The Pirates signed Nick Evans to a minor league deal last night, according to the New York Daily News. Evans has played bits and pieces of the last four seasons with the Mets as a utility first baseman/corner outfielder with very little power. That doesn't sound terribly exciting, but Evans does have a respectable .295/.360/.489 line against lefties, with six of his eight career homers coming off of southpaws despite having a few more PAs against righties (222 to 195).

All this really means is that Evans isn't a terrible insurance policy in the event that the Pirates can't go out and find an everyday first baseman this winter and that Matt Hague isn't ready for the big leagues. Neither of those scenarios are a stretch, so even though Evans isn't terribly exciting he's probably a nice guy to at least have around in camp. If worse comes to worst, he'd make a nice platoon partner for Garrett Jones at first base and could potentially even spell Alex Presley occasionally against tough lefties in the outfield. 

Jen Langosch, on the Pirates' Winter Meetings agenda: 

The club's top priority is finding a first baseman, as the Pirates' only current internal options are Garrett Jones and Matt Hague. There would be significant risk going into 2012 with either as the team's everyday option. Jones has never hit well against left-handed pitching. Hague, on the other hand, has yet to make his Major League debut.

There's nothing technically wrong with this, of course, as first base is a position that the Pirates seriously need to upgrade, but it does imply that the club's top priority is not improving the starting rotation. The starting rotation that is currently comprised of James McDonald, Jeff Karstens, an injured Charlie Morton, Brad Lincoln, and Kevin Correia. 

The Pirates have showed some interest in upgrading their rotation, though to this point the only name I've seen them attached to is Aaron Cook. I've got a gut feeling that doing nothing at all might be preferrable to signing Aaron Cook. 

Keith Law set the Yinzernet on fire this afternoon by suggesting that the Pirates would consider trading Andrew McCutchen if they get an offer that blows them away. He didn't say that the Pirates were shopping McCutchen or hoping to trade him or anything like that. He said that they'd do what any team in their situation would do with an elite young player that has a ticking arbitration clock without an extension: they'd listen to offers and probably reject 99.9% of them. 

Still, the reaction to Law's blurb was pretty predictable: some Pirate fans were angry on the assumption that it's already time to start selling to the highest bidder, some were scared, some shrugged it off the way I have on the assumption that the Pirates are probably at least a couple years away from realistically looking to shop him at the very earliest. Tim is right in pointing out that in order to trade McCutchen at this point in his career, the Pirates would have to more or less go to one of baseball's best minor league systems and name their top five prospects for it to be a fair deal. The sorts of GMs that get those types of prospect stashes aren't the sorts of GMs that trade them away.

The summary of the summary here is that the Pirates aren't shopping Andrew McCutchen. They're not going to trade him this winter because they almost certainly can't get fair value for him short of Alex Anthopolous or Josh Friedman losing their minds. They're willing to listen because sometimes GMs lose their minds and so long as you're a 90-loss team, you can't afford to ignore anything. This is not news to anyone that follows the Pirates, but most people don't follow the Pirates and so it's being trumped up like big news. 

Even the mention of trading Andrew McCutchen gets my gears turning about the future of the Pirates, though, and so what I'm wondering right now is this: should the Pirates be shopping Andrew McCutchen this winter or in the nearish future? 

BLASPHEMY!

I know, right? But let's walk through this. 

Try to imagine the Pirates being good in 2012. OK, now try to imagine it without the following words and/or phrases: "miracle" and "if Pedro Alvarez pulls things together." Now try to imagine it. It's not very easy. Try to imagine the Pirates being good in 2013. Now, try it again without the two key phrases. A little more likely, perhaps, but still not easy. If we go to 2014, things get downright plausible even without Alvarez: Cole and maybe even Taillon should be up, Starling Marte should be up and adapted to big league pitching, maybe even a little more help will be on the way at that point. There are still things that need to come together, but on November 28th, 2011 it doesn't seem ridiculous to suggest that the Pirates could be contenders in 2014. This is not idea, but I guess it's progress. 

Andrew McCutchen will be a free agent after the 2015 season. The problem with that isn't that it's so near that the Pirates' inability to extend him to this point should be panic-inducing; it's that it's awfully hard to think that the Pirates will contend with what they currently have in their system before 2014, at which point the Pirates will have to be seriously considering what to do with McCutchen if they haven't signed him to an extension by that point. 

