It looks like Nate McLouth's return to the Pirates is all but a done deal, as Ken Rosenthal is reporting tonight that the two sides have agreed to terms and only a physical separates this deal from completion. If McLouth hadn't once been a Pirate, I doubt this move would garner much interest. With Xavier Paul gone, the Pirates only have three big league outfielders and since Alex Presley is a bit of an unknown quantity and since Jose Tabata tends to get hurt a lot, they need someone else until they're sure Gorkys Hernandez is ready. Nate McLouth is "someone else." He had a couple good years a couple of years ago and he's been awful lately, but PNC Park can be friendly to lefties and he only just turned 30 and it's a one-year deal, so there's not really anything to get worked up over. 

Of course, McLouth is more than just some guy because he's an ex-Pirate. He was sort of the face of the "This Front Office Has No Clue What They're Doing" movement during the late Littlefield era when the Pirates couldn't find him regularly playing time in 2006 or early 2007. He had a fantastic breakout year in 2008, when he lead the NL with 46 doubles, hit 26 homers, put up an .853 OPS, and won a Gold Glove that people are still debating in Pittsburgh. He started 2009 out looking like he was going to follow up 2008 with a strong year, then was dealt to the Braves in what was probably the most shocking move of the Neal Huntington era. Now, he's back. This is very weird. 

Let's begin here: you cannot understate how bad Nate McLouth has been in his last two years in Atlanta. In 2009 and 2010, he's hit a combined .210/.322/.328. He's got just 10 homers and 24 doubles and three triples in 166 games/609 plate appearances. That line makes him pretty damn similar to Xavier Paul, though he certainly has more extra base power (his slugging percentage is lower because his batting average is so low) and he does draw more walks. Regardless, he's been really, really terrible with the Braves. 

So why bring him back? I think there are at least a few possible answers. One is that for all of his struggles, he wasn't a terrible hitter against right-handed pitching last year. He hit .251/.372/.372 against righties, with all four of his homers and eight of his 12 doubles. Again, not great stuff, but if Tabata gets hurt again, a McLouth/Gorkys Hernandez platoon in right field might at least make a functional baseball player. That would be better than anything Xavier Paul or Matt Diaz offered last year. Presumably in a bench role, Clint Hurdle will be able to keep McLouth away from tough lefties the way he did with Garrett Jones last year and by simply doing that, McLouth's numbers should improve a bit. 

The second reason is that being back at PNC Park will probably be beneficial for him, too. If you check McLouth's home run tracker from 2008, most of his homers were pulled straight down the right field line. PNC's ten feet shorter in right than Turner Field, and Turner gets a lot deeper quicker in right center than PNC does. McLouth obviously doesn't have the same power he did in 2008, but being in PNC should at least help him maximize what he's got left. 

Let's not kid ourselves: McLouth isn't ever going to be the player that he was in 2008 again. He shouldn't be a regular starter for the Pirates under any circumstance that doesn't involve an injury. When it comes to fourth outfielders, though, it's a one year commitment, he should be very cheap, and there's at least some reasons to think if he's used properly he could see a bit of a bounce back in 2012. Really, I don't hate this move as much as I thought I would when word of it first leaked out a couple of days ago.

Rob Biertempfel tweets today that the Pirates are "[moving] closer" to signing both Nate McLouth and Wilson Betemit. As long as McLouth is in on a one-year deal, I have no problem with him being a fourth outfielder and maybe even spelling Jose Tabata from time to time, both in hopes of keeping him healthy and giving the Pirates the occasional platoon advantage. (UPDATE: Looks like this deal really is close, as per everyone else that covers the team)

Betemit would really only make sense as Pedro Alvarez Insurance. Given that we've seen the Pirates interested in Ian Stewart and Mark DeRosa this winter, it's clear that they want some form of contingency in case Alvarez comes to camp out of shape or in case he never starts hitting again. Betemit's been pretty decent as a part-time player in Kansas City and Detroit the last two years, hitting .290/.359/.479 with 21 homers and 42 doubles in 674 PAs.

He's a switch-hitter that beats up on right-handed pitching, which I guess might make him an option at first base, as well, should Alvarez establish himself and the team elects to non-tender Garrett Jones (Jones is suspiciously missing from the list of Pirates that will be at PirateFest, though obviously he might have some other kind of obligation preventing him from attending). The danger is that his glove is pretty notoriously bad at third base and I doubt it'd be an upgrade at first, where he doesn't really enough to justify a ton of playing time. Regardless, I think Betemit's a useful bench piece and a better option behind Alvarez at third than Chase d'Arnaud or Josh Harrison, so he'd be a nice pickup on a short-term deal. 

This is a few days old, but Mark Simon at ESPN identified Nick Evans as a potential "under the radar asset" due to his very strong glovework at first base. Keep this in mind when you read that Neal Huntington is saying that the Pirates might not even look for a first baseman if they can't bring Derrek Lee back. Jen Langosch, meanwhile, says that Lee will likely turn down arbitration to wait and see how the Pujols/Fielder situations play out. 

