The Pirates Firesale

Who's Left? Capps & Doumit?

The Pirates are famously holding a firesale. They've traded all their starting position players from the beginning of 2008, which looks remarkable on paper. The players they've managed to move include:

• Nate McLouth


• Freddie Sanchez


• Jason Bay


• Xavier Nady


• Adam LaRoche


• Jack Wilson


• Nyjer Morgan


• Sean Burnett


• Iain Snell


• John Grabow


• Tom Gorzelanny


• Damaso Marte


• Eric Hinske

What a list.

When I got my Billy Beane Front Office game on my PS3, one of the things I tried out was GM-ing the Pittsburgh Pirates. It's a hard task to make them competitive enough. The only real way to fix the Pirates in that game universe was to trade just about everybody, starting this last spring and I couldn't get them to win at .500 until mid-2010.

The funny thing is, I too traded all the guys above except Sanchez. I even traded Doumit. I think I kept Capps, Maholm, and Duke, but I let Maholm walk at the end of 2009. But I really put on a firesale and went after young talent hard.

That's just the game. I was able to trade for Travis Snider, Ian Stewart, Clete Thomas and a host of no-face A talent that doesn't exist in the real world. Which means there would have been much less to target that's available to trade for the real world Pirates. It's tough.

Nobody really knows if the talent they got back in return is good enough to justify all of these trades, but you have to kep in mind that the players traded away were at best league average or slightly above. Excepting Jason Bay, none of them were players around whom you could build a franchise around.

The point I'm making is that as drastic as the Pirates firesale looks, if you put yourselves in their shoes you have to consider that most of the players on their 25man roster were not going to be part of the next winning Pirates team. It's a terrible admission, but the previous GM, David Littlefield clearly had no tools for assessing talent, or he simply wanted the team to be at best a .500 team for reasons of budget.