So I guess what I'm thinking is this: if the Pirates can't extend McCutchen and they're going to be trading him in 2014 or 2015 and they're probably not going to be contending before about that point anyway, why not trade him now or next season or after next season? They'd get a heck of a whole lot more post-2015 support out of a McCutchen trade that netted someone three years of Andrew McCutchen instead of a trade that gives someone half of that at the most. 

This is an incredibly dangerous way of thinking, of course. The Pirates kind-of-sort-of contended in 2011 with basically no Pedro Alvarez or Jose Tabata and a Neil Walker season that left things to be desired. If the Pirates can cobble some pitching together in the next month or so and have some young players make progress and Albert Pujols and Prince Fielder leave the division ... anything is technically possible. It's not likely by any means, I don't think, but it is possible. It's not possible without Andrew McCutchen.

The Pirates have had 19 consecutive losing seasons and this management group has had four of them now; it's not really fair of them to ask the fans to concede 20 and 21 well before either of those seasons start, no matter how long of a shot things are at this point. If the right offer were to come along in the next 16 months, though, the Pirates would be awfully hard-pressed to ignore it. 

Jim Callis tweets new news about the CBA that's even more depressing than what we learned last week: 

If you don't sign a pick, you lose his cap value. You can't not sign [your first round pick] and spend his money elsewhere. 

As Charlie points out, this is basically a hard slot. Which leaves considerably less room for creativity than the initial idea of a pool of money to be spent on your first ten rounds worth of picks does. This sucks.

With the winter meetings just about a week away, we've entered the first big off-season lull. There's not much that's going to happen in the next seven days, I don't think, though there are a few odds and ends to pick up that I missed over the Thanksgiving holiday. 

The Pirates offered Derrek Lee arbitration on Wednesday, but not Chris Snyder or Ryan Ludwick. That's all pretty predictable stuff; Lee is the only one of the trio the Pirates would have any reason to want back and he's also the least likely of the three to accept. Assuming he signs elsewhere, the Pirates will get two compensation picks (one for Lee, one for Doumit) in the 2012 draft before Type B compensation goes away forever.

In the same vein, the Cubs offered Carlos Pena arbitration, but Jon Heyman says he's unlikely to accept because he wants multiple years. The "he wants multiple years" part is why the Pirates should be staying away here, in my opinion. 

The Astros finally fired Ed Wade last night, now that their sale to Jim Crane is complete. The Astros are leaving the division and I don't really bear them a ton of ill-will, so I don't begrudge them a decent GM, but the Ed Wade Era in Houston has consistently been one of the funniest running subplots in baseball and I'd be lying if I said I wouldn't miss it a little bit. As Dejan Kovacevic pointed out on Twitter last night, Neal Huntington is now the second-longest tenured GM in the NL Central behind Doug Melvin.

Jane: That's not fair, daddy. Lilly got a mango pop and I didn't get one.

Louie: Yup.

Jane: Well that's not fair.

Louie: I don't even know what that means.

Jane: Why does she get one and not me?

Louie: 'Cuz she's a separate person from you. You're never gonna get the same things as other people. It's never gonna be equal. It's not gonna happen ever in your life, so you might as well learn that now, OK?

Let's lay it out: baseball's new CBA is not good for teams like the Pirates, who've focused all of their resources on rebuilding through the draft. There certainly seems like there will be some allotment for the teams at the top of the draft to spend more than teams at the bottom, which may mitigate things a bit, but it will certainly prevent a team from spending the way the Pirates or Nationals did in 2011 and it'll probably rein the Pirates in at least some from the way they've been spending over the last few years.

The initial reaction yesterday, from me and from just about everyone, was that this thing will be a disaster for teams like the Pirates. It's true that it might be, but it's also true that if bloggers are trying to find loopholes, the Neal Huntingtons out there certainly are, too, and the smart GMs will likely find a way. Teams will probably have to find a way to improve their scouting departments and the way they evaluate amateurs (meaning that the draft is an inefficient process, even for the teams that reap the most benefits from it) and the teams that make bigger strides will probably draw an early advantage. The teams that it'll be the biggest disaster for are the teams that will refuse to adapt: the teams that are the quickest to adapt will probably find a way, even if those teams have limited funds like the Pirates. 

