Where have you gone, Andy Van Slyke?

Jason Marquis is going to sign a 3 year, $21 million deal with the Cubs . I've never seen a team spend money in one off season like these Cubs have. They've dished out a quarter of a billion dollars on free agent contracts in their desperate attempt to build a team for Lou Piniella to manage. Jason Marquis had an ERA over 6.00 last year and lost his roster spot in the playoffs to Anthony Reyes, a rookie with 21 career starts. This is now worth $7 million a year. Lots of people thought the Pirates would look to Marquis to fill the hole in the rotation, but I'm not sure I'd want him for half of what he signed for. Anyways, this deal certainly pushes Jeff Suppan's price up to the "The Pirates could afford it, but please, please, please let's not pay Jeff Suppan $52 million for four years" range (that's if the insane Gil Meche deal didn't do that already). I hate saying this, but at this point I think Chacon is the best option for the Pirates as f...

The deadline for teams to offer their free agents arbitration was last night at midnight. This is slightly less of a big deal than it's been in the past because players that aren't offered arbitration no longer have to wait until May 1st to suit up with their old team. The reason it still matters is that anyone that's offered arbitration by their old team and rejects the offer, then signs with a new team will cost their new team draft picks (Cory breaks it down here ). Anyways, of the big names left, Zito and Jason Schmidt were offered arbitration while Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, and Andy Pettitte were not. Carlos Lee and David Dellucci, who both have preliminary agreements with other teams in place, were offered arbitration. Of potential interest to the Pirates, Jeff Suppan, Vincente Padilla, and Gil Meche were all offered arbitration while Tomo Ohka was not. Jeromy Burnitz (who somehow is a Type B free agent and would've garnered us a compensation pick, though he l...

You may say that Dave Littlefield hasn't done anything this off-season, but Ed Eagle would disagree with you if you said that (though, if it makes you feel better, I agree with you). Eagle's article today talks about how Littlefield has been "setting the groundwork" for moves that may come as early as during the winter meetings next week. DL had a very busy winter meeting last year when he traded for Sean Casey and dumped Mark Redman off on the Royals. I can't imagine that he's going to be that busy this year, given his near inactivity to this point. Then again, I'm searching through the archives from last year and I can't find much proof that things were different at this point last year. In the linked article above, Eagle assures us DL is looking to go younger (at least in comparison to Casey) at the meetings this winter. We can only hope.

With only a little over a week left until the Winter Meetings kick off, Dejan Kovacevic returns to the PG today with two Pirate related stories, which is pretty much two more stories than we've seen about the team from the PG since his post-season wrap in October. The first story is similar to what I said here , that the crazy off-season market could benefit the Pirates if they play their cards right in the trade market. In the article Littlefield has this to say about the market: Sure, it's going to help us. You've got to go someplace to get players. If the free-agent market gets expensive, you would think, in general, that the trade market would increase, as well, as far as value. It's nice to know that DL's at least got his mind on the right track this winter. I doubt he's thinking of going as far as I talked about in my post (that would be trading EVERYone), but at least he's saying the right things. From the same article, we get what we bloggers thriv...

Holy freaking crap, there's some Pirate news to talk about. Rotoworld is relaying the rumor in from Denver that the Pirates and Rockies are discussing a Paul Maholm for Brad Hawpe trade (the Rocky Mountain News article is here ). Hawpe put up a .293/.383/.515 line with 22 HR and 84 RBIs in 499 ABs last year, so we could likely suspect something similar in Pittsburgh since he's a lefty. He played some first base in the low minors but has been a right fielder for a few years now. He had two years in the minors in which he absolutely raked at the plate, 2002 in high class A Salem in which he OPS'd 1.034 and was named league MVP and 2004 in offense friendly AAA Colorado Springs where he slugged .652 in 92 games before a call-up to Colorado. I would guess that a guy like Hawpe is the ceiling for a straight-up Maholm deal, though Rotoworld relays that the Rockies want more and the Pirates may be willing to part with Gorzellany instead of Maholm to make this trade happen. I hope ...

Finally an awards choice I can sink my teeth into a little bit. It's not that Ryan Howard is a bad choice for MVP, because he isn't. It's just that Albert Pujols is a better choice. I won't make the argument that Pujols made the playoffs and Howard didn't because, well, the Cards finished with a worse record than the Phillies. First off, Pujols lead the league in VORP despite missing some considerable time with his "oblique" strain or whatever it was. It was a narrow lead, but it was there. You can throw in that Pujols was the whole Cards lineup for long stretches of the year with Edmonds missing long chunks of time and Scott Rolen being a less valuable third baseman( VORPwise ) than Freddy Sanchez. Throw in the homer that Pujols hit on this day (the part where I say "It was probably Pujols" really was Pujols, if you recall his big homer to pull out a win against the Padres when the Astros probably would've either tied or pulled within a g...

