MILWAUKEE — This looked like an easy one, a tap-in. Low-hanging fruit, even by Pirates standards.
With the MLB trade deadline Monday, it was theoretically the picture-perfect time for general manager Ben Cherington to cash in on some of his present assets and shift the focus even more toward the future, to several years down the road when some of their prospects would be fully developed and ready to set foot inside PNC Park.
As the clock ticked toward 4 o’clock Monday, however, Cherington and the Pirates remained quiet. There would be no flipping of Keone Kela, Adam Frazier or Richard Rodriguez. The Pirates’ move turned out to be no move at all. They stood pat.
“Sometimes the outcomes just aren’t going to be there,” Cherington said. “We can’t force that.”
This deadline may have seemed like a dud, and maybe it will ultimately turn out to be that, but there’s some important context around what the Pirates did — OK, didn’t — do during a hugely important point of any season, stuff that further explains Cherington’s inactivity.
But to drill deeper into what happened here, we need a baseline, a starting point for Cherington and his thought process. For that, let’s rewind to February.
“We’re not tearing something down to start over,” Cherington told the Post-Gazette back then. “We are simply taking a team that wasn’t good enough or wasn’t as good as we wanted to be last year, but has a group of players with a chance to be much better, and we’re trying to build on that.
“If we had made four or five trades involving more established major league players who were on last year’s team, then maybe I’d think about it differently.”
So where are the Pirates and what are they doing here?
Couple things. First, as Cherington would outline Monday while expounding on his desire to build instead of rebuild, is this: The Pirates wanted to avoid making some sort of colossally stupid decision or one that looks that way in a couple years.
Given a few of their recent trade flops, it’s understandable.
“We’d much rather hold than make trades that we’re not confident in that later come back and bite us,” Cherington said.
Holding instead of forcing something here likely involves the Pirates starting pitchers who were linked to other teams: Trevor Williams, Joe Musgrove and Chad Kuhl.
In recent history, the Pirates cut bait on Charlie Morton and Tyler Glasnow and watched them go other places and thrive, something that owner Bob Nutting said this offseason began to really bother him.
Chad Kuhl, who has looked excellent in five starts after coming back from Tommy John surgery, fits in that category of a guy who might go somewhere else and burn them.
Plus, considering the fact that Kuhl is not terribly far removed from a serious arm injury, the return he’d net the Pirates simply wasn’t enough to compel them to move now.
By waiting, the Pirates can determine whether they want to keep Kuhl around or perhaps trade him at a higher price if they don’t. In the meantime, he’s under contract at a reasonable rate for the next couple years.
“We had a lot of conversations, and I thought we might be getting close on a couple things at a couple points in time,” Cherington said. “One of the things we did was look at what the line would be that we would need to clear for guys that we felt like we might get calls on, and so we spent a good amount of time setting what that threshold would be. ... We just didn’t clear that threshold this year.”
The other thing that happened here involved the baseball world, once again, conspiring against Cherington.
Already in his Pirates tenure, Cherington has navigated the COVID-19 shutdown, a shortened season, a condensed draft and now this — where many of his most tradable players encountered health- and performance-related issues.
Chris Archer was lost for the season thanks to surgery to relieve symptoms of thoracic outlet syndrome. Keone Kela endured another arm issue. Adam Frazier slumped. Derek Holland’s ERA swelled to 7.62.
It’s likely the Pirates had no interest in moving Joe Musgrove to begin with since he might fall into the same category as Kuhl, but it was likely a non-issue since he’s been out for weeks with right triceps inflammation.
“If players are not active, it’s an input in to how you might value or make a decision,” Cherington said, talking about no player in particular.
As for Josh Bell, another player some groups of Pirates fans seem irrationally excited to trade, remember this: Moving Bell now doesn’t matter. It would qualify as forcing the issue.
After a slow start, it looks like Bell is back to being himself. So let him be. If he continues to hit and ups his trade value, the responsible play should be to make him the next Andrew McCutchen. But if for whatever reason that doesn’t happen, they still have a couple more years before they have to trade their slugging first baseman to avoid getting nothing back in return.
“We’ve got a lot of players here, and some of them have not performed to their standard,” Cherington said. “We expect that a lot of those guys will [perform better] going forward, so we need to be careful about not allowing that to affect our evaluation of them.”
That’s a different way of saying the Pirates can’t assume a player stinks because he’s had a bad month. They also can’t get desperate because they’re mad now, and they would really like to start winning games.
From Day 1, Cherington has talked about the future and building the Pirates into a consistent winner. That rings as true now as it did the day he was hired. It’s also instructive to remember a couple words he let slip recently that indicate where the Pirates really are right now.
“There are players on this team right now who are going to be part of this team when we’re good,” Cherington said. “I really do believe that.”
“When we’re good” would indicate that the Pirates are not at this current moment. So would their 10-21 record heading into Monday’s game. And Cherington — right or wrong — believes that he has a couple of the pieces here. He may be right, too.
But getting good isn’t something they realistically plan on happening overnight, so their trades should not be made according to that. They should be made based on high values and adequate return, and sometimes that takes longer than anyone — Cherington included — would like.
So for now, the Pirates are left with flipping Jarrod Dyson into $243,300 of international bonus pool money and the knowledge that they didn’t trade a player away for nothing, only to see him flourish elsewhere.
Fans, meanwhile, are left with some immediate frustration, which is natural in sports, and also the clear-as-ever message that Cherington isn’t the least bit interested in rushing this.
“Our job is to listen, have conversations, pull information the best we can and see if there are ways that we can make the Pirates stronger,” Cherington said. “We take that same approach into the offseason, but we also know that we want to look for opportunities that we feel confident make us stronger, and not do something just for the sake of doing something.
“We didn’t pass that threshold, other than the Dyson case, this time around.”
Jason Mackey: jmackey@post-gazette.com and Twitter @JMackeyPG.
First Published: August 31, 2020, 8:29 p.m.
