly built specifically for left-handed mashers, and yet we haven't had anything even close to one since Giles left. Leaving the "clutch" argument aside, Bay has pretty much done a dead-on Giles impersonation at the plate since he's gotten here. The thing is, he hits most of his homers on the road (18 of 25 so far this year and 25 of 32 last year with SLG split of .500 at home vs. .589 on the road this year and .488 vs. .595 last year). This is pretty logical given the design of PNC, it's just that if Bay had ended up in Houston or Cincy, people would probably refer to him as the Canadian Pujols. Littlefield purportedly turned down a shot at a lefty masher in the form of Ryan Howard and took Wigginton (and while I know that rumor was everywhere, I suppose it's unfair to hang Littlefield for something we can't be 100% sure about, but then again this is a blog, so we'll do it anyways). This year he signed Burnitz, hoping that the call of the Clemente Wall would coax 30 or so homers out of a guy at the twilight of his career. It won't. Most likely, his desire for a left-handed bat will just lead to another failure on the level of the Burnitz experiment. There is one palatable (however unlikely) solution, mentioned briefly in the now famous "Six Man Rotation" notebook of late last week. Korean-born Japanese baseball star Sueng-Yeop Lee wants to come to America next year and the Pirates are supposed to be interested. He is the only player in the Japanese league to reach 400 homers before the age of 30 (he's got 404 and just turned 30 last week) besides the legendary Sadaharu Oh and is chasing down the all-time single season record of 55, held by Oh and the immortal Tuffy Rhodes. Sure, it's a risk. Sure, Japanese fences are typically a bit shorter than American fences. But who wants to see Burnitz or someone similar again? He wants to come to America and the supposed starting point is $3-$5 million a year. We can afford that, or maybe a little more. I don't know how you convince a guy to come to Pittsburgh when other MLB teams (Yankees included) are making offers, but I think Littlefield would be wise to find a way.