There’s some stiff competition from the Aramis Ramirez and Matt Morris trades, but Chris Mueller argues the Chris Archer deal stands alone as the worst in Pirates history.
It might surprise you, reader, to find out that I rarely remember my reaction to major sports moments. I don’t have many vivid memories of where I was when this or that big moment happened.
I remember exactly where I was, and what my reaction was, when I found out that the Pirates had traded for Tampa Bay starter Chris Archer. I was on-air, my jaw nearly at the floor, trying to process the fact that the Pirates had landed the biggest available fish in the pond at the trade deadline.
I praised them for the deal. Congratulated general manager Neal Huntington for backing up his words with action. Huntington had spoken of the team needing to give him a compelling reason to add at the trade deadline, and they ripped off an 11-game winning streak in response.
For a team that typically augmented their roster with subtle, smaller moves around – and sometimes after – the trade deadline, making a big trade was as much about fan catharsis, about the feeling that the team was finally taking winning as seriously as everyone else, as it was about actual on-field improvement.
Yesterday’s revelation that Archer underwent surgery to correct neurogenic thoracic outlet syndrome (layman’s translation: his arm and shoulder were all messed up) likely closes the book on the trade, at least from the Pirates’ perspective. Archer has an $11 million team option for 2021, but it costs the Pirates just $250,000 to buy out said option.
(Of course, there’s always the chance that the team buys out the option and tries to sign Archer back for less money, but that’s another column for another day.)
There’s some stiff competition from the Aramis Ramirez and Matt Morris trades, but for my money, the Archer deal stands alone as the worst in club history, for a variety of reasons.
One is that the motivation behind it was flawed. Perhaps the sheer shock of it all obscured this at the time, but it’s clear now that the Pirates felt they had to make some sort of deal as penance for doing so little to improve on a 98-win club in the 2015 offseason. Lingering bitterness and resentment from fans created at least a partial public relations motive behind the deal. Even then, the Pirates only consummated the trade because Archer was affordable and under team control. He wasn’t the kind of high-cost rental that fans really wanted to see, like C.C. Sabathia in Milwaukee in 2008.
Two is that the deal was an admission of failure with Glasnow. The Pirates touted him as their rotational cornerstone, a player with a ceiling that rivaled Gerrit Cole’s. Of course, Glasnow never put it all together here, with many claiming he lacked mental toughness. Turns out, all he needed was competent instruction.
The Rays turned Glasnow into a devastating strikeout artist – his 11.3 strikeouts per nine innings would have been fifth in the American League had he pitched enough innings to qualify – by doing something novel; telling him to throw his four-seam fastball up in the strike zone, and to hammer hitters with his curveball at the bottom. Unsurprisingly, a six-foot-eight man throwing in the high-90s with a wipeout off-speed pitch proved tough to hit.
You’ll also recall that the Pirates tried to get Glasnow to throw sinkers, to his great detriment. Oh, he also cut his walk rate from 5.5 batters per nine innings with the Pirates in 2018, to 2.1 per nine innings in 2019.
Three is that the Pirates were so desperate to make some sort of deal that they desperately threw in Austin Meadows, who stayed mostly healthy in Tampa, playing in 138 games, and hit 33 home runs with a .922 OPS. Meadows might end up being one of the best left-handed bats in the game for years to come. Shane Baz was the very high-profile player to be named later, and wouldn’t you know it, he looks like a potential star for Tampa, too.
In exchange for all of that, the Pirates got 33 starts, six wins and an ERA that hovered just under 5 from Archer. That’s it. He regressed under the team’s tutelage. Even if he had pitched like an ace this season, the trade still would have been a loss.
Huntington failed. Former pitching coach Ray Searage failed. The Pirates failed. They risked everything, and got nothing in return. A franchise that needs to get everything right got their biggest trade of the decade catastrophically wrong, and it will haunt them for years to come.
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June 04, 2020 at 05:11AM
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Chris Mueller: Archer's surgery closes book on disastrous trade - Ellwood City Ledger
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