It was a term routinely applied to Josh Bell, though one he never explicitly used.
After the Pirates traded away Andrew McCutchen and Gerrit Cole — first-round picks, incredible talents and a few of the last vestiges of playoff baseball at PNC Park — they needed to replace their face(s) of the franchise. Bell, a big bopper with a bigger heart, was a natural fit.
Cue the search committee because the Pirates, in perhaps their biggest, grandest declaration yet of where they stand on the competitive spectrum, traded the replacement for those replacements — Bell — to the Washington Nationals on Thursday for a pair of pitching prospects, further cementing this as a rebuilding effort.
Those pitchers are Wil Crowe and Eddy Yean, and the Pirates believe they have the talent and temperament to become major league arms who contribute to the next winning team in Pittsburgh. Time will tell. They are, for what it’s worth, considered two of Washington’s better prospects.
The bigger issue here involves the frequency with which deals of this magnitude have happened and how another one is going to play with a fan base so frustrated right now that it could spit nails.
“Emotion, yes. Fallout, I don’t know,” Pirates general manager Ben Cherington said on a Zoom call when asked about selling this one to paying customers. “Emotion, yes, because I understand Josh is a likable guy, a likable player, and he did a good job in a Pirates uniform. I personally really like and respect him.
“More than anything else, what I believe Pirates fans want is a winning team, more than they want to root for a single player, even one who is a really good guy and good player. That’s how we see it.”
It was a tough move for Cherington to make but also one that was seemingly coming down the pike, arriving no later than the 2022 trade deadline. That boundary exists for a variety of reasons, but it boils down to money and timing, something fans have probably heard way too much with the local baseball team.
Cherington did what he did because there’s little chance Bell was going to stick around and sign a long-term extension before, during or after the 2022 season, when he’s scheduled to become a free agent.
Knowing that, it’s smart business for Cherington to recoup as much value as possible before the Pirates lose Bell, flipping a veteran player who was an All-Star in 2019 for several prospects they can develop over time. (Crowe actually made his MLB debut in 2020.)
Cherington’s predecessor, Neal Huntington, fell short in that process and it cost him his job. The McCutchen trade was fine, bringing back Bryan Reynolds, but shipping Cole to Houston was bad. The words to describe the Chris Archer trade probably aren’t printable in a family newspaper.
The precedent there, though, matters little to Cherington. He made none of those trades and will be judged ultimately on how this one and several others like it pan out.
“In order to build a talent base that’s big enough, deep enough and dynamic enough to win, we need to add more,” Cherington said. “So when we have guys who might be at points in their careers where we have less time with them, and there’s an opportunity to try to add more talent that we may have a longer time with, those are the kinds of things that we’re going to have to be willing to do, even when it involves someone like Josh, who we really respect.”
Then Cherington added the kicker: “It likely won’t be the last one.”
The baseball aspect of this makes sense. Bell had 37 home runs, 116 RBIs and earned an All-Star nod in 2019. Many around baseball viewed that as a breakout season for him, proof that what he did in 2017 — 26 homers, 90 RBIs and finishing third in the National League Rookie of the Year voting — was more than a mirage.
For Cherington to make the deal now, when he had time to spare, the acquisition of Crowe and Yean must have been appealing. Ditto for not paying Bell’s projected arbitration number — as high as $7.2 million — in a season where the Pirates clearly do not plan on being competitive.
So the appropriate move, then, is to flip a finite number of games with Bell to future performance times two (or more if Crowe or Yean are traded). The issue remains how many times Pirates fans have heard this particular tune.
“For those of us in baseball operations, that’s what we wake up thinking about every day: How do we build a winning team and one that can be sustainable?” Cherington said. “Because I think at the end of the day, that’s what Pirates fans care about more than anything else.
“In order to build that winning team that our fans deserve, it’s going to require making some decisions like this along the way to give ourselves the chance to build enough talent to do that.”
Bell is 28 years old but handled himself with the maturity and moxie of someone a decade or so older. He was a terrific representative of the franchise and the city, even though he never really took to the four-word label that was routinely slapped on him.
“It is something that I never really thought about unless I was talking to some of you guys,” Bell said back in September, talking about being the face of the franchise. “In the clubhouse every day and around the guys, I don't think anybody treats anybody differently in regards to being more recognizable. That might be a different story around Pittsburgh.
“People are excited to see the Pirates when we're playing well. You want to be the face of the franchise on a winning team. That's what we all strive to be. We strive to be winners. That’s the most important thing. So I don't think there's any added pressure. It's just continuing to focus on winning games.”
Bell downplayed his own impact in the community, but it was certainly sizable. When racism and social justice became a bigger (and important) topic of conversation, Bell addressed it head on. He also upped his charitable and outreach efforts.
Bell appeared on several local and national platforms, sharing what it’s like to be a Black baseball player in 2020 and suggesting steps forward to improve the situation. He also started #SocialReformSunday on social media and a book club focused on race-related reads. He continued volunteer work with the Pirates’ RBI (Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities) program and the Jewish Community Center of Pittsburgh.
For his efforts, Bell became the Pirates’ nominee for the 2020 Roberto Clemente Award.
“I obviously respect him as a player on the field, but really do truly respect him as a person,” Cherington said. “I felt like I learned a lot from him in the last year. So that’s a difficult conversation when I made that call [Thursday].”
It also, as Cherington said, likely won’t be the last one of its kind, as the Pirates continue to shop such players as Joe Musgrove, Adam Frazier and a handful of others.
The Pirates are clearly comfortable making themselves and their fans a little uncomfortable in the short-term, so long as the new regime, spearheaded by Cherington, can finally get some of these prospects to consistently pan out.
“We’ve had a lot of phone calls, and we’ll see where those lead,” Cherington said. “But I will just say that in order to accomplish our goals, which is again to build a winning team and sustain that in Pittsburgh, we’re going to need to continue to focus on accumulation of talent and then development of that talent.
“That comes from all different avenues, but trade is one of them. This is the time of the year where those conversations happen, so we’ll continue them.”
Jason Mackey: jmackey@post-gazette.com and Twitter @JMackeyPG.
First Published: December 24, 2020, 7:03 p.m.
