Pittsburgh Pirates Would Be Wise to Trade Andrew McCutchen This Winter

The Pittsburgh Pirates have shown signs of life the past few years, making the playoffs as a wild card team from 2013 to 2015, losing the last two wild card games they played in before missing the postseason entirely in 2016. Trading Andrew McCutchen this winter is a necessary evil.

The Chicago Cubs aren’t going to lose dramatically fewer games in 2017, and the Pirates aren’t going to catch them. The Cardinals are going to ride The Cardinal Way to compete for a postseason spot. The Giants, Dodgers, Mets and Nationals all look to be better than Pittsburgh and just about every team in the National League aside from the Padres is going to be improved. This is the landscape for next season. If everything goes right for the Pirates they could win an extra ten games in 2017, bringing their win total to 88, and likely enough to challenge for a wild card spot. But they’ll still lack an ace that can counter Madison Bumgarner, Clayton Kershaw, Max Scherzer or Noah Syndergaard, so a wild card berth shouldn’t be the goal.

The Pittsburgh Pirates aren’t big spenders. They’re not going to be either. That’s why they have to have young, affordable players and veterans that can bounce back or provide cheap value to the club to fill out the 25-man roster. When it comes to Andrew McCutchen, the team’s highest paid player by nearly $10M, they have a wild card. Was a down 2016 a fluke, or will a 30-year-old McCutchen once again lead the team? The Pirates just don’t have the resources to find out.

It’s true that McCutchen’s value has taken a hit after playing at nearly replacement level last season, but his track record gives him the benefit of the doubt, which means teams will still ante up to gain his services and take that risk themselves.

From a Pirates’ standpoint, trading McCutchen while his value isn’t as high obviously isn’t what you’d want to do if you were going to move the face of the franchise. So you keep him, let him rebuild that value and flip him at the trade deadline? Well what if the 2016 version is the new version or he gets off to a slow start? Then a lot of that value could go out the window, and an excellent potential trade piece becomes a bit tougher to move, since the lower return would be increasingly hard to justify to the fans.

There have been plenty of rumors out there on what the Pirates are asking for. One of the Nationals top prospects, Victor Robles has been a popular name floating around the rumor mill, but whether or not Washington would be willing to give him up is another question entirely.

If that is in fact the bar, a team’s top prospect, or a couple of mid-level prospects, then that’s not a bad get for what could ultimately be a gamble. The Pirates have a decent farm system as is, and supplementing that system with more talent for an outfielder that isn’t going to be able to carry the team to the playoffs by himself without a smattering of upgrades around him. He has two years left under team control and the Pirates aren’t going to (shouldn’t at least) re-sign an aging outfielder if they hope to compete. If he’s not coming back, then it makes too much sense to move him now, while his value still holds.

Right now we know about the past, and predicting the future is impossible. Let another team take that chance while helping to set up Pittsburgh for another playoff run in the near future.