Hey, cool, the Pirates are trying to get better.
The Pirates have worked hard to try to make a trade for Jose Quintana, whose modest contract is perfect for their budget size.
— Buster Olney (@Buster_ESPN) December 21, 2016
That’s nice for them. Trying things is great; I tried to finish Christmas shopping last night and wound up seeing “Rogue One” for the third time instead.
In that regard, I have something in common with the Pirates; I attempted something, let it be known that I was attempting it, and failed. It happens often with them.
They tried, by various degrees of reports, to get Chris Archer from the Rays at the trade deadline. Didn’t happen. They tried to sign Scott Kazmir last December. Didn’t happen. They tried to trade for David Price in 2014. Didn’t happen. They’ve tried to move Andrew McCutchen for a premium and extend Ivan Nova all offseason. Hasn’t happened.
Now they’re trying to pry Quintana from the White Sox, and it probably won’t happen. That’s a prediction steeped in history; Neal Huntington’s body of work, impressive as it is, and Quintana’s price tag, enormous as it is, make any outcome more than “welp, they tried” unlikely.
Olney brought up another point; it’d grease the wheels for, yes, a McCutchen trade. Congratulations, maybe, Mets fans.
Ancillary benefit of a Quintana trade for PIT: It would give them cover to deal McCutchen. Could say (rightly) they are trying to win in '17
— Buster Olney (@Buster_ESPN) December 21, 2016
Right — just not ... that hard. A McCutchen move, given what Quintana would cost, would likely be more about refilling the prospect coffers, not actually improving the product all that much. They’d get worse. They’d restock on prospects, but they’d get worse.
To a real extent, this is understandable. The Pirates shouldn’t make moves just to make them, and whether Bob Nutting maxes out the amount of money he spends on players or not (he doesn’t), the organizational focus always needs to stay, largely, on prospects. If they ever win anything more than two divisional series games, it’ll be with a roster whose guts are made up of in-house players.
On the other hand, if they ever win anything more than two divisional series games, it’ll be because they augment those guts with the right big-ticket buys. Quintana qualifies as such — and certainly more than, say, Kazmir or Nova.
Quintana is 27 and lefthanded, with a demonstrated track record and a contract that pays him less than $16 million over the next two seasons. He can help in a real way, and he can do it, at minimum, until 2019, then courtesy of $10.5 and $11.5 million options in 2019 and 2020.
In his last four seasons, Quintana has posted a 3.35 ERA, an 18.1 FanGraphs WAR and thrown at least 200 innings in all of them. His two main pitches are a fastball that averages 92 mph and a curveball he threw a quarter of the time in 2016.
Also, the creep can roll.
Really, what it comes down to is whether the Pirates are content muddling around on the periphery of the wild-card race with their current core. Set McCutchen aside for a second; Starling Marte is 28 years old. Gerrit Cole seems guaranteed to hit free agency in 2019. Jung Ho Kang’s deal is up the year before that. Josh Harrison has been average or worse for two full seasons.
That’s not to say there’s no reason for optimism; full seasons from Kang and (maybe) Josh Bell, plus (maybe) a bounce-back from McCutchen would still give the Pirates one of the best lineups in the league. Nobody is better at building a bullpen than Huntington. Cole and Jameson Taillon are legit building blocks at the top of the rotation.
The Pirates’ reality, though, is that every year, they’re going to face the Cubs Death Star and the Cardinals nearly 40 times a season. If they’re going to compete with that in the foreseeable future — if they’re going to win enough games to make the playoffs — the rotation has to be made up of more than Cole, Taillon, lottery tickets and a rotating cast of Juan Nicasio scrap-heap picks.
This is where Quintana comes in; it’s not necessarily that he has more potential than Tyler Glasnow, who seems like the most likely package centerpiece. It’s that he’s demonstrably better right now, and figures to be demonstrably better for the next two years.
Without looking at numbers, Jose Quintana's trade value would make the 2017 Prospect Guide several pages shorter. And he'd be a great pickup
— Tim Williams (@timwilliamsP2) December 21, 2016
This is the deal that I think could put #Pirates right back in as top 5 NL team. I proposed Keller/Glasnow, Bell and Newman for Quintana https://t.co/H3JJwYc3K4
— David Todd (@DTonPirates) December 21, 2016
If the Pirates feel good about their chances from now until 2019 — that is, if they feel like they said they’d feel a few years ago — they’ll keep McCutchen and actually go get Quintana. They won’t just try. They’ll make the choice to maximize whatever shot, as currently constituted, they’ve got left. They’ll do right by their fans. They’ll, you know, get better.
And if not, oh well. At least they tried.
Sean Gentille: sgentille@post-gazette.com, Twitter: @seangentille
First Published: December 21, 2016, 6:55 p.m.
