Image taken from Google Images

What has only happened a handful of times in the past 20 years seems to be breathing again.  It is now June and the Pittsburgh Pirates are flirting with .500.  The Pirates have one of the worst streaks in all of sports, in fact it is the worst.  Eighteen consecutive seasons with more losses than wins.  Kevin McClatchy, who was the majority owner for many of those years, and Dave Littlefield, who was McClatchy’s pawn in dumping payroll, caused the Pirates to be the punch line of many jokes over the past couple of decades.  This year, the team is not laughing.

Yankee fans, always known for running their mouths about “homegrown talent“, have done little with their farm system over the past ten years.  Everyone knows that the mighty Yankees can buy things they need whenever they need them.  Unfortunately, Pittsburgh can’t do that.  Yep, it is a small market team and the best shot they have is to develop players through a good farm system.  That farm system is now starting to show its effect on the big team.

Free agency is non-existent in Pittsburgh unless they are selling.  The Pirates look like a pack of geniuses for picking up Kevin Correia (pictured, top) for a 12-pack of balls and some fireworks.  Correia has been among the leaders in the NL in wins, WHIP, and ERA.  The other big acquisition was probably manager Clint Hurdle.  Hurdle had success in Colorado and was notorious for a couple of blistering months where his team was unbeatable.

Image via Wikipedia

Look at what has come from the farm system and how they are doing.  Andrew McCutchen is not where he should be as far as batting average, but he is piling up extra-base hits at key moments.  He is also one of, if not the best, defensive outfielders in the game today.  Neil Walker is showing no signs of a sophomore slump.  Jose Tabata is making strides in the right direction.  Paul Maholm has had a few hard luck losses but has a stellar ERA and all of his starts but one have been quality starts.  Evan Meek is rested and ready.  And, there are more.  Pedro Alvarez is the question mark of the group.  Alvarez, known for his slow starts, can really give the Pirates a lift if he can come off of the DL swinging a hot bat.  Evan Ryan Doumit is contributing with game-winning grand slams.

All of those guys came from a farm system striving to serve a purpose instead of agricultural turnover.  A farmer raises a pig and sells it.  These pigs are staying in the pen for a few more years.

Andrew McCutchen photo taken from Google Images

People know Pittsburgh as one of the “City of Champions”. While the Steelers and Penguins have had recent success, the Pirates have been cellar dwellers and have has loosing seasons for 18 consecutive years. This is definitely not the team they were in the 1970s. Like the Kansas City Royals and Colorado Rockies, the Pirates are building a farm system that can help them regain glory in a few years.

Last year I traveled and got to see Pedro Alvarez crush long balls and Jose Tabata looks to have some good speed. Then there is Garrett Jones who had burst onto the scene a few years back, and crowd favorite Andrew McCutchen. Evan Meek has become a top reliever and was an all-star last year. Their former ace Zach Duke is now in Arizona and the Pirates have made some moves this off season. Pitching is still a problem currently, but there is light at the end of the tunnel in the farm system.

With the second pick of the 2010 draft the Pirates selected Jameson Taillon. This is the ace they have been missing for a number of years. He can throw upper 90s and has spectacular movement. He has been compared to Roger Clemens and Josh Beckett. Their second pick was Stetson Allie. Stetson can prove himself as a starter, but has been known to lose control which could move him to the bullpen. 2009’s #4 overall pick Tony Sanchez will need to prove himself as hitter as he moves up the farm system. He has a great average thus far, but has only played in high class A.

Under Neal Huntington’s tenure they have really made some good draft picks and as the picks progress and spending increases (Taillon received the second most for a signing bonus in draft history) they can be a competitor again. However, that pitching staff needs an upgrade fast, but it is doubtful they call up Rudy Owens quickly. Owens was the AA Eastern League pitcher of the year, 12-6 with a 2.46 ERA. Ross Ohlendorf, Paul Maholm, Kevin Correia, James McDonald, and Scott Olsen/Charlie Morton are the starters for the 2011 Pirates. There is definite work to be done with the starting rotation, but Joel Hanrahan and Evan Meek can shut the door to close the game.

There is also talk of calling up Alex Presley who is a CF that batted .312 and had 85 RBIs. They already have four starting OF: Tabata, McCutchen, Jones, and Diaz. Potential trade chip(s)? The lineup looks pretty good through the top 6 spots, which hopefully can create enough runs for wins.