Having the advantage that the Pirates had in the draft taken away from them stinks, but it's not really what bugs me about the new system (to be fair, what really bugs me in this whole thing beyond baseball is the way that the kids from the Dominican Republic and Venezuela are getting screwed). What really sticks in my craw about this is that I can't look at the new draft rules as an attempt to keep the smaller market teams from finding success. 

Look, I'm not stupid. I understand that the Pirates do less for Major League Baseball than the Yankees and the Red Sox. I understand that they draw fewer TV viewers, that the bring fewer fans into parks, that they sell fewer t-shirts, that they spend less money on free agents. If the Pirates disappeared tomorrow, baseball would functionally be the same. If the Yankees disappeared tomorrow, baseball would become soccer in terms of national profile. I know this. The abstract concept of sports, though, doesn't really work when you apply capitalism to it because they're about sports and not business. Small teams need to have at least something resembling the same chance as big teams, which is why salary caps and luxury taxes and such things exist in US sports. Otherwise, why care about the Pirates? 

In the last ten years or so, the smaller teams have figured out how to exist: because they have less money to spend, it's easier to cast a wide net on amateur players and develop that talent. They've had some success, too, and seeing the Rays make the playoffs three times in four years in the American League East gives hope to teams like the Pirates. But every time the Rays make the playoffs, the Yankees or Red Sox don't. And when the teams with huge fan bases don't make the playoffs, TV ratings suffer and baseball is weirdly obsessed with them, despite there being a million better indicators of the game's health. 

Major League Baseball can say that this is about making sure the best players are drafted in the right place and making sure that money is spent on big league players instead of amateurs, or however they want to justify these new rules, but as the fan of a small market team all I see is an attempt to cut the small markets off at the knees. It hurts the Rays, who build through the draft. It hurts the Rangers, who've spent a ton of money in the international markets. I do believe what I wrote above -- that smart small market teams will find a way even if it takes a while -- but any time you narrow the playing field the way this new CBA does, you tilt it back towards the big markets. Baseball knows that, because that's what they want. And that's what hurts the most as a fan of the Pirates.

Baseball can't come out and say that they don't want a team like the Pirates in the World Series because they think it'd be bad for business, but they don't really have to. Their intent at this point is clear. 

Today's a pretty busy day for baseball news, but I'm leaving in a couple hours to make the Thanksgiving trek back to Western PA and so I don't have a whole lot of time to really write about some things I'd like to tackle today, like the new CBA. 

The new CBA is going to be announced within minutes here, and it's going to include some kind of strict luxury tax on the draft. Exactly what the threshhold is going to be, how strict the tax is, what sort of draft picks teams will lose for repeat violations, etc., but it's clear that it's targeted at keeping the Pirates and Nationals and Royals from spending excessive sums on the draft and that sucks for a number of reasons. The terms appear to be quite strict, and I'm not lying when I say that this has me seriously disillusioned. I want to write more now, but I'm very short on time and the more I read the more livid I get. I'll have more tomorrow, I promise. 

Meanwhile, the Pirates have signed Jake Fox and Shairon Martis. You may recall Fox as the big fellow who played for the Cubs and hits home runs and does literally nothing else, though he's purportedly kind of a catcher. Martis threw a no-hitter for the Dutch team in the World Baseball Classic a few years ago and pitched a bit for the Nationals since then. He's only 24, but he's never really pitched well above Double-A. These guys are probably minor league depth, but at least with a liiiiiitle more upside than your typical minor league depth, which makes them semi-interesting. 

Brian McTaggert is reporting for MLB.com this morning that Clint Barmes has officially signed with the Pirates for two years and $10.5 million. I said I'd write more when the deal was official, so let's get two it. I'll start with two statements: I'm pretty sure that Barmes will be better than Cedeno in 2012, and if Barmes can hit enough that he's as good in 2012 and 2013 as he was in 2011, it'll be a good deal worth every penny for the Pirates and there won't be anything to complain about here.  

