As much as I respect Bob Smizik's work, the man is irrationally infatuated with Aramis Ramirez. I'm not saying Aramis is a bad player, but it's a little early to frame last summer's trade as something like the Red Sox trading away Babe Ruth.
And I take issue with his assertion, often repeated, that the Ramirez trade sent a message to all Pirates fans that the Pirates were not interested in winning. That's his interpretation. It's not like Littlefield read an announcement titled, "We don't want to win," the day he announced the trade. It's not a fact. That's Smizik's interpretation. He got that message from that trade.
I said good riddance, see you later, thanks for all the memories. And I for one thought it was pretty good to sneak Bobby Hill away from Dusty Baker's Cubs. Just because he was a PTBNL doesn't mean he wasn't a key to the deal. I thought he was the PTBNL because the Pirates wanted to make sure he came back to play from that back injury. And I also thought Littlefield did a good job of playing down Hill's value - this is something that I do when I make big trades in my roto leagues. "Oh, and by the way," I said last January, "why don't you throw in Khalil Greene and we'll call it even."
Maybe I'm a fool. Certainly I say and do all kinds of foolish things. But at least I understand that this is my interpretation of the deal. Smizik should stop insisting that all Pirates fans everywhere understood the Ramirez trade as an admission that the team was not at all interested in winning in the long term. I think that reading is unduly pessimisstic and I don't share it. And I know plenty of other Pirates fans who were equally frustrated with Ramirez's play in Pittsburgh. It ain't right to keep writing as though all Pirates fans think dealing Ramirez for "nothing" means only that the Pirates ownership is not interested in winning in the long-term as well as the short-term.
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