Recent stuff:
- The Pirates added 22 non-roster invitees for camp. There are a boatload of arms and some top prospects like 2B Nick Gonzalez, SS's Ji-Hwan Bae & Liover Peguero, OF Travis Swaggerty and RHP Quinn Priester. They'll join previously signed FA-NRIs IF Wilmer Difo, C's Joe Hudson & Andrew Susac and OF Troy Stokes Jr to bring the NRI count to 26. Other guys you may be looking for like Oneil Cruz are already on the 40-man roster and get an automatic invite.
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| Archie: good guy, bad deal - 2019 Topps Museum Collection |
- What could make one of baseball's worst deals even worse? RHP Chris Archer, 32, and the Tampa Bay Rays agreed on a one-year, $6.5M deal. He'll join Tyler Glasnow, Austin Meadows & Shane Baz, who were traded for him.
- LHP Francisco Liriano, 37, signed a minor league deal with Toronto worth $1.5M if he makes the MLB roster. Frankie twirled for the Jays once before from 2016-17.
- SS Jordy Mercer, 34, signed a minor league deal with Washington that included all the veteran trimmings - camp invite, opt out and $1M big league salary w/$400K in possible incentives.
- Grant "Buck" Jackson, 79, passed away. The lefty tossed for six years (1977-82) for the Bucs, slashing 29-19-36/3.23 and he went 2-0 in six scoreless appearances during the 1979 NLCS and World Series, winning game 7 of the Fall Classic against the Orioles. Buck played for 18 years for six teams, ending his career as a Pirate in 1982 after some shufflin'.
2 comments:
You may not believe me, Ron, but I said at the time---and this is a direct quote to a friend of mine---that the Chris Archer deal was the kind of trade that gets GM's fired if it doesn't go exactly right. And even then I thought the Pirates gave up entirely too much for him. I could have seen them trading either Glasnow OR Meadows along with Baz, given Archer's then-pretty good track record and the two-plus years he had left on his contract at that point. But ALL of those guys? See, that's the kind of trade that IMO is driven by sabremetrics and especially Moneyball calculations. I doubt very much that most old school baseball professionals would have pulled the trigger on an exchange like that one.
Anyway, it blew up in Huntington's face, and he quite rightly walked the plank.
Yah, I was not a fan of the trade either, Will; my take was that the Pirates thought they could coach him back to his sinker (and winning) days. But even if he became a workhorse, I thought the need to keep Meadows was greater; I'm old fashioned in that I value everyday players over pitching, all things being equal. Just another unforced error by the ol' FO.
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