With the Winter Meetings wrapping up now that the Rule 5 draft is over, we can probably assume that the Pirates are dont making moves, at least for the next few days. So, for now, let's take a breath and count the players that the Pirates have added to the 40-man roster since the regular season ended: 

1. Erik Bedard
2. Jeremy Hefner
3. Rudy Owens
4. Duke Welker
5. Justin Wilson
6. Rod Barajas
7. Clint Barmes
8. Matt Hague
9. Jordy Mercer
10. Yamaico Navarro
11. Gustavo Nunez
12. Starling Marte
13. Nate McLouth 

Less than half of those players were added from within the organization to protect them from the Rule 5 draft. And I'm almost certain the Pirates aren't done yet. This is going to be a heck of a different roster when 2012 begins. 

The Pirates made a few selections in the Triple-A phase of the Rule 5 draft today, and a couple of them are interesting picks worth keeping an eye on. The most interesting one is Aaron Poreda, who you may recognize as the White Sox' first round pick in the 2007 draft and a main component of the Jake Peavy trade in 2009. He's since completely lost his control in the Padres' system, but he's a big lefty capable of huge strikeout totals. That makes him probably worth a roll of the dice, even if fixing him is likely a very long shot at this point. The Pirates have had quite a bit of success in the past curing young pitchers with control problems, so why not give it a shot, you know? 

They also picked up two more catchers (!), Francisco Diaz from Philadelphia and Charlie Cutler from St. Louis. Diaz doesn't seem all that interesting, but it looks to me like Cutler can hit a bit, though he only played 72 games in 2010 and 69 in 2011, which probably indicates some injury problems. 

You can check out the full Rule 5 results here: for what it's worth Baseball America calls Gustavo Nunez "one of the highest profile players" drafted this year and they say that he "has a better chance to stick than most Rule 5 picks." 

Albert Pujols is an Angel for the next 10 years, for the price of $250-$260 million. I'll be happy that he's no longer in the division to terrorize the Pirates, but I can't pretend like I'm overjoyed to see a great player leave the team that made him great. The Angels also signed CJ Wilson today, which means that they spent more than a third of a billion dollars on baseball players in one day. Good thing that baseball reined in spending by fixing big bonuses in the draft. 

Sarcasm aside, both of these moves are interesting to the Pirates because it makes it almost certain that Kendrys Morales will either be traded or non-tendered and since the Angels have Wilson, Jered Weaver, and Dan Haren, there's a good chance that Ervin Santana will hit the trade market as well. If Morales is healthy, he'd be a nice fit at first base for the Pirates with (I think) two years of arbitration left and his injury concerns may make him a bit cheaper in a trade, though his availability and the other dominoes falling at first base may change that quickly. The Pirates would likely have to move quickly on him, though, which means no more waiting around for Derrek Lee. Mark Trumbo is probably an option, too, but given that he's young with a ton of control left and that he's basically got Brad Eldred's profile at the plate (his minor league OBP is just .330, his OBP last year was a paltry .291), I'd guess he's going to cost more on the trade market than he's worth to a team like the Pirates. 

Santana, meanwhile, would just be a solid pitcher to pick up at a fairly reasonable cost ($11 million this year, $13 million option next year) to plug into the rotation/trade at the deadline. I wouldn't give up much in the way of prospects for him, but David Todd's idea of dangling Joel Hanrahan ... well, it can't hurt to ask, right?

As it turns out, the Pirates released Ross Ohlendorf last night to create a space on the roster to make a Rule 5 pick today, not to make room for Yamaico Navarro. The roster spot for Navarro will apparently be cleared sometime this afternoon. 

The draft is in about five minutes. I'm busy this morning, but I'll try to get this post updated as quickly as I can. Until then, you can check out Vlad at Bucs Dugout's great preview of the draft because the Pirates' pick will likely come from his list of players. 

UPDATE (10:12)- The Pirates picked Gustavo Nunez, a shortstop from the Tigers organization that Baseball America calls a "highly skilled defender with a highly questionable bat." They just missed Pedro Ciriaco so much! They also apparently lost Brett Lorin to the Diamondbacks, which is a little disappointing, but not really all that surprising.  