At Bucs Dugout, Charlie has a nice piece about the tone of off-season discussion as it applies to what the Pirates are doing this winter. 

This is still scuttlebutt at this point, but it looks like the Marlins have offered Albert Pujols a 10-year deal. If that's the case, that's where he's going to end up. And if that happens, I'm going to hate the Marlins more than any team in the National League.  

There's not much going on on the Pirate front tonight, but John Perrotto has tweeted a few updates about the Pirates that help clarify a few things we've already heard. He says that the Pirates' interest in Nate McLouth is because they want him to be a fourth outfielder and because they're not certain Gorkys Hernandez is ready for that role. That's about what I figured when I first read about the Pirates' interest in McLouth last night. It makes sense to want to see Hernandez for another year at Triple-A before bringing him up and McLouth wouldn't be the worst bench option in the world. It'd also give the Pirates room to trade Hernandez to anyone looking for a young, defensively sound centefielder, but that's neither here nor there. 

Perrotto also confirms the Bucs' interest in Mark DeRosa, which was first reported by Ken Rosenthal. It doesn't sound terribly likely he'll end up with the Pirates, though, because the Pirates want him on a minor league deal to provide competition for Pedro Alvarez, but DeRosa isn't interested. That dovetails pretty well with what Neal Huntington told the press today about having a contingency plan in place in case Pedro craters out again. Given DeRosa's recent injury problems, I wouldn't give him more than a minor league deal, but if the Pirates got him for that little it'd be hard to complain about it. 

That's about all for the night, and if anything it's more confirmation that there's not much exciting that's going to go on on the Pirates' side of things this week. 

The Pirates are one of the teams interested in free agent lefty Jeff Francis, says Jon Morosi, and now we have our first nugget of depressing information from Dallas! I actually thought Francis would've been worth a flier last year, when there was some uncertainty as to how he was going to recover from his shoulder surgery and there was a chance that he'd be able to recover some of his pre-injury form. 

Instead, he signed with the Royals, his strikeout rate dropped to Zach Duke levels (4.48 K/9), and his average fastball velocity plummeted to under 85 mph. Which is to say that he'd probably be able to get some ground balls and eat up some innings at above-replacement level, but I don't think I'd count on him for more than that. I'd take him over Aaron Cook, if we're ranking the players Clint Hurdle is attempting to acquire in his hostile take over of the Pirates front office to recreate the worst National League pennant winner in recent history without any of their good players, but I'm not sure I'd be willing to say much more than that. 

Here's a list of exciting things the Pirates might do in Dallas this week:

1. ... 

And here's a list of things the Pirates might actually do in Dallas this week:

1. Acquire Nate McLouth.
2. No, seriously, Nate McLouth. I mean, I guess Nate McLouth would be better at being Xavier Paul than Xavier Paul was and maybe a return to PNC would help him find his power stroke again. Probably not, though. Nate McLouth kind of sucks now.
3. Trade for Ian Stewart as a depressing form of Pedro Alvarez Insurance. 
4. Have Derrek Lee turn down their arbitration offer. 
5. Make a Rule 5 draft pick that will almost certainly make no impact on the 2012 team. 
6. Issue a statement about the Miami Marlins, saying that the way that they've basically blackmailed their fans into buying them a new stadium and MLB into paying their bills with revenue sharing money so that they can now go ahead and buy a World Series will "literally take the sport down." Actually, if this happens it would be exiting. And they should definitely do it.

As usual, I will be spending most of my non-sciencing moments trawling the TwitterNetz for the latest in Pirate-related developments, rumors, rumblings, etc., and will do my best to get them posted here as quickly as possible. 

Chris Capuano will sign with the Dodgers for two years and $10 million, Jim Bowden reported today. Capuano was somebody that I think a lot of us were hoping would end up with the Pirates. You can see that that's a very reasonable deal and as a lefty that can strike guys out, he's something the Pirates don't really have right now. 

I'm not really sure what the club's goal is with the rotation this winter. As near as I could tell, they didn't even express a ton of interest in Capuano (I'm wrong here, the Pirates were apparently involved in the bidding), who would've been a nice fit and a decent value even at, say, $7 million a year instead of five. This rotation needs help, and the guys that they seem most likely to sign right now (Francis and Cook, the ex-Rockies) won't give the help they need. Hopefully, Huntington's got something else up his sleeve for next week's meetings. 