In just over two weeks the season will start, and this should make for an exciting year after some of the signings this past winter: Cliff Lee to Philly and A-Gonz/Crawford to Boston (among other signings). I look forward to seeing a great season, and cannot wait for some summer league action as well!

LET’S GO BUCS!

Pirates 1979 Team Photo taken from Google Images

Chuck Tanner sadly passed away on February 11th.  One thing you will never hear me criticize when writing about Pittsburgh is the loyalty that fans have shown to those who have given their best.  Sometimes, one’s best isn’t enough to win a championship. Fortunately for Chuck Tanner, his best was good enough to claim a World Series with the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1979.

Chuck Tanner broke into the majors as a rookie left fielder with Milwaukee in 1955.  He spent a couple of seasons with the Chicago Cubs, Cleveland Indians, and Los Angeles Angels before retiring as a player in 1962.  Tanner batted .261 with 21 HR and 105 RBI over his playing career.

Tanner stayed around the game and got his first job as a manager with the Chicago White Sox in 1970, and won Manager of The Year in 1972.  He also managed teams in Oakland (1976), Pittsburgh (1977-1985) and the Atlanta Braves (1986-88).  Tanner compiled a 1352-1381 overall record as the skipper of the four teams spanning 18 consecutive seasons.

Tanner was actually acquired by Pittsburgh as a manager in exchange for a player,  Manny Sanguillen.  The apex of Tanner’s managerial career came in 1979 with the “We Are Family” Pittsburgh Pirates.  That team included Hall of Famers Willie “Pops” Stargell and Bert Blyleven.  Other key players on that successful team were Dave Parker, Bill Madlock, and Kent Tekulve.  The fete was accomplished when the gutty Bucs overcame a 3-1 series deficit to win out and upset the Baltimore Orioles that year.

Current Pirate GM Neal Huntington named Tanner a senior advisor in 2007.  Tanner was born and passed away in the same town – New Castle, Pennsylvania, about 35 minutes West of Pittsburgh.  Tanner ran a successful restaurant business called, what else, Tanners Restaurant.

Chuck Tanner was unconventional and liked to take chances and was as much a fan of the game as a manager.  He can be credited with the lofty stolen base totals now seen in modern-day baseball.  Pittsburgh would prosper under his leadership and could probably have used his wisdom heading into 2011.

Off the field, Tanner did the right things.  He was a devout family man who enjoyed being with family and friends.  He had a smile on his face, kind words about everyone,  and a memory which still amazes me.  Pittsburgh lost a little chunk of class with Tanner’s passing.

Let his teachings, and more importantly, his demeanor, live on at PNC Park.

Photo of Mr. Lajoie taken from Google Images

Editor’s note: This article was first published on Bucs Prospects HERE on December 30th.

As far as Pirates fans should be concerned, the biggest mistake Bill Lajoie made was joining the organization 20 years too late. You Bucco fanatics have no idea what you missed and what Detroiters like me gained.

Allow me to explain.

Hired by Neal Huntington after the 2008 season, Lajoie was a senior advisor for the Pirates until his passing on Tuesday. Universally respected as one of the greatest baseball minds of his time, Lajoie had never failed to make any of his clubs a winner until now. He had a small impact on the Big Red Machine of the 1970s, was the architect of the 1984 World Champion Detroit Tigers, and a driving force behind both the 1990s Atlanta Braves and the mid-2000s Boston Red Sox, all of whom were dominant in their eras. The recent success of the Milwaukee Brewers and Los Angeles Dodgers have also come along with Bill Lajoie’s fingerprints.

But regretfully, in his mid-70s, Lajoie was relegated to a much more marginal role during his final stop in Pittsburgh. His health prevented him from scouting too far outside of his Florida gulf coast home and his “old school” scouting and player development background just wasn’t a natural fit for Huntington’s system. Still, Huntington was wise enough to send his interns and young scouts Lajoie’s way to have them watch games together and learn from the master.

Lajoie still made his impact, but instead of having a leading role like he did with the Tigers, Lajoie worked from the grassroots up.

If this rebuilding project succeeds and the Pirates become winners in the near future, it can be said that Lajoie was at least a small part of the effort. But had the Pirates succeeded in hiring him as their GM in 1988, it’s my belief that the entire recent history of the franchise would be unrecognizable compared to what it is today.

