In Defense of Pirates GM Dave Littlefield

Recently, there’s been a lot of anger directed at various facets of Pittsburgh sports…. Recently, there’s been a lot of anger directed at various facets of Pittsburgh sports. Steelers coach Bill Cowher, I hear, is insane for making Jerome Bettis a backup. Pitt fans feel betrayed by our very own Rod Rutherford, who is accused of doing some very bad things. And the city’s current budget crisis, according to angry citizens, is entirely the fault of the new stadiums on the North Shore. Ah, if only our fair president had such a beautiful, gleaming, obvious scapegoat for the rest of the country.

But there has been no target so openly and angrily attacked as Dave Littlefield, general manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates.

In the past month or so, Littlefield and the rest of the Pirates front office have been hastily shopping players to other teams, trying desperately to dig the Bucs out of the financial and talent-less hole dug by Cam Bonifay.

Sunday night’s postseason roster deadline marked the official end to a flurry of moves that angered tons of Pittsburghers, who have dubbed the past month a “salary dump” and a “fire sale.” Some of the most targeted deals were ones that sent elsewhere players like Aramis Ramirez, Mike Williams, Jeff Suppan and Brian Giles.

But seriously, people, give the man a break. He’s doing his job, even though we’re not used to that.

Let’s first take care of the semantics: the deals constitute neither a fire sale nor a salary dump. A fire sale is what you call a team in contention that auctions off its players to the highest bidder (Cincinnati Reds, anyone?). The Pirates, regardless of what some fans might think, were not in contention at the All-Star break. A team eight games out of first place is not in contention. A salary dump occurs when a team that won the previous year trades all its talent and fields a bottom-line salary the next season (Florida Marlins, here’s looking at you).

This is different. When your team isn’t winning – and the Pirates weren’t, even before the All-Star Break, and haven’t for a while – you need to change something. That something is usually the amount of money you have available. To increase that, simple economics will tell you, you need to spend less. Let’s go down the list, shall we?

Williams made $3.5 million in 2003, and had a robust ERA – he became the first All Star ever to have an ERA over six. For that money, we can do better.

Suppan we had fairly cheap, but he was going to cost more next year. And yes, he was pitching well when we traded him, but he has never had more than 10 wins in a season or an ERA below four since he entered the league in 1995. He’s not young, and he’s not an impact player on any team – just ask the Red Sox. In exchange, we got Freddy Sanchez, who is an A-list prospect middle infielder, where we’ll soon need to replace the aging Pokey Reese. And he’s costing us close to nothing.

Giles is admittedly one of the best hitters in the game. He also made $8.5 million this year, and is due to make more in the two remaining years of his contract. There is no way we could have kept him, in our financial position, after 2005, so we got something for him while we could. We got Oliver Perez, a great, young pitcher, and Jason Bay, who’s done well since the trade. While Giles at less than $10 million is a steal, those two are better steals for a team that’s rebuilding.

And then there’s Ramirez. The shining example that Bucco fans point to as the one we should have kept, claiming that he was the epitome of building a player and keeping him, the proposed mission of the new management. Ramirez made $3 million this year, which would be a great price for his 34-home run, 112-RBI season of 2001. But for a guy who’s not hitting .300, he has an obvious attitude problem and made 23 errors in the first half of the season, Littlefield thought – and rightfully so – that he could do better.

And he will.

Littlefield is a smart man, and good at his job. He knows that he has to rebuild a team, and, to do that effectively, you need to get rid of some great players. You also need young guys, like Bay, Perez and Sanchez, instead of established players who are about to be free agents your team can’t afford.

For years now, the Pirates have had the “if everything goes right” game plan. That plan’s not getting it done, and Littlefield knows that. It’s not his fault that we invested too much in the wrong type of players and now need to save up some money to reinvest in the right kind. Just like it wasn’t manager Lloyd McClendon’s fault that his players couldn’t ever put the wins together.

A good owner hires someone to do a job and then lets him or her do it. Before the entire city demands the heads of Littlefield and McClendon on a pike, maybe we should give them a chance to do what they were hired to, also.

Greg Heller-LaBelle is the editor in chief at The Pitt News.