Neal Huntington said Sunday that he is looking to add players for “future teams” by the trade deadline Wednesday. That isn’t exactly a surprise given the way the season has gone into the tank.
Last year, the Pirates were buyers at the trade deadline, and Huntington made the bold move of trading for starting pitcher Chris Archer.
It was a deal lauded by many. Archer wasn’t a rental player. The Pirates have control of him for this season and next and thus he wouldn’t just help last year’s team win, he’d help in the future as well.
That was the plan, but sometimes a plan doesn’t come together at all. And sometimes the plan is a complete disaster. I’d classify the trade for Archer as the latter, a complete disaster and absolute failure.
Archer not only didn’t help last year’s team get to the playoffs, he has been mostly disappointing this season. That is probably being kind, actually.
It wouldn’t be a stretch to say this was the worst trade of the Huntington era. I’ll take it one step further than that, though, and say this was the worst baseball trade the Pirates have made for as long as I can remember.
The Pirates once traded Kenny Lofton and Aramis Ramirez to the Cubs for Matt Brubek, Jose Hernandez and Bobby Hill. That is often held as the gold standard among awful Pirates trades. And it was an awful, awful trade that the Pirates never seemed to fully recover from. But the caveat with that trade is that it wasn’t a baseball trade — it was basically a salary dump. The Pirates front office was forced to cut payroll and had no choice but to dump Ramirez, so they had to take what they could get for him.
That’s why the Archer trade is worse. It was made 100 percent for baseball reasons. Not a salary dump or a trade to get rid of a disgruntled player; it was an actual attempt to make the team better. And it came at a great cost, too, as the Pirates gave away young power arms in Tyler Glasnow and Shane Baz and also had to part with Austin Meadows, who was their top outfield prospect.
Like many, I had no problem with the trade at the time. I think it is the kind of trade the Pirates need to make more — top prospects for an established player — and I thought Huntington did a great job of identifying the pitcher he wanted and the contract he wanted to take on.
But it just hasn’t worked. There are many ways to measure that, but here perhaps is the easiest one to point to: Glasnow hasn’t pitched since May 10. He has six wins. Archer has three.
Would you bet that Archer will finish the season with more wins than Glasnow? (And it is probable that Glasnow won’t pitch again).
I wrote a few weeks ago that Archer was a key player for the Pirates in the second half of the season, and their season would likely mirror his. It turns out I was right, as he has been bad and the team has been worse. Huntington needs to cut his losses and move on from Archer because it just hasn’t worked out at all.
Paul Zeise: pzeise@post-gazette.com and Twitter @PaulZeise
First Published: July 29, 2019, 4:37 p.m.