So the market has gone crazy, there's no use in debating that. The thing that I wonder about is why so many people are going all "woe is me" in regards of what this means for the Pirates. Here's the question: If the Pirates had limitless funds to spend, would you want them spent on 8 years of Alfonso Soriano at $136 million? No, you wouldn't. Would you want them spent on 4 years of Justin Speier at $18 million? Or three years of Alex Gonzalez at $14 million? No, you wouldn't. A crazy market only serves to do one thing, create bad deals. The Cubs have been forced to pay $17M/year for Soriano for 8 years when their window for him, Rammy, Lee, and a healthy pitching staff is maybe (maybe!) one or two years. And yeah, they'll be good for those 1 or 2 years, but by the end of this contract my guess is that Soriano is going to be Mo Vaughn, sitting at home watching baseball while being the highest player in the league. To a good GM, it's not worth it. But t...

You've probably (OK, maybe is likely a better word) been wondering why I haven't been doing anything along the lines of Cory 's Fantasy GM posts or sifting through the free agent list looking for potential targets for the Buccos. I've been meaning to do something along those lines but haven't gotten around to it and I've finally decided to scrap the idea. You are probably asking why, so let's get to it. The truth of the matter is, I have absolutely no ability to get excited for another Dave Littlefield-lead off-season. Until something happens to give me reason to think otherwise, creating trades for Mark Teixeira or Chad Tracy or Marcus Giles on paper feels futile to me (note: I am not trying to take anything away from the people that do this in the offseason, I'm just explaining my own mindset for your benefit, please please please don't take out of this that I think everyone that posts about what they think DL should be doing this off-season is wa...

Dave Littlefield has finally commented on the Yuslan Herrera situation by talking to Paul Meyer and it's probably not what people expected to hear. We're aware of the player and we've been scouting him [for a while]. We're still scouting him and hope to attract him [to the Pirates]. Right now, that's basically it. The rest of Meyer's column is pretty much a rehash of everything else we've heard, though it doesn't say he pitched in the 2004 Olympics (Olympic baseball stats are incredibly hard to find, I've been trying for a couple days now, and Herrera seems to appear on some lists of that Cuban team's roster and not on others). There's also one other thing that I haven't seen anywhere else. Meyer says, It's unlikely Herrera, assuming the Pirates sign him, would be with the major-league team next season. Hmm, that's interesting, though there's a good chance that Meyer knows as much about this guy as we do and he's just s...

There is lots of speculating what the Yuslan Herrara signing means for the rest of the off-season going on, which is natural. It may well mean that DL is planning on trading off one of our other four starters for a big bat, then signing a pitcher to fill the resulting spot in the rotation. It does almost certainly mean that we can kiss Shawn Chacon goodbye (though we already knew that). Still, it's hard to say what DL is planning without knowing what they're going to be paying Herrara. Since he was a fairly highly regarded Cuban defector, I'd imagine that he's not going to be as cheap as we might think. This move may well take the place of signing a free agent off of the typical market, say John Thomson or Jason Marquis (two players from the list of guys who have filed that seem like probable and affordable targets for the Pirates; they also might do something like go out and overpay for Weaver, but I thinking (hoping?) he pitched himself out of our price range in the ...

As the old saying goes, you've got to trade something to get something. If Dave Littlefield is serious about adding some left-handed pop to the lineup, he's got to trade for something because the free agent market is less than promising. So who should DL give up? My candidates, in order. Mike Gonzalez- After I wrote my bullpen review , Charlie pointed out that decent-to-good left handed relievers brought us Brian Giles, Jack Wilson (when he was a top prospect in the Cardinals system), and helped bring us Freddy Sanchez . It can be argued (rather easily argued actually) that Gonzalez is better than Rincon, Christiansen, and Saurbeck. He should be fairly easy to replace from within. It's very unlikely that he'll match his 2006 again because of tendency to walk a ton of people. Trading Gonzalez now would be selling high. I think the Pirates have to seriously consider doing this. Damaso Marte- For all of the same reasons above, only Marte is less valuable to us than Gonzo i...