The Rule V Five, Pt. 2

Bob Smizik’s PG column and my response to it generated a lot of email and considerable discussion over at Baseball Primer’s Clutch Hits blog. I was out-numbered and out-thought on most points, but I’ll sleep well knowing I did my good deed for the day. Someone has to stick up for the Bucs and challenge some of the more inaccurate commonplaces that are circulated about the team, if only to provoke the conversation that will replace the stale cynicisms with newer, sharper, more accurate cynicisms. I still don’t understand all the complexities of options and protecting players from the Rule V draft, but this is clear to me now. There is only one reason for exposing a player: you must consider the player a non-prospect. Otherwise, here’s no reasonable interpretation of the loss as anything less than a mistake or a betrayal of the team’s best interest. It’s possible the Pirates weren’t sold on Shelton. Baseball America published a Rule V preview which explains that some scouts weren’t sold on him. I don’t see what’s special about any of the other players taken in the Rule V draft, and I could be persuaded that Shelton has no big-league future except perhaps as a DH. I have no doubt the Bucs had no use for him in 2004. That said, if 2004 is not the year that the Pirates return to the playoffs, then maybe they would have had a use for him in 2005 or 2006. Still, other teams valued him, and Littlefield must have known the Tigers needed a catcher. And I'm told that many teams think highly of Jose Bautista, and he will never make his way back to the team. If Littlefield didn’t know these things, that's not good, to put it softly. Since we should have been able to get more than $50K in a trade, again the notion that Littlefield exposed Shelton for that amount of cash has little purchase in my mind unless I come to believe that he was oblivious to the high opinion other clubs had of these guys. But that’s not all. If the other players are non-prospects – the only excuse for losing them in the Rule V draft – then why, one emailer asked, did the Pirates put Thompson, Brooks and Bennett on the Arizona Fall League roster, something which is usually reserved for your best and brightest prospects? I don’t have a clue. I can’t believe, however, that the Pirates used the AFL to showcase this talent with the intention of selling in the Rule V draft for $50K a head. If they were actively shopping the players in the AFL, then they must have known they could have traded the players for something better. If they were having trouble paying the salaries of the secretaries, or if McClatchy needed a new Benz, surely there were better ways to raise that money. I think we’re still missing some part of the story. Until we learn something new, the default verdict will have to be some mixture of incompetence and indifference. I'm guessing three parts of the former and one part of the latter. I recommend the Primer thread because we debated a whole series of related issues. What value, for example, can the Bucs expect to gain from a winning minor-league system? Are they wise to insist on fielding a team with at least three veteran starters – even when this means they have to sign the veterans off the free-agent market? Are the Tigers, the Indians, or the Mets doing a better job of rebuilding, and doing it in a way the Pirates could emulate? Is Ray Sadler worth anything? There are a lot of good questions on the table. Thanks for the all the email and all the comments. It made my day.