Pirates offer Freddy multi-year extension

The PG is reporting today that the Pirates have offered Freddy Sanchez a multi-year contract and since the quote is coming from Frank Coonelly, there's little reason to doubt this. If it's a two year deal to take us through his arbitration years ... great. If it's anything more than that ... ugh.

Let's play a game. Which seems more likely to happen in 2008: Freddy Sanchez hitting .340/.380/.440 or Freddy Sanchez hitting .285/.320/.390? If you picked the second one, you're on the same page I am. In fact, towards the end of the season I said at least twice that Freddy Sanchez needed to be traded because he's one of the few players on the team with any trade value and that value is likely to disappear quickly. I'm sticking with that statement. If he does put up a line that's similar to the second one, how much would playing Brian Bixler over him hurt the Pirates? His defense isn't great at second base by any measure. If another GM is going to overpay for anyone on the Pirates' roster right now it's going to be 2-time all-star, champion of adversity, all-around good guy Freddy Sanchez (actually, this should be probably be in the past tense since most of the moving and shaking in the middle infield positions seems to be done for this winter). Extending him beyond 2009 makes even less sense to me than not trading him.