The draft and the future

Ahh, 'tis that time of year again.

Actually, that statement can go a couple ways. It's almost June and if you guys are anything like me, you're currently thinking, "Man, this Pirate team is awful. They're bad in the majors and I can't see how McCutchen and Walker are going to be good enough to completely turn things around in the next two years. We are hopeless." You probably have this thought just about every single year around June 1st. Maybe the names are changed, but the sentiment remains the same. I know that's about how it works for me.

But think about everything that has happened since this time last year. There was a draft. In the draft, we went for the "safe" pick. Brad Lincoln, a pitcher out of Houston whose stock had risen through the roof after a summer in the Cape Cod League and a great senior year. It's true that Lincoln was pretty widely regarded as the second best pitching prospect in the draft at the time. Then again, the guy that was rated as the best prospect in the draft was still on the board. We drafted Lincoln and he got hurt after throwing a very few number of innings for us. Could we have seen this coming? It's neither here nor there. But imagine we drafted someone else in that slot. Imagine we drafted Andew Miller and signed him or imagine we ignored the concerns around Tim Lincecum and drafted him.

Now fast forward a month and a half. It's the trade deadline. We made a ton of moves that day and most of them galled me at the time. Only one really still bothers me. You know which one... Oliver Perez and Roberto Hernandez for Xavier Nady. Nady is a platoon player. Perez is an immense baseball talent. The scales were so tipped on this trade it wasn't funny then and it never will be. For the Pirates to have completely given up on a talent like Perez at his age is ludicrous. It will haunt Pirate fans and Dave Littlefield for years to come.

Now imagine we are in this alternate universe, one in which the Pirates had some balls at the draft table and the coaching staff to fix Oliver Perez. On May 31st, 2007 our starting rotation would be Gorzelanny/Snell/Miller-Lincecum/Perez/Duke or Maholm. Look at the National League Central. Tell me a team with that rotation wouldn't be competitive in the Central. And all we'd be short of our current team is Xavier Nady, a streaky hitter that generally can't hit right-handed pitching to save his life. One year and this team could be well on it's way to turning around.

So what's the point of this? I don't mean to harshly criticize anyone for taking Lincoln instead of Miller or Lincecum, a lot of people that know a lot about the draft thought Lincoln wasn't a bad pick at the time. But the real problem with the Pirates is that there's no vision. Their goal right now is 2009, a year that's too far away to know anything about. No vision is required to set 2009 as a goal in 2006 or 2007. You say, "the guys we have will be better and these guys will be here and we'll be good," and like magic you have yourself a three-year plan. Those things never work out. Unless every single move is geared towards making the team better as soon as possible, none of the moves being made are anything but lateral. That's where the Pirates are right now, and that's where I'm afraid they're going to stay.