Pirates Shed Salary at the Cost of Two Prospects

The trade of reliever Mark Melancon by the Pittsburgh Pirates to the Washington Nationals sent a clear message: the Pirates are in retool mode. Not rebuild mode — they’re too good for that. And certainly not go-for-it mode — the Pirates barely had a 1-in-10 shot of making the playoffs, and you don’t go for it by trading away one of the best relievers in the game. No, the Pirates were retooling, selling from the immediate future to improve in the very short-term future, and, to a lesser extent, the long-term future. The crux of the return, left-handed reliever Felipe Rivero, will contribute for the Pirates both immediately and moving forward. That’s the difference between he and Melancon — he’ll be sticking around for more than one season. Prospect Taylor Hearn is the longer-term play; small-market teams like the Pirates live for long-term plays.

Which is what makes Monday’s last-minute deal for broken pitching prospect Drew Hutchison — one which allowed them to dump Francisco Liriano’s salary on the Toronto Blue Jays but also cost them prospects Reese McGuire and Harold Ramirez — so puzzling on the surface. While neither prospect cracked Baseball America’s recent top-100 update, McGuire and Ramirez are both legitimate prospects, the type of pieces that can be essential to a franchise like the Pirates by providing cheap value, allowing them to continue chugging along at an affordable operating cost while retaining the pieces that really matter. McGuire is regarded as one of the best defensive catching prospects in the minors, one whose receiving ability alone gives him a near-certain path to the majors. Ramirez is an athletic bat-to-ball outfielder with a plus hit tool who’s playing center in the minors even if he’s likely to move to a corner.

In Hutchison, the Pirates get back a Ray Searage reclamation project, and little more. Hutchison’s still just 25 with some former prospect shine, but the career ERA in more than 400 innings is nearly 5.00, and he’s got a serious home-run problem. Maybe Searage can coax some ground balls out of him.

But Hutchison’s not so much what this deal was about. The motivation behind this deal was clear. It was a straight salary dump. The Blue Jays are taking on the entirety of Liriano’s salary, which amounts to roughly $17 million through the end of next season. They had the space available to take on the money — though it is interesting to wonder how this could impact their ability to re-sign Jose Bautista or Edwin Encarnacion in the offseason — and they were willing to do so for the price of the prospects.

To rationalize this deal from the Pirates’ perspective, you’ve got to believe the organization thinks it can do more with the $17 million and Hutchison to help it win next year and moving forward than it could with Liriano and the prospects. It may be a tough sell, but it is what it is. And to believe that, you’ve got to believe the organization views Liriano as broken.

The thing about an organization selling low on a player is, no one else has as much information on the player in question as the selling organization. So, on one hand, you’ve sort of got to give the Pirates the benefit of the doubt. Liriano’s looked broken, but every broken player has the potential to be fixed. The Pirates selling this low on Liriano indicates they don’t believe he can be fixed, and no one knows Liriano better than the Pirates.

I wrote about Liriano’s struggles earlier in the season. The walks and homers are way up, the strikeouts are way down. Nothing looks great. Liriano’s pitched with such an extreme approach during his time in Pittsburgh, throwing fewer pitches in the zone than anyone while getting batters to chase at unthinkable rates, and it seemed like all hitters would have to do was stop swinging and Liriano would start beating himself. And that’s almost exactly what’s happened. From one year to the next, Liriano went from running one of the highest chase rates in baseball to one of the lowest. Batters are laying off the breaking and offspeed stuff that Liriano buries in the dirt, and when they do swing at a slider, it’s because Liriano’s leaving too many up in the zone:

You can pretty easily see it in Liriano’s mechanics. I’ve got a .gif of Liriano throwing a good, tight slider from last year, and a .gif of Liriano throwing a flat, elevated slider from this year, and they look like two different pitchers.

Last year:

This year:

I cherry-picked these examples, of course, and I’m sure the bottom clip isn’t perfectly representative of every Liriano pitch, but the point is that, as of late, there’s been too many examples of the bottom type of pitch, relative to the top. Liriano’s too often been closing off in his delivery, rendering his motion stiff and unathletic, without the drive necessary to really pull that slider down through the zone. The hitters have made their adjustments to Liriano, sure, and those haven’t helped, but it’s not like Liriano isn’t beating himself, too.

A popular theory seems to be that Liriano reconnecting with Russell Martin, the catcher with whom he worked to a great deal of success in Pittsburgh from 2013-14, will help fix him. And it probably can’t hurt; Martin’s great. But there seems to be more to this than just the catcher. And the Blue Jays could use the help, what with Aaron Sanchez’s imminent move back to the bullpen.

Maybe Liriano really is broken without the potential for repair, and the Pirates just cleared enough space for them to go get a player next offseason who can positively impact their playoff-quality roster. But even if that is the case, though, it’s not like $17 million is a ton of money in this day and age — it’s the cost of a couple wins — and the Pirates still have to count on the difference between the future value of McGuire and Ramirez relative to Hutchison to be less than the amount of cash saved.

Of course, it’s possible that McGuire and Ramirez’s bats never play enough to make them more than bench pieces, and Searage works his magic on Hutchison to pull a mid-rotation starter out of thin air, and Liriano never throws a quality inning again. And if that happens, it’s a shrewd salary shed. Anything can happen. But for Pittsburgh, it just feels like things have got to break perfect for this to look good. Toronto’s got a number of ways.