After the 1988 season, Syd Thrift had just been fired after three years as GM despite a miraculous rebuild that both loaded the farm system and improved the big league record by 28 wins. Personality issues were given as the cause and the Pirates knew that Bill Lajoie, who had just finished his fifth season as the Tigers’ GM, was the best in the business.

Lajoie was also grossly underpaid and rumored (correctly) to be increasingly disenfranchised with the Tiger organization, who were becoming much stingier under the ownership of Tom Monaghan and presidency of Jim Campbell.

The Pirates took the initiative and asked permission from Campbell to speak with Lajoie, but Campbell denied them. Lajoie ultimately stayed on as his hometown team’s GM for three more seasons while the Bucs promoted Larry Doughty.

Lajoie was the epitome of the hardcore baseball man whose first-hand knowledge of playing, scouting, coaching, player development, and trade making were rivaled only by Hall of Fame inductee Pat Gillick. Like the modern day “Ivy League” GM, Lajoie was plenty book smart and got excellent grades in high school and college, but Lajoie’s intelligence was much more practical when it came to baseball. He was exceptionally versed in every baseball operation because he’d been through every one and was keen enough to learn from what he saw.

I have no question, no doubt whatsoever, that had Lajoie come to Pittsburgh after 1988, they would have won at least one World Series during their 1990-1992 run of N.L. East titles. Nobody, absolutely nobody was better at putting his team over the top, at getting that late-season pickup, even on a budget. The Detroit Tigers dominated the 1984 World Series with a middle-third payroll largely because Lajoie traded for a journeyman reliever named Willie Hernandez who went out and won both the Cy Young and MVP awards. Superb backupDave Bergman was also acquired and Lajoie later picked up released players like outfielder Ruppert Jones and lefty specialist Bill Scherrer who fulfilled important supportive roles in their championship run.

Doughty and later Ted Simmons were hardened baseball men themselves who did what they could as the Pirates GM. This is not to put them down, only to speak on how exceptional Lajoie was because most mortals would have been dealt with the same results. Bill Lajoie, on the other hand, never could have watched his team get knocked out of the NLCS three years in a row. Unfortunately for Bucco Nation, Lajoie was on the other side helping John Schuerholz’s Braves, knocking the Pirates out of the NCLS in heart-breaking seven-game fashion both in 1991 and 1992.

As good as Lajoie was with big league transactions, he was just as good at loading up a farm system. He ranks as one of the greatest scouting directors of all-time for what he did for the Tigers from 1974-1978 in building the core of the future champs despite the 25^th highest scouting budget of the 26 teams. If Syd Thrift had gotten the ball rolling in Pittsburgh, Lajoie was going to put it into hyper-drive.

Having done that, I’m certain the Pirates would have won beyond 1992 and significantly cut into the current 18 losing-season streak whether he could have re-signed Barry Bonds or not.

I wish Pirate fans could have experienced first hand what I did as a Tiger fan in the 1980s, watching the great skill and class with which Bill Lajoie operated his ballclub. He was a man so different from the modern GM, one who had no desire for attention or power or even to be a GM, one who just loved baseball and knew he was good at it and didn’t care who got the credit. Lajoie was fiercely competitive, but competitive to win, not just to make it “look like” he was doing a good job to the media. There was no political savvy, no charm, no spin.

Bill Lajoie would never be portrayed by Brad Pitt like Billy Beane. He wouldn’t be able to do radio like Jim Bowden or Jim Duquette or TV like Steve Phillips or John Hart. There was nothing poetic or photogenic about him, he was the polar opposite of his manager Sparky Anderson.

I’ve never come across a baseball man with intentions so pure. It was never about Bill Lajoie, it was never about climbing the ladder, being loved by the media, or telling the world how smart he was. Bill Lajoie’s only concern was winning and making his ballclub better but doing it while living up to his scruples and standards of integrity. He was taken advantage of by slick colleagues time and time again, by people who took credit for things he did and even betrayed his trust and generosity for their own gain. It made Lajoie more careful of friendships, but it never changed the way he operated, which was committing himself to the fans to make their hometown team as outstanding as possible.

Had Lajoie taken the Pirates over before 1989, you’d better believe he’d have kept Jim Leyland aboard as manager. Not only was Leyland proving himself to be the best young manager in Baseball, but he and Lajoie grew up in the Detroit Tigers organization together and had both a nice friendship and tremendous mutual respect. To have Lajoie and Leyland running your show would have been so wonderful, you don’t even know.