That said, there are a number of things that just don't sit well with me about this deal, and they all have more to do with the process that leads to signing Clint Barmes more than the actual signing of him. The first part that bugs me is the age. Barmes will be 33 in March, Cedeno will be 29 in February. Barmes's main value is in his defense, because he generally scores as both a better and more consistent shortstop than Cedeno. You can compare their advanced fielding numbers at FanGraphs (Barmes, Cedeno) and over their careers we've got a pretty good sample size for each at shortstop (3,748 innings for Barmes, 4,492 for Cedeno) and you can see that both UZR and DRS say that Barmes is better than Cedeno (UZR says Barmes is good where Cedeno is average, DRS says Barmes is spectacular while Cedeno is below-average). 

What worries me is the age, of course. At 33, Barmes is pretty clearly past his prime and while he's known for his defense, he doesn't have a great arm for a shortstop. It was a big enough concern for the Astros that they were going to start Tommy Manzanella, who's bat is the equivalent of taking Barmes's bat and dividing it by Ronny Cedeno's bat, over him at short when 2011 began. That means that if he loses a step this year, he won't have a Jack Wilson Laser Cannon to make up for it. Basically, if you're going to sign a shorstop and pay a pretty good price for him solely based on defensive purposes, you'd better be damn sure that he's going to be a very good defensive shortstop. Barmes might be. Heck, he probably will be, but I'm not sure that's good enough for me. 

Let's move on to Barmes's bat. His career 94 wRC+ isn't great, but it's much better than Cedeno's 67. What worries me is that I think he's going to get eaten alive in PNC Park, and because I'm pretty sure that park adjustments don't use splits for handedness, that's something that's could affect Barmes quite a bit more than we might anticipate. I pulled up Barmes's home run chart for 2011 last night and posted it on Twitter. Every home run he hit went to left/left-center and his average homer length was a paltry 376.5 feet. You can click through by season and see that the same thing is generally true of him every year, except that he's not hitting the ball as far as he used to me. If you go back to his FanGraphs page, you'll see that Barmes hits a ton of flyballs every year. So he's right-handed, he pulls the ball a lot, he's starting to lose his power, and he hits a ton of flyballs. I hope I'm wrong here, but I'm not seeing a guy that's going to hit well in PNC Park. Honestly, it wouldn't surprise me if his batting numbers with the Pirates over the next two years are Cedeno-esque.

Therein lies my problem with the deal: Barmes is probably either equal to or an upgrade on Cedeno, but not dramatically so. Possibly not even noticeably so. In that situation, I'd much rather have the guy on a cheap one-year deal than the guy on a slightly more expensive two-year deal, because it would force the Pirates to re-address the situation after 2012. This just feels to me like they're punting on really upgrading the position for two years. That's fine if they're really planning on upgrading the team somewhere else, but thus far this winter they've replaced Doumit and Cedeno with Barajas and Barmes, and on the whole it's hard to see how the duo the Pirates have is a lot better than the duo the Pirates had.

Ken Rosenthal tweets this afternoon that the Pirates appear to be the leaders to sign the services of Clint Barmes this winter to what would likely be a two-year deal. The Brewers and Giants are also in the mix. Barmes was a pretty good player for the Astros last year, turning in some impressive glovework at shortstop with just a hint of pop (12 homers). 

On the whole, though, I doubt that having Barmes at short would be very different from having Cedeno there. Barmes's OPS since 2006 is .695, which is a little better than Cedeno's (.635) in the same span, except that Barmes played a huge chunk of his games in Colorado and righty-friendly Houston, while Cedeno most of his games in Pittsburgh and Seattle, which have very difficult parks for righties. Barmes's glove grades out a bit better than Cedeno's at short, but it's worth noting that he's barely played there since 2006 (2011 was his first year as a full-time shortstop since the Tulowitzki era began in ColoradO) and so it's a bit harder to make a judgment with the advanced metrics that need a bigger sample size. 

