Where have you gone, Andy Van Slyke?

If there's one GM in the bigs crazier than Dave Littlefield, it's Jim Duquette. Not only did he offer Burnitz that 2 year deal, now he's royally pissed Burnitz signed with someone else . Meanwhile, Oriole fans are rejoicing at the fact that someone was stupid enough to take Burnitz off their hands. I can't believe this is all taking place over Jeromy F-ing Burnitz. If he hadn't just officially signed with us today, I'd find this all hilarious.

It's Wednesday and the new year brings a lengthy new Q&A to us. A lot of it deals with the Burnitz signing, which Dejan tries to at least partially defend. Most of you probably know I find the signing completely indefensible, and I'll leave it at that. There's also a lot of Randa questions that are dealt with. He closes with reader suggestions on how to get people interested in the Buccos and most of them are pretty interesting to read, though most of them deal with winning, which I'm becoming increasingly convinced that this front office has no interest in doing.

This is part one of my "Dave Littlefield is the Smartest GM in the National League" series, or perhaps more accurately "Why I think Dave Littlefield is an evil genius." The Introduction can be found here , part two here , part three here , and part four here . The Illusion of Competition is something that I've started to talk about a couple times in the past after the Randa and Casey moves. I've also seen it called other things elsewhere, like "The Drive for 75" (at OnlyBucs ) but I'm going to stick with the "Illusion of Competition." The idea is that Dave Littlefield set out in the offseason with the goal of building a team that wouldn't actually compete, but instead appear to be improved enough to get the average, typical Pirate fan interested in the team. He doesn't care what I think, I'll probably be at games next year no matter what. He probably doesn't care what most of you readers think, because let's face i...

There's no sarcasm at all in that title. After the Hernandez signing, the Randa signing, and now the Burnitz signing I've done a lot of thinking about the Pirates, where they're headed and what in God's name they're thinking. I've talked about it a lot with other baseball fans and other Pirates fans, especially my dad, and I've come to a conclusion. Think about any movie with a strong anti-hero. I'm thinking Michael Corleone in the first Godfather (ahh, Sports Guy movie reference alert, yes, I got his book for Christmas, can you tell?), the Bride in the Kill Bill movies, the McManus brothers in the Boondock Saints , people like that. They aren't good guys, hell, they aren't even close. But something about what they do is so beautifully wrong and so perfectly twisted to benefit themselves that you can't help but admire it in spite of yourself. Judging by this offseason, I think Dave Littlefield (and to a certain extent, the owners) is a l...

Looks like it's official, Jeromy Burnitz is going to be a Pirate . Instead of the initially reported 2 year, $12 million deal it looks like a one year deal in the neighborhood of $6 million. Last offseason he was coming off of a monster season (.283/37/110, .916 OPS, albeit in Coors field) and a free agent. He signed a $4.5 million deal with the Cubs (he was too expensive for us). He put up a .757 OPS (lowest full season OPS of his career except for 2002) and, as Rowdy notes , completely disentegrated in the second half. Of course that happened because he was 36 last year. Now that he's 37 and coming off of one of the worst seasons in his career, we can suddenly afford him at the bargain rate of A $1.5 MILLION RAISE to $6 million for one year (plus an unknown "mutual club option"). Stop me if I'm wrong, but this is insanity. The only potential advantages he gives us over our current roster is that he's probably better than Jody Gerut and he's a decent insu...

Jon Weisman of Dodger Thoughts has an interesting interview with John C. McGinley (aka Dr. Perry Cox of Scrubs aka Bob Slydell of Office Space ) about mostly baseball and Scrubs that I figured I'd give a link to since the new season of Scrubs finally starts tonight (and my brother and I have been obsessively watching the second season DVDs since he got them on Christmas). Over at Baseball Toaster's The Griddle (yeah, I've been perusing the Toaster's site this morning, could you tell?) Bob Timmerman weighs in on how Oriole fans must feel now that we've snatched Burnitz from under the Orioles, umm, beaks. I'll tell you how Pirates fans feel about it... JUST STICK WITH BALTIMORE, JEROMY.

I was about to go to sleep when I saw this . To summarize: Jeromy Burnitz, 2 years, $12 million (possibly the richest deal in franchise history), 37 years of age (older than Joe Randa). Pure insanity. The column is full of superlatives such as: He is a left-handed power hitter, with 299 career home runs to go with a .255 average, and is sound defensively. Color me all warm and tingly after that sentence. I'm going to try and sleep, probably thrashing about with nightmares of our Chris Duffy, Jack Wilson, Jason Bay, Sean Casey, Jeromy Burnitz, Joe Randa murderer's row to kick off next season. I'm going to go to bed and pray that I'm completely delusional.