Of course, I am thankful for selfish reasons that Bill Lajoie stayed in Detroit. I dreamed of one day working for Bill Lajoie, a dream which never came to fruition though he became a great mentor for me and a co-writer just the same for the book we published last January (Character is Not a Statistic: The legacy and wisdom of baseball’s godfather scout Bill Lajoie). Bill regularly read this very blog and though he couldn’t talk business with me as a member of the Pirates front office, he clearly enjoyed the material and remained a diehard baseball fan to the end. This will be the first article on BucsProspects.com that Bill won’t read.

You weren’t able to get Bill into the black and gold twenty years ago, but you should take pride that he literally died a Pirate. He died while he was doing everything he could in his power to help Neal Huntington’s noble endeavor to restore the pride in Pittsburgh for their long-suffering fans. Regardless of what the last 18 years have brought, few professional sports teams can boast the historical prestige of the Pittsburgh Pirates and even though Bill Lajoie could only stick around for two years, the organization and their fans should take pride in the fact that he was a part of their history. With his tireless mentoring of the organization’s young employees, you can be sure that his influence on the Pirates will be felt many years from now when they will hopefully be champions again.

Andrew McCutchen photo taken from Google Images

This article was originally posted on Bucs Prospects back on the 19th.

Image via Wikipedia

I hope baseball fans enjoyed watching Game 7 of the 1960 World Series on MLB Network.  I didn’t think it possible to fulfill the build-up, but it absolutely did.  Maz’s homer was hardly the only drama, it was baseball at its best with two highly talented teams who refused to die, a display of desire and competitiveness not seen in recent World Series.

And while the championships of 1909, 1925, 1971, and 1979 were surely tremendous for the city, I can understand why so many believe the 1960 Pittsburgh Pirates to be the most meaningful team of them all.

Sentimentality aside, I’m forever a scout and while I enjoyed the spectacle, I was unable to turn off my internal radar gun and stopwatch.  I watched the way the Pirates won that World Series with great fielding and athleticism and asked myself, why can’t this next generation of Bucs also build around those same ideals?

From watching Game 7 alone, I could see that the Pirates’ athleticism, speed, and defense had much to do with defeating the New York Yankees despite their “Murderer’s Row” of Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, and Moose Skowron.  The Pirates had some bats, but not nearly the same juice as the Yanks.  The Pirates won on great defense, occasionally good pitching, and timely but less than thunderous hitting.  The Yankees blew them out three times for a combined score of 38-3, but Pirate “small ball” managed air-tight wins in the other four games and that was the difference..

The Pirates’ emphasis on athleticism and defense was exemplified by their scouting and signing of minority players in a time when much of Baseball was still prejudiced against them.  Roberto Clemente was the first and best of many more to come.  Later in the decade, stars like Willie Stargell and Manny Sanguillen would join him and the Pirates boasted the first All-Black lineup in the early 1970s.  The 1979 club had more Black players than any World Series Champion in the history of the game.  Many of these players brought speed, athleticism, and defense with them, aspects of the sport that the Pirates excelled at over two decades.

There aren’t many dark faces in this 1960 game aside from Roberto Clemente’s, but you can see that GM Joe Brown had already put that stamp on the franchise.  Base-stealing had been dormant since the Babe Ruth era (Los Angeles Dodgers shortstop Maury Wills was about to change things), but the Pirates still had plenty of speed and athleticism all over the field.

When you have Bill Virdon in center field and Roberto Clemente in right, not much is going to fall in.  Both were speedsters with great instincts who were off and running by the crack of the bat.  Other sparkling gloves included 8-time gold glove second baseman Bill Mazeroski, slick hot corner man Don Hoak, and shortstop Dick Groat, whose athleticism made him a serious NBA prospect out of Duke.

I believe Major League Baseball is going to take a step back from the last two decades of “Gorilla Ball”.  Small stadiums, lighter bats, and performance enhancing drugs made the 1990s and 2000s a home run era, but I believe the crackdown on PEDs have already made a mark.  Its effect will grow over the years, forcing teams to manufacture runs with small ball and speed, and to have more far-ranging fielders.