Possibly in that vein, Rob Biertempfel tweeted today that the Bucs are interested in Wei-Yei Chen and Tsyoshi Wada. Chen is the more interesting of the two to me. He's Taiwanese and the Pirates have actually established a bit of a presence in Taiwan over the last couple of years, signing a handful of teenagers from the island. I can't find much information about his 2011 season, but in August of 2010 Patrick Newman said he had "NPB's top power lefty arsenal," with a low-90s fastball and a high-80s slider. I'm not sure that's still true as his K-rate plummetted in 2011 after a drop in velocity, but if the Pirates think he's healthy he's definitely worth a look. Wada's older (he'll be 32 before opening day, Chen will be 27 in July) and more of a soft-tosser and from reading about him I kind of get the feeling that he might have some trouble transitioning to MLB. Either way, it is nice to see the Pirates show some international interest this winter; they've made some big strides in the Latin American market, but the club hasn't done much on the other side of the world. As near as I can tell, the only Major League leve talent that they've brought in directly from Japan is Masumi Kuwata, who was 39 and very clearly past his prime when the Pirates had him in 2007 (hat-tip to Bucs Dugout for the FanGraphs links)

The Miami Marlins signed Heath Bell to a three-year/$9 million deal last night. This is patently ridiculous: Bell is 34 years old, he's coming off of a year in which his strikeout rate took a nosedive and his peripherals indicated pretty strongly that his saves and ERA were a mirage, and he's a huge man that's probably more likely to plummet from usefulness rather than slowly decline. 

This is the latest in a line of ridiculous closer contracts that have been signed this winter, and with every one the response from me and lots of other Pirate fans is this: "Trade Joel Hanrahan." While I think that the Pirates should be shopping Hanrahan right now and at next week's winter meetings, I think that in the off-season it's often easy to assume that every move takes place in a vacuum and it's often pretty easy to get your perspective on these kinds of things mixed up. 

Consider this: if you were the fan of a team that had a fair amount of money to spend and a GM that overvalues closers (note that this comprises a huge portion of the league), would you rather see that GM spend $27 million on three years of Heath Bell, or trade two decent-to-good prospects for Joel Hanrahan? The money is one thing. It might keep you from spending it somewhere else in a year or two, it might force a trade you don't like somewhere down the road. But the prospects? They're gone and they're not coming back. In the winter when there are always plenty of free agent closers, doesn't it make more sense to overpay a closer in terms of money rather than in terms of prospects? During the season as the trade deadline approaches is a different story, but over the winter I wonder how many teams would be willing to overpay for a closer in terms of prospects compared to teams willing to overpay for a closer in terms of money. 

This sort of situation exists with everything during the offseason. When Ramon Hernandez signed with the Rockies for less money than Rod Barajas signed with the Pirates (though with a guaranteed second year instead of an option), there was some backlash on the Pirates for moving so quickly to pick up an inferior catcher. It's true that that's what happened. There's a lot more to consider than just "Barajas or Hernandez," though. At the time the Pirates signed Barajas, the old CBA was in effect, meaning that to sign Hernandez the Pirates would have to give up their second-round pick in 2012. Barajas had a couple of other offers on his table, meaning that if the Pirates didn't move quickly he might've ended up elsewhere. And who knows how willing Hernandez would've been to play for the Pirates? If it cost the Rockies -- who have a better chance at making the playoffs in 2012 and 2013 than the Pirates do -- $6.5 million over two years, maybe it would've cost the Pirates $9 million. Maybe Hernandez would've told the Pirates he wanted to wait for the new CBA on the assumption that the penalty pick would be dropped for him (it was), specifically to see who else would be interested. Maybe while the Pirates waited for all that to play out, Barajas signs with the Dodgers and then they don't get Hernandez anyway, so they end up with Mike McKenry catching. 

I'm not trying to necessarily defend bad decisions here, just giving a friendly reminder that there are two sides to everything and that in many cases, the Pirates are going to be viewed as baseball's leper colony until they turn things around. 

Lyle Overbay hit a combined .234/.310/.360 with the Pirates and Diamondbacks next year. He only hit nine home runs all year. The Diamondbacks apparently want to bring him back for another year. 

Of course, the D'Backs will almost certainly finish with a better record than the Pirates in 2012 and the Pirates are playing Clint Barmes more than $10 million over the next two years. So maybe the joke is on me.  

Every year around this time, the BBWAA releases its annual Hall of Fame ballot. This accomplishes a few things: everyone starts talking about guys that are still on the ballot that deserve to be in the Hall, everyone starts dissecting the serious new candidates, and everyone looks at the down-ballot guys that aren't likely to even get a vote and wonder exactly how the BBWAA picks the cutoff between who gets on the ballot and who doesn't. 

This year's biggest head-scratcher for me? Tony Womack. Tony Womack of the career OPS+ of 72, the career OBP of .317, the career bWAR of 1.2. Tony Womack was traded five times in his career for seven players. Of those seven, only Jason Boyd and Matt Duff played in the Majors. His career accomplishments amount to this: he lead the NL in stolen bases from 1997-1999 and he got the game-tying hit off of Mariano Rivera in the 2001 World Series.

Tony Womack: potential Hall of Famer.