ANALYZING UPDATE: I'm not sure I understand this pick a whole lot. Nunez is 23 and only just made it to Double-A part way through 2011. He had a decent line at Advanced-A this year (.304/.368/.431), but he was pretty brutal there in 2010 as a 22-year old, hitting .222/.263/.281. He was also pretty rough at Double-A after his promotion in 2011, hitting .215/.282/.289 in 34 games. He shows flashes with the bat from time to time that might make him a bit more interesting if he were already in the organization, but I find it hard to believe the Pirates are going to be able to hide him on the 25-man roster all year with Clint Barmes and Yamaico Navarro and Chase d'Arnaud and Jordy Mercer all being more deserving of playing time at this point. 

When the news broke this afternoon that the Pirates were no longer in on Wilson Betemit and that they'd made their roster moves to accomodate Erik Bedard and Nate McLouth without releasing Ross Ohlendorf, my gut feeling was that it was a sign that there was another move in the offing. It turns out that was a good instinct: the Pirates traded Brooks Pounders and Diego Goris tonight to Kansas City for infielder Yamaico Navarro, and it appears that the corresponding move to create space on the 40-man will be to release Ohlendorf. 

Navarro's just turned 24 and he's spent a bit of time in the big leagues with both the Royals and Red Sox in 2010 and 2011. The Pirates interest likely comes in the form of his decent walk-rate and .430 minor league slugging percentage, even though his big league numbers aren't great. He does indeed have an interesting minor league profile and you can see why a team in search of a utility guy would be interested in him over, say, Wilson Betemit. I honestly don't know much about Navarro, but my gut reaction is that if the Pirates are going to acquire a utility guy, I'd rather have a 24-year old with some potential than another re-tread. To be honest, I need to do some more reading on Navarro before I really make any sort of judgment here. 

On the other end of the deal, Pounders is a tough pitcher to peg. The Pirates picked him out of high school in the second round of the 2009 draft, when he was billed as a big guy without an overwhelming fastball, but with much better secondary stuff than the average high schooler. He pitched well with West Virginia this year, but it was mostly in relief. As far as I've read, I don't think he's done much more than crack the low-90s with his 6'4"/260ish pound frame, which may be why he's on the list of pitchers to be dealt. To be honest, there's going to be a huge logjam of pitchers in FSL Bradenton when the 2012 season opens and Pounders is way, way down on that depth chart (he's behind, by my calculation, Cole, Taillon, Cain, Von Rosenberg, Fuesser, and Dodson, just off the top of my head, though I guess Cole may start 2012 in Altoona), so it makes sense that he'd be the one to be traded for some big league depth. I will, however, miss having a player named "Brooks Pounders" in the Pirates' system. 

I've got a busy end of the day here, but there are a few things we need to catch up on here: 

Rob Biertempfel tweets that the Pirates are out on Wilson Betemit, which means that the utility infield job is still open. Ian Stewart, here we come! 

Meanwhile, the addition of both McLouth and Bedard means the club has two roster spots to open up and so they've DFA'd both Jason Jaramillo and Pedro Ciriaco (I'm having trouble figuring out exactly who reported this first, but it's all over the place by now). I'm pretty surprised to see that Ohlendorf wasn't one of the people DFA'd, because I'm almost positive he'll be a non-tender in the coming days or weeks. It's possible he'll be removed to make room for a Rule 5 pick at the end of the meetings. In any case, it's odd that they'd DFA these two with the non-tenders coming up, so maybe we should read this as a sign that more moves are coming in the near future. 

What a day, huh? I guess I was wrong when I said the Pirates wouldn't be doing much at these meetings.  

I've already written quite a bit about Erik Bedard, both below and at the beginning of November, but now that it looks like a deal is happening I want to give the lefty his own post. You can check out his career stats here and get into the nitty-gritty here at FanGraphs, but basically Bedard is a fastball/curveball guy that can get a lot of swings and misses when he's healthy. The problem is that he's so very rarely healthy that he just signed a one-year deal with the Pirates. 

Without Paul Maholm, the Pirates' rotation entering this off-season was paper-thin. James McDonald and Charlie Morton, the only two pitchers that offer any sort of upside for the Pirates over their 2011 performances, both have their flaws without even considering how Morton's hip injury will affect him for 2012. Behind them, the rotation is mostly a mess of low-upside guys like Jeff Karstens and Brad Lincoln, no upside guys like Kevin Correia, and complete question marks like Rudy Owens, Jeff Locke, and Chris Leroux. That's why I hated letting Maholm walk so much: because the Pirates mostly have nothing, and Maholm is definitely something, even if he's a bit pricey for a known and unimpressive quantity. 