It's also worth noting, of course, that he's four years older than Cedeno and that he's at a point in his career where it's possible his ability to play shortstop will disappear in very short order. Which, I suppose, is to say that it's possible that Barmes will be better than Cedeno in 2012 and it's also possible that he'll be worse. He'll also quite possibly be very bad in 2013. The beauty of the Cedeno option was that it was cheap for 2012 and didn't extend to 2013, which left the Pirates with some time to evaluate d'Arnaud and Mercer and look for a better upgrade through a trade. Signing Barmes to a two-year deal wouldn't be ignoring the Pirates' shortstop problem, exactly, but it'd basically be deferring it until after 2013 rather than trying to tackle it head-on this winter.  

UPDATE: Jon Heyman says the Pirates are "close to a deal" with Barmes. BE STILL MY BEATING HEART! All jokes aside, it is nice to see the Pirates going out and getting guys they want, rather than sitting back and hoping someone falls to them. Unless they sign Barmes to a three-year deal. That will not make me happy. 

UPDATE #2: Heyman says it'll be two years/$11 million for Barmes when finalized. That seems a bit pricey to me, but I'll write more about it when the deal is official. 

The Pirates waited until pretty late last night to announce all of the roster moves they made in advance of the Rule 5 Draft, but the news finally did get out. They started early in the day by claiming Brian Jeroloman and Jeremy Hefner off of waivers and outrighting Matt Pagnozzi to the minors. Jeroloman, from the Blue Jays system, doesn't appear to hit much, but he's got a crazy minor league walk rate (his minor league batting average is .245 and his minor league OBP is .378). I will just assume that the Pirates think highly of his defense because that's usually the reason guys like these get claimed. Still, he's 26, hasn't played in the big leagues yet, and put up a .631 OPS (.295 SLG) in the hitter-friendly PCL in 2011. I'm a little puzzled by this pickup, to be honest. Hefner's a bit tougher to judge; he put up some good strikeout rates in the low minors, including in the extremely hitter-friendly California League, but he's struggled a bit in Double-A and Triple-A with those strikeout rates dropping some. In the article linked above, Neal Huntington calls him a victim of the PCL (that's probably true to an extent; check out how his homer rate ballooned this year) and says that the Pirates' scouts have liked Hefner for a while. It's true that most of San Diego's affiliates play in pretty extreme and dangerous environments for pitchers, so it's possible that there's more here than initially meets the eye. Still, I wouldn't expect him to be more than rotation depth, though it seems like there's a chance that he'll be better rotation depth than guys like Brian Burres and Aaron Thompson. 

In terms of the Rule 5 moves, most of the pre-deadline speculation was pretty accurate. The Pirates added Starling Marte, Rudy Owens, Justin Wilson, Jordy Mercer, Matt Hague, and Duke Welker to the roster. The only person I thought might be added that wasn't was Brett Lorin, and while I think it'd be a shame to lose him, it's likely a safe gamble that a guy that will be 25 before the season starts and hasn't pitched above Advanced-A will slide through the draft. It's true that the Pirates lost Nathan Adcock on a similar gamble last year, but he's a bit younger than Lorin and that likely made him more attractive to the Royals.

To clear room for the six new players, the Pirates designated both Xavier Paul and Eric Fryer for assignment. Paul was certainly an expected move and the Pirates won't miss him, but I was surprised to see Fryer DFA'd. I suspect it's a calculated risk to let them keep both him and Jason Jaramillo (Jaramillo has six years minor league service, so I think if they DFA'd him and he cleared waivers he'd be able to opt for free agency, unless I'm mistaken) as they may still need Jaramillo early in the season to back up Rod Barajas and Fryer probably has a good chance of clearing waivers. Still, they could lose Fryer here. He's got a strong defensive reputation and he's shown the ability to hit here and there and the catching market this winter is obviously thin. Anyone that picked him up would be taking a bit of a flyer that he's ready, but, I dunno, I think he's an interesting player despite his age. It seems to me that after last year's catching debacle the Pirates are trying to get as much depth as possible behind Barajas and if Fryer slips through waivers they'd have McKenry, Jaramillo, Jeroloman, and Fryer. I'm worried, though that this might be a case of trying to have their cake and eat it, too; Fryer's the only one I'm even remotely interested in long-term as a Tony Sanchez Insurance Policy and Jeroloman seems like a waste of a roster spot. If Fryer gets through waivers, there's no harm done and it was a good gamble by the front office. If they lose him, it'll be hard to see it as anything other than a mistake.