One of my disappointments as a fan is that Major League Baseball has become slower while both the NFL and the NBA have become much faster over the past thirty years.  If you go to the early 1980s, almost every team had more speed then than they do now.  Even Earl Weaver’s “Pitching and 3-Run Homer” Orioles and the notoriously slow-footed Boston Red Sox would have someone who could run and steal bases, i.e. Al Bumbry or Jerry Remy.  Everyone had a true leadoff hitter and the glove men were more athletic.

Because of Gorilla Ball, the speed-and-defense aspect of the game has been diminished.  While I don’t see it coming back to Dead Ball Era levels, when the league home run leader would be lucky to hit 10 and Ty Cobb could swipe 90 a year, I do think the speed-and-defense guys will make a comeback.  Some of those burners who go off to the NFL and NBA will get longer looks and more coercion to play baseball from scouts.  At least that’s what I’m hoping for, because I love speed and what it can do out on a baseball field.

I believe that the Pirates can and will benefit from this trend and build their team in such a manner.  Andrew McCutchen can be their flag bearer, because he is very much out of this mold.  “Cutch” hit 16 HR last year and I can see him hitting 20 in the future, but that’s just icing on the cake as far as his game is concerned.  McCutchen’s one of the game’s fastest players, with the potential to steal 50+ bags and cover a ton of ground in center.  In many ways, he’s a righthanded hitting version of his 1960 counterpart Bill Virdon but with base-stealing skills.

Pedro Alvarez is the next most important core player and he, of course, is much more out of the Gorilla Ball mold.  Alvarez is a lefthanded hitting slugger and though he’s inherently athletic with good defensive actions, he’s put on significant weight since college and is not consistent with the routine plays.  Alvarez looks like a much better hitter than this 1960 counterpart Don Hoak, but Hoak got to balls and made plays in Game 7 alone that Alvarez can only dream about.

Where the next generation of Pirates will have the hardest time matching the 1960 Champs is at second base and right field.  I’ve heard older baseball men argue that Hall of Famers Bill Mazeroski and Roberto Clemente were not only the best defenders at their position in their time, but the best fielders of all-time!  For current second baseman Neil Walker and whoever ends up the long-term rightfielder, those are impossible shoes to fill!

Think about that for a second.  How much did it help their pitching staff just having Clemente and Mazeroski alone?  This game didn’t show a lot of Mazeroski’s slick glove work (though he came through with the bat!), but I’ve seen the clips of his lightning double play pivot and his exceptional hands and range.  Clemente had a beautiful glide and showed a ridiculously strong arm on a couple throws to keep runners from advancing.  Over the course of the season, how many times did these two alone kill rallies with their gloves and arms?

I don’t know how often teams look specifically for gloves in the draft or even on the free agent market.  Offensive numbers and sabermetrics have more influence than ever on both personnel decisions and in salary negotiations.  You don’t hear much of teams making a wish list for a “gold glove-caliber rightfielder” or a “wide-ranging second baseman who can turn the deuce”.

As general managers have become more dependent on numbers and less on pure scouting, the importance of fielding has been diminished or, in some cases, been vastly misunderstood.  Instead of listening to their veteran scouts on who the best defenders are, or even watching the games themselves, the modern “educated” GM is resorting to recently invented metrics like Range Factor and Ultimate Zone Rating as a catch-all to determine who the best fielders are.

(It’s a topic I’ll discuss at length in another story, but I believe those new defensive metrics to be greatly misleading and that their emphasis is actually contradictive to an emphasis on fielding.)

What most appeals to me about building a team around speed and defense is simply that you’re circumventing everybody else.  Everybody else is going after the big bats and driving up the prices.  The good gloves and the speed guys aside from Carl Crawford tend to slip through the cracks as bargains.
I liken it to changing the rules of a rat race.  It’s hard to win a rat race if you put in a rat, but what if you enter a cat instead?

The Whitey Herzog-led St. Louis Cardinals were the team of the 1980s and they played the fast cat.  “Whitey Ball” was a different brand of baseball that got everybody else off their game.  He took speed and defense to the extreme and let everybody else fight over the power-hitting gorillas.

And this philosophy ran top-to-bottom, throughout the organization.  Scouting director Fred McAllister drafted for it and the minor league coaches made sure their prospects learned how to run the bases and play the field.  Three pennants and a World Series crown later, Whitey Ball was a rousing success.

