Time to protect guys

Today or maybe tomorrow, the Bucs have to make a bunch of roster moves to protect some of their best minor-league talent from the Rule V draft.

As Clay points out in the comments, Joe Rutter is on the story. Rutter writes:

Littlefield not only must decide which players to add to the roster, but which to subtract. Although he currently has three roster vacancies, Littlefield has at least seven minor-league prospects vying for inclusion on the 40-man. They are first baseman Brad Eldred, outfielders Chris Duffy, Nate McLouth and Rajai Davis, and pitchers Matt Peterson, Leo Nunez and Jeff Miller.

If those prospects aren't protected, they could be lost in the Rule 5 draft next month.

I'd say the situation is a little different. If they aren't protected, it's not that they could be lost but that they will be lost. Hour one of any team's preparation for the Rule V draft - after last year - is scouring the Pirates' farm system. Hour two is deciding what the hell, even if there's little chance we'll be able to keep a player on the 25-man roster all year, let's go ahead and select him anyway. Hour three is coming up with plans to trade these guys back to the Pirates, Jose Bautista-style.

I'm not one of those whiny fatalists - like Kris Benson - who think the Pirates can't compete on a limited budget. The thing is, though, that small-budget teams must pursue different strategies than big-market teams. And lately, the big-market team strategy involves collecting and/or manufacturing "prospects" that can be traded to small-market teams for big-salary players. If the Yankees had the Pirates' minor-league depth, they'd trade it in two weeks to acquire Randy Johnson and other players who cannot be traded without a sufficiently face-saving number of "prospects." It may very well be the case that unproven prospects like Rajai Davis would have more trade value for teams like the Yankees than possibly-more-promising guys like J.J. Davis, who have already been given a bite at the apple. I think we've reached a point where untested Rule V nabs may be more valuable to some teams than "proven failures" nabbed off waivers. I just can't believe that all the league wants J.J. Davis and Carlos Rivera as much as they want younger, less proven dudes that can be thrown into a deal to a small-market club.

I don't know the exact reasoning and calculus that determines if, say, J.J. Davis is more valuable to the 2005 and 2006 Pirates than Leo Nunez. I'm not going to embarrass myself by presuming to know more about the minor-league guys than the front office. Few fans are so knowledgeable that they can honestly put themselves in the position of making demands - the Pirates must protect so-n-so, the Pirates must release so-n-so, etc.

On the other hand, I do think we can safely guess that the rest of the league will feast upon whatever Littlefield leaves unprotected. Not protecting some of these guys is tantamount to cutting them. There can be no more surprise, feigned or otherwise, when the Red Sox claim one of our scrubby minor-league relief pitchers.

And for the record, I am rooting for those seven players Joe Rutter identifies. Part of being a Pirate fan these days is casting longing looks at the minor-league teams and indulging in mid-day reveries of these youngsters coming up and doing better than J.J. Davis, Tony Alvarez, and Carlos Rivera. We have a lot of hope tied up in those names and a lot of frustration tied up in the J.J. Davis crew.