There is one final thing I want to say before I step off this soap box.
This thread exists for a reason. It's not to promote each and every thing the Pirates do, it's to give a 'safe space' to Pirates fans because every time the subject of the Pirates would come up in The Pittsburgher Thread, which was started to be the thread for all non-Penguins sports/teams on this board, it would be drenched in a page of negativity and borderline trolling. Those negative individuals had every right to be furious at the way the Pirates had been run for two decades at that point, but the excessive negativity meant that it was
impossible to talk about the Pirates at all on this board. Even the most positive thing would result in a string of posts saying that nothing will ever change. Those people may have been Pirates fans at one point in their lives, but they weren't any more. Again, there's nothing wrong with that...but this thread started as a way for people to be able to talk about the Pirates without layers upon layers of negativity, and a couple of layers of negativity are starting to be established in here.
Nobody that posts in this thread is a rah-rah cheerleader who believes everything the Pirates do is right...but there's a difference between being critical and commandeering the conversation. There's a reason I barely talk about the Penguins on this board any more, it stopped being enjoyable when the negativity became the status quo.
I'm not saying everyone has to pull the 'We Happy Few' act and pretend that everything is awesome, when in reality this season is pretty analogous to that opening
(link with a gore warning for those unfamiliar with the reference)...but the tone of this thread is getting too doom and gloom for what was intended. I'm critical of this team at times, I expect everyone to, but when doom & gloom becomes the tenor of the conversation, this stops being a discussion about a sports team that we all love and instead turns into a chore to be dealt with.
edit: Read your post. What happens on the Pirates Prospects boards happened there, not here. On this board there are no vocal proponents of the trade, this is a soap box issue where you will find no opposition here. That's what makes it so painful to me to slog through, you're arguing something that nobody is arguing in favor of, we just disagree on the level of insanity.
At the end of the day this is a trade that can't be judged for the here and now, it can only be judged when we see a.) what the Pirates do with that prized 'financial flexibility' (which I'm as sick of hearing about as anyone else is) and b.) what the prospects and Hutchison do. If Hutchison turns into a solid #3/4, Liriano posts a 5 run ERA again next year, Ramirez ends up closer to my projection of him than yours (4th outfielder with a .300 batting average but low slugging percentage) and McGuire's bat never comes around...
That's a lot of things that have to go right for the Pirates, but there is a way we win this trade. This isn't trading off an established 25 year-old star for spare parts because his arbitration numbers are getting a little too high. At the end of the day I think our only major disagreement is that I believe that the Liriano money will be spent elsewhere, while you seem to think that it's just going into Nutting's pocket. They've lost your trust, and I get that. For me I still say there's a big difference between the way Robert runs the team and the way his awful miser of a father ran the team. G. Ogden was all about profit, and Robert...well he's mostly about profit, but he has shown a willingness to spend money on things that the average fan doesn't see, such as facilities, the draft (before MLB closed that off for us), etc. Robert will lose my trust when we lose an good, established youngster because we don't want to pay him what he's worth. That wasn't Walker, who isn't worth what he's going to make. That won't be Cole, who would be testing free agency no matter how many dump trucks of money the owner had (see: Greinke). That could have been McCutchen, but at this point I don't think anyone wants him around long-term. Marte & Polanco are already locked up through their primes, so we shall see. Personally I found the fact that the Bucs paid Cervelli to be very refreshing because we are not far from players of his caliber simply being replaced by the next reclamation project to hit the market. Our budget should be higher, but the way to do that isn't by signing Ian Kennedy for $50 million more than he's worth, as the market set last year.
The big issue with this year's team is that Huntington went into last off-season with a plan...and the market seemed to take him completely by surprise and he lacked a back-up solution. Hopefully he learns from that mistake and is more proactive this off-season. A repeat of that off-season is the sign to me that he's not the right man to carry a team from rebuild to contender. I think we'll see a very proactive Huntington this off-season.