That means the Pirates have to do two things with their rotation this winter: add talent and add innings. The Pirates got plenty of innings last year from decent starters, and as a result the rotation was greatly improved over the 2010 edition. That said, there wasn't a ton of talent in the Pirates 2011 rotation and that certainly showed through at times. Swapping Jeff Francis with Paul Maholm doesn't really fix that problem, even if it more or less replaces the innings without sacrificing a ton of performance. Hoping that a rotation that couldn't really strike anyone out repeats itself as an effective rotation is a pretty dangerous bet for a team like the Pirates to make. 

This is exactly why Bedard makes sense for the Pirates: he gives them something they don't have at all, if he's healthy, and spending money on this sort of risk is a better use of funds than signing another Kevin Correia. Bedard will probably get hurt at some point in the year, but even 130-150 innings from him will make the rotation much better than it would be without him and if he can postpone that injury until late in the year, the Pirates might be able to flip him for some value at the trade deadline. If he's not healthy, well, he'll still probably be as valuable to the team as Correia for about the same price. It's a risk, but it's one worth taking if the Pirates had any intention of making their rotation better in 2012. 

That said, it'd be foolish to think that Bedard completely fixes the depth problem the Pirates have in their rotation. The Pirates are paying solely for Bedard's talent: actually relying on him to throw more than 100 innings is probably foolish. A McDonald/Bedard/Morton/Karstens/Lincoln rotation early in the year could pretty quickly turn into McDonald/blech/meh/yikes/ew with injuries and poor performances. Which means that I wouldn't be surprised if the Pirates went out and tried to pick up one more starter, likely a guy like Jeff Francis, just to put in the rotation with the idea that he'll eat some innings up and give a relatively stable performance, Maholm-style. With Bedard in the mix, Francis becomes a bit more palatable (to me) because the Pirates aren't really looking to him for anything more than innings. 

I don't know if that's what the Pirates are thinking at this point, but I guess it wouldn't surprise me. Either way, Bedard has the ability to make the Pirates a lot better, and that's not something that can be said of most of the signings we're used to seeing the team make. That alone makes it worthwhile, even with the unignorable injury risk.  

Marc Brassard of Ottawa's Le Droit just tweeted this: Érik Bédard, de Navan, va signer un contrat d'un an pour 4,5 M $ plus primes avec les Pirates de Pittsburgh ce PM, a appris le Droit. My french is rusty (translation: I took spanish in high school, I speak no french) roughly translates to "Erik Bedard, of Nevan, will sign a one-year contract for $4.5 million, plus incentives, with the Pittsburgh Pirates, le Droit has learned."

Le Droit is, per Wikipedia, the only francophone newspaper published in Ontario, which is where Bedard, a Franco-Ontarian, is from. Which is to say that I know nothing about it and so I can't say for sure if this is a reliable report, but there's plenty of reason to think that it is. 

If it goes through, this will be very good news. Will update as warranted.  

Big thanks to the Blitzburgh Blog for passing this along. 

UPDATE: Tim Dierkes says he's confirmed it.

With the addition of Jose Morales, the Pirates currently have a hilarious six catchers that are somewhere between the Majors and Triple-A, not counting actual prospect Tony Sanchez. They are, in alphabetical order, Rod Barajas, Jake Fox, Eric Fryer, Jason Jaramillo, Mike McKenry, Morales, and Wyatt Toregas. I have never seen such an acumulation of mediocre-to-sub-par catching talent in one place in my entire life and now the only thing I can think to do is to rank them all by offense, defense, scrappiness, and intangibles.

Let's go to the list! 