I don’t know if the Pirates are capable of remaking to the extent of the 1982 St. Louis Cardinals, but I do think they could mimic the 1960 Pirates.  The Pirates will have a better chance competing if they take an alternate path that doesn’t always involve butting heads with the big boys.  By emphasizing defense, they might be able to sneak in some really good players.

In their minor league system today, I believe Starling Marte has the potential to become a very good defensive outfielder.  If Chase d’Arnaud can make the routine plays at shortstop, he might become a plus defender as well.  Players like that, even if they don’t mash from day one, should have a more prominent role in the 2010s than they would have the last two decades.  They deserve more patience with their bats because their big league value will go beyond whatever their stat-line reads.

People can look at the offensive stat-lines and even the pitchers of the 1960 Pirates and Yankees and conclude the Yankees should have killed them.  Some sabermetricians will go as far to claim the Yankees are the better team simply because their “Pythagorean” record (another recent statistical invention that takes into account “runs for” against “runs against”) is overwhelmingly better.

But I don’t think teams really care about winning the Pythagorean World Series, they want to win the real one.  Great fielding and great baserunning will never be accurately accounted for by statistics, but they’ll always play up, measurable or not.   Very often, such talents will be the difference in what was “supposed to happen” based on computations and what actually ends up happening in real life.

A lot has changed with baseball in 50 years, but this is one that hasn’t.  It’s very simple.  If you can catch the ball and throw the ball, you have a better chance to win.  Watching Mazeroski and Clemente do it in the flesh drives that home with much more conviction than any comparison of Ultimate Zone Ratings ever could.

New skipper Clint Hurdle will have an array of things working against him.  Most notably would be the Pittsburgh Pirates front office.  No big names were offered anything to come to Pittsburgh this season at the recently held Winter meetings.  A couple of acquisitions were made, and a decent Buc flew South to Arizona.

Scott Olsen was the big prize for the Pirates.  Olsen, who has averaged thirteen starts each of the last two seasons, was given lunch money and told if he can stay healthy, he can earn a real paycheck.  Olsen will be competing for a spot in the rotation.

Kevin Correia comes to Pittsburgh from San Diego.  Correia did some solid pitching for the Padres in 2009.  No one is sure what happened to him in 2010.  He struggled with his control all year, walked a batter more per start than the season before, and was eventually yanked from the rotation down the stretch.  How fitting the Pirates would offer him a contract to soul search at the expense of a still-diminishing fan base.

Gone is Zach Duke.  Duke was peddled to the Diamondbacks for a shovel, a couple of bags of rock salt, and a minor league utility infielder, Cesar Valdez, who will start the season at Triple-A Indianapolis.

With Duke gone, and Paul Maholm still being shopped, the Pirates will have a potential rotation of Correia, Olsen, Ross Ohlendorf, James McDonald, and who knows where the fifth spot will go if Maholm goes away.  Evan Meek is about it in the pen.  The Pirates have done absolutely nothing to help their relief pitching in the off season so far.

Offensively, we need a shortstop.  Send your resumes to PNC Park in care of Neil Huntington.  Word on the streets was a big push for JJ Hardy, but he has since signed elsewhere.  The Pirates plucked Josh Rodriguez in the Rule 5 Draft last week from the Indians organization, but for him to be ready for the big team would be a stretch.

Ryan Doumit may be on his way out the door as the Pirates are telling other teams they will eat a part of his $5.1 million contract to make room for Matt Diaz.  Diaz was basically cut by the Braves at the end of the 2010 season.  The Pirates, always opportunistic in other people’s dumpsters, scarfed Diaz up.  If Doumit hangs around, it will be a platoon situation with Diaz in RF.  The brightest spots in the lineup are unproven second year guys (Walker and Tabata), and Andrew McCutchen who is simply building a blueprint to get out.  This team will struggle to score runs in 2011.

Photo of new Pirates Manager Clint Hurdle was taken from Google Images

Clint Hurdle had some magic in the wand when he waived it in August a couple of years ago and the Rockies won 80% of their games in the last two months of the season.  Hurdle better hope there is some magic left in the old wand if he wants to go .500 this season, and that mark may even be a bit unrealistic.

Of the 25 Pittsburgh Pirates who took the field on Opening Day 2008, 7 remain with the organization today. General manager Neal Huntington has turned over his depth chart methodically and added a number of talented prospects to his farm system. Doing so was not easy. Huntington sent away All-Stars in Jason Bay, Nate McLouth, Freddy Sanchez and Jack Wilson in the past year, undoubtedly frustrating the average fan in the process.

