I was originally going to post a feature article asking the fans which trades they would like to see made.  Leading up to that I had been researching the often quoted media perception that Pittsburgh is asking too much for their players as the deadline draws near.

What I came across set me back. 

If you have followed this blog for any period of time, you know I talked about problems last winter during the GM hiring process.  My personal observations about those issues aren’t relevant today, but what is relevant is that a few of those issues remain large in some industry circles with the most talked about around the game being the “number of bodies strewn across the baseball landscape” last winter because of “Frank [Coonelly's] and Neal’s handiwork.”

And that is sure to be handcuffing Huntington on a few fronts.

1.  Does he really have as many potential trade partners as the fans want to believe he has?  In other words, while there may be media reports which indicate one club has a need and then they identify one of the Pirates as a potential target, there is some concern Huntington may not have the ability to ever consummate a trade with a few of those clubs unless he is “taken to the cleaners.”

Mind you, that’s over and beyond the always ’hard-to-deal-with’ teams.

2.   And if every GM in the game knows there might be ”hanging chad issues” surrounding Pittsburgh’s GM hire, can Huntington even be expected to get larger value-for-value deals done?  Some say probably not as easily as it seems, and certainly not with a few clubs.

Now the issue becomes, will this alter the course of Huntington’s short-term plans?  Say, for instance, if he can’t get the number/quality of prospects he wants in any deal because he’s being squeezed, what else can he do except to say the market wasn’t there and he has decided to keep them.

Or take short sales, which isn’t as likely but is possible because he could have a directive to clear “X” amount of payroll off the books from Coonelly via Nutting.  And we all know that is exactly how the Pirates have approached the July deadline in the past - to clear salary off the books.

So if Huntington has been directed to clear salary, then Jack Wilson is probably going to be the first one dealt.  Only the Dodgers and Rays are known to have been ringing our phone with replacement level players close enough to taking over for Wilson so we have to expect under this scenario Huntington pulls a trigger with one of those teams.  Of course, a third team could come along with the same replacement candidate.

Bay would be the other obvious ’salary dump’ candidate.  Since he is our franchise player and doing well, trading him for prospects to help us reload our system might have happened anyway simply because we won’t be able to afford him after 2009.  True, we might have to keep him because nobody will pay the booty for him right now, the Pirates then attempt to get him to add a few years at a discounted price making him believe they are going to rebuild around him, and then peddle him this winter with the more attractive contract. 

Either trade, assuming a dump, would leave us with less return value than we would ordinarily expect. 

So where are we going to be at August 1st?  Will we

a.  have gone through short sales to dump salary? 

b.  restocked our system with value-for-value trades for some of our veteran players?  Or

c.  still be holding on to a 90 loss roster because Huntington couldn’t get any reasonable deals done which didn’t belittle his future trade credibility?

Unless one of Huntington’s trading partners is Dombrowski or Shapiro where the aforementioned issues won’t be viewed as harshly because Huntington has their support, one team becomes so desperate they target one of our players because nobody else available is worth a can of corn (Wilson fits this potential I’d say) or will deal as cheaply as we will, or our trade partner is a GM in save-my-job-mode, I think Huntington ends up holding his better players unable to get value-for-value this July.

And I believe you will hear the club’s PR suggest they want to continue forward with their current roster believing they have the right mix heading into 2009.

But now you know there might be another reason.  I hope I’m wrong, so now let’s sit back and watch what actually gets done.