Brandon Inge is the best we can do for a rumor?

There's lots of talk in the thread of the post below and all over these here internets about Brandon Inge coming to Pittsburgh. Charlie writes up a good post on his blog about the actual possible benefits of adding a guy like Inge to the mix here. I'll use his post as a jumping off point: instead of taking the negative stance that Inge is an awful acquisition, we'll start at "intriguing." And even if we start there, I don't like it very much.

Here's the thing: if you view each of Dave Littlefield's trades in a vacuum, he wasn't a bad general manager. As late as like June of last year my uncle (who is a devoted Pirate fan) was telling my dad that I was being way too hard on DL here on WHYGAVS and that he'd made a lot of good moves. The thing was, Littlefield's moves never got us anywhere. Oliver Perez and Roberto Hernandez for Xavier Nady and Mike Gonzalez for Adam LaRoche aren't necessarily bad trades, but they are redundant. Kris Benson probably wasn't worth more than Ty Wigginton, but the DL had a chance to get more and the Pirates had no idea how to use Wigginton once they had him. Strictly speaking, Dave Williams for Sean Casey is a good trade, but it's not a good move when you're expecting Casey to be a power hitting left-handed bat. As I wrote in my One Craig Wilson post, Littlefield was constantly shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic. Instead of consciously trying to build something, Littlefield was always attempting to maintain a status quo that never existed. It was the annual "Drive for 75," if you will.

If we trade for Inge, I don't see it being much different than any of the moves Littlefield made that ultimately ended up being so infuriating. Inge is a guy that might be able to step in and be better at third base than Jose Bautista, but he also might not (quantifying the differences between offense and defense and coupling them with projections are never terribly easy). Inge would probably come cheap because of his contract, Miguel Cabrera, and the fact that he's not a very good hitter. He would probably make the Pirates a little better and we could probably swing a trade for him that would go down in our favor. But the fact of the matter is that he'll only serve to make the Pirates a little better right now. What's Brandon Inge at third base next year? A jump from 68 wins to 70 wins? Maybe. It's not that it would be a bad move to trade for Inge, strictly speaking, it's just that it would be a classic Dave Littlefield move. I hate to say this, but the front office should be much more concerned with the team that will be taking the field in two or three years than the team that will be taking the field in 2008. It was lack of vision for things like that that doomed Littlefield and I'd hate for Huntington's first major move to be in the same vein.