1. Rod Barajas

• Offense: 2 (relative to baseball in general), 7 (relative to the field). Barajas's offensive value mostly relies on the fact that he can occasionally hit home runs. PNC Park will almost entirely neuter this ability. But he's still better offensively than just about anyone else on this list! 
• Defense: Let's be honest, I don't know the best way to truly characterize catcher defense and you don't, either. All indications, though, are that Barajas is pretty good, both in the traditional ways that you can measure catching defense and the new ways to look at things like blocking pitches in the dirt. The Pirates have a pretty progressive statistics component to their front office, so I'll tell myself that he scores pretty highly. 
• Scrappiness: As a guy that played for both the Mets and Dodgers, he is barred from being referred to as "scrappy" under the Small Market Scrappiness Agreement, which first came about under during the resolution of the 1994/1995 player's strike. 
• Intangibles: The Pirates are paying him $4 million. That makes him go #1 if only for my sanity alone.  

2. Eric Fryer

• Offense: incomplete. Fryer has a career minor league line of .281/.372/.427, which is pretty good for a catcher, but he didn't get above Advanced-A until last year, when he was 25. He's barely got any experience above Double-A and he cratered in Triple-A last year after a brief stint with the Pirates. He can take a walk and he showed some power with Altoona last year, but his age at the level and the fact that he always seems to be blocked means that he's pretty much impossible to judge. 
• Defense: Same thing applies here, but everyone that's watched him play raves about him. 
• Scrappiness: He's from Ohio. OHIO. The name Eric Fryer just sounds scrappy. 
• Intangibles: Nicknamed Fryerbot by the McEffect last year, which is awesome. Young enough that he might not completely suck. I like him. 

3. Don Slaught

• Used to have an awesome mustache, was a glove-deficient line-drive machine.
• My nickname in the machine pitch league when I was eight was Sluggo, because I was our catcher and I was a line drive machine. I don't know if I was actually a line drive machine, but I tell myself I was. I probably wasn't: there was no base stealing allowed in machine pitch and since I was an eight year old and this was way back in the day at Hermitage Little League when there was no bridge between machine-pitch and Little League, which meant that there was a lot of nine and ten-year olds in machine pitch, they probably just stuck me there because they needed a catcher and called me Sluggo because I liked it and they were trying hide the fact that they were burying me on the field. 
• I might actually rather have the 2011 version of Don Slaught, whatever that entails, than anyone else on this list from this point onwards. To be fair, though, I was always a big Don Slaught fan. 

4. Mike McKenry

• Offense: In his early days in the minors with the Rockies he showed some decent pop and his minor league lines indicated at least an ability to take a walk. A relatively robust strikeout, total, is probably a decent indicator that he's unlikely to do much better than the .222 batting average (his BABIP last year with the Pirates was a dead-average .290), which means he won't hit much in the Majors. He did have that homer off of Marmol, though.
• Defense: Not enough of a sample size to really judge his advanced stats from last year, though his minor league reputation is strong. He was obviously better than Ryan Doumit, for what that's worth (NOTE: that's worth nothing). 
• Scrappiness: Mike McKenry is so scrappy (How scrappy is he?) that the Pirates are considering re-writing the team history books to refer to Phil Garner as "McKenry Iron." Mike McKenry is so scrappy (How scrappy is he?) that he could be a punt returner/wide receiver/running back/defensive back for the Patriots. Mike McKenry is so scrappy (How scrappy is he?) that people just assume that he was a punter for Nebraska. 
• Intangibles: Greg Brown loves him so much it makes my head hurt. But to counterbalance that, I started calling him Scrappy Doo last year and then he said on the scoreboard that Scrappy Doo is his favorite cartoon. Which means he might be a WHYGAVS reader. I'm sorry for all the mean things I've said about you, Mike. You're a much better catcher than I ever was. I was a Ryan-Doumit-level defender behind the plate after Little League, if we're being perfectly honest. Except that I could always throw out base stealers pretty well. 

5. Jake Fox

• Offense: He has 20 career big league homers, which I can tell you without even a Baseball-Reference search is more than everyone else except for Barajas on this list combined. Depending on how Fryer's career plays out, that will likely still hold true in 2050. But more seriously, the dude is like Brad Eldred. He can hit home runs, but he will strike out. 
• Defense: Calling what he does defense is akin to calling baseball hockey.
• Scrappiness: Guys with some pop that strike out a ton aren't generally allowed to be called scrappy under the Dave Kingman Corollary. 
• Intangibles: Played well enough in 2006 to convince some Cubs fans he was good, then hilariously dashed their hopes. 

