Used to be, major league baseball teams would use the winter months to make trades and big moves to stoke up the excitement of the fans and get baseball on the minds and tongues of a fan base that is surely yearning for news, any news, about their favorite sport.
Not the Pirates.
No, they make their first significant move of the off-season and make the announcement (a) at about nine o'clock on a Saturday night, and (b) on the night before a Steelers playoff game. If one were cynical, one would suspect that the Pirates were doing all that they could to NOT draw any attention to themselves as they begin to tear down the core of a team that reached the post season three straight years (2013-15), albeit a team that was not so good in 2016-17.
First, the departed.
Gerrit Cole leaves after five seasons with the Bucs and heads to the defending World Series champion Houston Astros. He was the overall number one draft pick in 2011, and he reached the Pirates in June of 2013. (In retrospect, that was an astonishingly short period of time given the Pirates reluctance to rush their prized prospects to the majors.) In his first three years with the Pirates, Cole went 40-20, including an All-Star year in 2015 when he was 19-8 with a 2.60 ERA. He had the appearance and the demeanor of a genuine top-of-the-rotation staff Ace with a capital A. There then followed an injury plagued 2016 season, followed by a 12-12, 4.26 ERA, 31 HR's allowed 2017 season, although he never missed a turn and pitched over 200 innings.
More to the point, Cole was at the point in his career where he would start making big dollars via arbitration and he was two years away from qualifying for free agency, and you know what that means to the Pirates: Time to get rid of him! I had also heard that Cole, in his role as the Pirates MLBPA Player Representative, and an active and outspoken one at that, had irritated team management and was branded a clubhouse lawyer. Fun Fact: the Player Rep who preceded Cole was Neal Walker. Make of that what you will.
Anyway, late last night I saw a couple of social media comments from blind loyalists to the effect of "he was a hothead....had no self-control...gave up too many gophers...good riddance." Admittedly, Cole was not an easy guy to like. Mrs. Grandstander, for one, didn't care for him at all. Me, I liked him for the reasons that my wife did not. I liked that badass manner that he brought to the mound. While he didn't turn into the next Tom Seaver or Don Drysdale or even Bob Friend that that Overall #1 selection might have portended, he was still the Pirates best pitcher, and it won't be all that easy to replace him. He will not have to be the bellwether of an Astros staff that includes Cy Young winners in Dallas Keuchel and Justin Verlander, and will you be at all surprised if Cole turns in 12-5 or 14-7 types of seasons for Houston for the next two years? You know, like Charlie Morton did in 2017. It wouldn't surprise me one bit.
As for the return, the Pirates got four players from Houston: third baseman Colin Moran, RHP's Joe Musgrove and Michael Feliz, and minor league outfielder Jason Martin. Hey, the Bucs need a third baseman, you can never have too much pitching, and if last year showed us anything, we know that the depth in the outfield through the system was thin. I am not going to pretend I know anything about these guys, but the scant evaluations that I have read thus far are telling me that none of these guys were or are blue chip prospects. Maybe one or two of them will turn out to be All-Stars, who knows? All of them, of course, should they make the Pirates, will be making the major league minimum salary, no small consideration for our Buccos.
I do know that on two previous occasions in his tenure as GM, Neal Huntington twice traded bona fide, if not stars, then really good players, and he spit the bit on both occasions. The first was trading Jason Bay and getting four players who turned out to be pretty much useless, and the second was trading Neil Walker for Jonathon Neise, who turned out to be less-than-useless. So Huntington's track record when he deals a front line player is not so hot. Maybe this deal will change that. We'll know for sure by midway through the 2019 season.
A bigger question is what does this portend for the immediate future of the Pirates. Most pundits agree that the team is throwing in the towel for 2018 and looking for a rebuild that will bear fruit along about 2019 or 2020. The Pirates will never say that, but if that is the case, then look for Andrew McCutchen and Josh Harrison to be the next to go, if not before the season, then by the July 31 trading deadline for certain.
A final word on Gerrit Cole. I am sorry to see him go, not only because I liked him as a pitcher, but because of what it says about the Pirates and the management of a team that will always try to do it on the cheap. Also, I am glad that Cole is going to the American League where the possibility of seeing him stuffing the Pirates in his hip pocket while pitching against them will be minimized.
It ain't easy to be a Pirates fan.
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