Considering a streak of 16 consecutive losing seasons is likely to be extended once again come October, no one would blame yinzers for questioning the team’s intentions. Five-year rebuilding plans have come and gone with no results. The current roster features 1 player over the age of 30 — utility infielder Ramon Vazquez — and millions of dollars have been slashed from the payroll.

Huntington’s late July fire sale included deals for Sanchez, Wilson, Ian Snell, John Grabow, Tom Gorzelanny and Adam LaRoche. Sean Burnett, traded with popular outfielder Nyjer Morgan to the Washington Nationals in June, recently called the Pirates the laughingstock of the league. And maybe there was truth in Burnett’s outburst — despite being considered winners at the trade deadline by national baseball writers, the team had turned into a punchline. Huntington listened to offers on everyone and anything, including the kitchen sink, in the nearly unprecedented sell off.

But what choice did he have?

The GM entered an impossible situation when he inherited Dave Littlefield‘s job. The major league roster was weak and aging, but the minors were undeveloped, too. Huntington did what was necessary: He kept what little talent could be controlled long-term and dealt remaining assets at as high a price as the market would bear. For the first time in years, the franchise would develop from within. Littlefield’s goal of reaching a single .500 season would no longer be considered acceptable. The cycle of overpaying role players and ignoring premium talent pools would end.

Huntington deserves the benefit of the doubt, and as soon as this winter he could prove his plan has the team headed in the right direction. After shedding veterans past their primes, targeting players with over-slot bonus demands in the draft and entering the Latin American free agent market aggressively, Huntington can take one more action to assure me that he’s the man who will turn the organization around.

Sign Andrew McCutchen to a long-term deal.

Fans lacking savvy would be quick to point out that Huntington extended McLouth, Sanchez and Snell, only to trade them away. There’s a difference between buying out arbitration years and cheaply controlling a premium player through three seasons of free agency, though. That’s exactly what the Tampa Bay Rays were able to do with Evan Longoria in April of 2008, just days into the franchise third baseman’s career in the show. There was no doubt that Longoria would emerge as a star, and so the team offered the 22-year-old a guaranteed $17.5 million. The Rays bought out his arbitration seasons and acquired club options for three free agency years.

Longoria could have hit the open market before 2014, and if history is any indicator, the Yankees or Red Sox or Mets or Cubs would have signed him then to a huge, multi-year contract. Instead, should Longoria progress as expected, the Rays can choose to control him from 2014-2016 for a combined $28 million. According to FanGraphs’ value statistics, Longoria was worth $24.1 million in 2008 alone.

It’s now that Huntington needs to sign a player of McCutchen’s star power; he can’t afford to wait until his center fielder can see free agency coming. Give McCutchen a life-changing amount — which $18-20 million certainly is — and ensure that he’ll be a key contributor to sustained winning in Pittsburgh through his physical peak. By all accounts McCutchen is a hard-working, explosive, two-way standout. His debut has quieted even the harshest critics. Prove to him, to his peers and to the Steel City that the Pirates are serious about winning and keeping the best players in Pittsburgh. Piecing together a top farm system is meaningless if All-Stars can’t be retained when they’re needed most.

Image by David Watson via Flickr

1B Adam LaRoche is a power-hitting first baseman who has averaged 24.5 homers over the past four seasons with the Braves and Pirates. He is hitting .247 with a .329 OBP and .441 slugging mark for the Pirates this year, down from career totals of .269/.338/.486.

In exchange, WEEI.com has learned from multiple baseball sources that the Red Sox will send Double-A shortstop Argenis Diaz and Single-A pitcher Hunter Strickland to Pittsburgh once the deal is finalized. Diaz is known as a gifted defensive player, but there are questions about his bat. The 22-year-old Diaz is hitting .253/.309/.310 with Double-A Portland this year. Strickland, an 18th round pick in 2007, is 5-4 with a 3.35 ERA for the Greenville Drive of the Single-A South Atlantic League this year. The 6-foot-5 20-year-old has shown excellent command for the Drive, with a 51-13 strikeout-to-walk ratio in 83.1 innings this year.

Hopefully a deal for Lugo will follow as I’d hate to hear that the Mets were able to just pick him up after he hits the market! I also wouldn’t be surprised to see Penny or Saito moved within the next week and a half either.