The Groundwork for the Pirates' Trade Deadline Was Laid in a Dreary Offseason

Replacing the Placeholders with Placeholders

As usual, major league baseball’s trade deadline dealing produced some headline-grabbing moves, as well as some that produced maybe a few notes at the end of articles. The Pirates’ deals fell strictly into the latter category.

It’s hard to criticize the trades on their own. Ben Cherington consistently got a fair return. The most notable was probably Jhonny Severino, a lottery ticket obtained for two months of a 37-year-old first baseman who’s a below average hitter for the position. Severino has some power and doesn’t swing and miss a lot, which is unusual for a guy who doesn’t take many pitches, so at least there may be something to work with. He and Estuar Suero were probably the best return the Pirates were going to get for what they had to offer.

The rest . . . well . . . . Jackson Wolf is very tall and he’s a lefty, so he’s a tall lefty. Alfonso Rivas looks like a placeholder for Carlos Santana, who was also a placeholder. And Rich Hill’s departure forced the Pirates to give up on the always-frustrating Rodolfo Castro to acquire Bailey Falter, a placeholder to replace the placeholder Hill.

And then there’s Austin Hedges, who brought back international pool space. So the Pirates signed Hedges for $5M and handed him their starting catcher job, he had exactly the sort of season they should have expected, and he brought back pool space. The obvious conclusion here is that Cherington placed a value on Hedges that was wildly at variance with the rest of MLB. And the rest of MLB had it right.

The whole exercise had more of a “clearing out” feel than one of moving forward. Not just that, but the feel of something that was pre-ordained when Cherington made his offseason moves. Nothing unexpected happened in the interim. Choi was hurt, which wasn’t too surprising because the Pirates knew he wasn’t healthy when they acquired him for a struggling class A reliever. Santana, Hedges and Hill all performed exactly the way anybody with any sense at all expected. What this trade deadline really means is an end to a poorly constructed team that was never a serious attempt to field a major league team, and a beginning with some players who might actually change things.

And the “veteran presence” meme that supposedly justified such a dreary offseason? The Pirates’ 2023 season was a case study showing how meaningless that sort of drivel is. They clearly have more talent than Cherington’s first three teams (how much more is a different question), yet over the past three months they’ve played even worse than those teams. The one veteran who worked out was Andrew McCutchen, for the simple reason that he can still play. And the credit for Cutch goes entirely to the owner, as Cherington wasn’t interested. It’s hard to think of anything else that better summarizes Cherington’s performace as GM: He got totally owned on a baseball decision by Bob Nutting.