 6. Jason Jaramillo

• Offense: Once hit a home run at a spring training game I was at. 
• Defense: Good, I guess?
• Scrappiness: Was acquired in a trade for Ronny Paulino, the least scrappy player in Pirate history. That gives him a scrappiness boost. When you consider that he's a Quad-A catcher, that makes him pretty scrappy.
• Intangibles: Lots of Pirate fans to pronouce his last name phoenetically, which drives me insane.

7. Jose Morales

• Offense: His major league numbers are, to this point, better than either McKenry's or Jaramillo's. It's an awfully small sample size, though, and his minor league numbers (.286/.341/.383) are bad. Also, he's played parts of ten seasons in the minors. That's never good. 
• Defense: On one hand, I say to myself that his defense must be good, because why else would he still be in baseball? On the other hand, he's listed as a C/1B, which is usually a sign of a catcher that can't catch. I know this because when I was 14, my coach moved me to first base because I couldn't really catch. 
• Scrappiness: Mostly, scrappiness is code for "untalented white guy." In order to combat this form of institutional racism, I will refer to Morales as The Scrappy Jose Morales, should he ever make the team. I mean, all Quad-A/aspiring back-up catchers who rely almost entirely on defensive reputation have to be scrappy, right? What else do they have?
• Intangibles: I don't know enough about this guy to honestly make a judgment.

8. Wyatt Toregas

• He wasn't a Pirate for a while, but now he is again! I just used an exclamation point in a sentence about Wyatt Toregas. This post is draining my sanity.

9. Brian Jeroloman

• Would be ranked higher due to his purportedly strong defensive abilities, but is no longer a Pirate because the Blue Jays re-claimed him on waivers like two minutes after the Pirates claimed him the first time. If the Pirates should ever re-acquire him, his nickname will be Hot Potato. 

While all of the baseball world had their eyes glued on Albert Pujols last night, the Pirates kept doing their own thing virtually undected by the rest of the baseball world. The best news, I thought, to come out of last night was Nick Cafardo's tweet that the Pirates are interested in Erik Bedard. Bedard is exactly the sort of high-risk/high-reward starter I want to see the Pirates after this winter. He'll always be an injury risk, but when he's healthy he's probably better than anyone the Pirates have in their rotation and the injury risk is the only thing that gives the Pirates a shot at him. 

In case you're not well-versed on Bedard lore, he was a promising young pitcher with the Orioles that had a huge breakout year in 2007, which resulted in the Mariners paying a king's ransom for him that winter. He spent most of his time in Seattle injured, suffering a torn labrum in 2009 that caused him to miss all of 2010, but he came back pretty strongly last year, making 24 starts and striking out 125 hitters in 129 1/3 innings to go with his 3.62 ERA for the Mariners and Red Sox. 

The danger, of course, is that Bedard is the sort of pitcher that when you see he pitched 129 1/3 innings, you say to yourself, "Hey! He was pretty healthy last year!" and really, that's not really impressive at all. He'll be 33 before the season starts, and so even with a pretty healthy year in 2011 behind him, he remains an injury risk. Still, he's a talented guy and he showed last year that he's still a talented guy, post-labrum surgery. A move to the NL could help him, and PNC Park is pretty friendly to left-handed pitching. I'm not convinced that Bedard would be all that interested in pitching for the Pirates since the Red Sox grabbed him at last year's deadline, though it's possible that other teams may want him on an incentive-laden deal and the Pirates could reel him in by guaranteeing him more money. It'd be risky to guarantee Bedard, say, $5 million, but honestly, I think that'd be a better use of funds than spending it on Aaron Cook. Still, I don't have my hopes up. 

The Pirates are also apparently moving close to a deal with catcher Jose Morales, according to Ken Rosenthal. Morales will be 29 before the season starts and he was drafted by the Twins in the 3rd round of the 2001 draft, spending his whole career there until moving to Colorado's organization last year. He's played 96 big league games over parts of four seasons and he's got a .289/.365/.344 line at the plate. My assumption is that it'd be a minor league deal, and then Morales would compete with Mike McKenry and Jason Jaramillo and Eric Fryer to be Rod Barajas's backup, which seems fine to me. It looks like he can at least take a walk now and then and his batting average isn't terrible, so I'd be perfectly fine with him backing up Barajas instead of McKenry or Jaramillo while we wait for Fryer or Sanchez to emerge.