When you go back to last year when the Pirates traded Xavier Nady, the question has been raised over and over again if the team is in a rebuilding mode.  Neal Huntington and the rest of the Pirates front office has insisted that they aren’t rebuilding, choosing to call it a myriad of words, but never using the word rebuild.  With the two trades made today, dealing Freddy Sanchez and Jack Wilson, its now a rebuilding, whether NH will use the word or not.  They’ve blown it up, acquiring a plethora of young talent along the way, and now they are gonna build it back up from scratch.

Before we get to the specific return from these two trades, I just wanted to point that out, because blowing it all away and building it back up from scratch is what Dave Littlefield would never do.  It always needed to be done, but for some reason he was always half in and half out, never going all the way.  Now that its done, we get to watch a lot of young upside talent play and see who pans out.  Count me in as excited.

Now that that’s out of the way, lets get to the two trades made today.  First, before the 1-0 extra inning loss in San Francisco, the Pirates sent Jack Wilson and Ian Snell and over $3 Million in cash to the Seattle Mariners for 5 players.  No that’s not a typo.  The Pirates got 5 players in a exchange for 2 months of a light hitting, great fielding 31 year old SS and a SP who earlier this year requested a demotion to AAA.  If your anything like me, your reaction to this is something along the lines of “Really? They probably aren’t any good then.”   Well, it turns out some of them are pretty good.  There isn’t really an elite level prospect here, but they are solid.

The headliner here is Jeff Clement.  He’s a C/1B who was the Mariners number one pick in the 2005 draft.  He was drafted as a catcher, but from what I’ve read he is now seen as mostly a 1B and no longer as a catcher.  He’s a bit enigmatic, in that he was given an audition last year with the Mariners big club and failed, but his numbers at AAA are excellent.  All in all, it seems that he could be an everyday first baseman who will slug 20+ home runs a year.

In addition to Clement, the Mariners sent SS/2B Ronny Cedeno and single A pitchers Aaron Pribanic, Brett Lorin and Nathan Adcock.  Cedeno is going to be the starting shortstop for the rest of this season, but unless he can show some offensive prowess that he hasn’t showed yet (his career average is .238), he is not a long term answer.  Of the pitchers, Lorin and Adcock both project to be back end starters at the major league level and Pribanic is seen as a fringe prospect.  I’m always cautious with any prospect who is below AA, just due to the level and what can happen between then and reaching the show, but adding this type of pitching depth to the low minors is nice.

I’m just gonna say it, this trade is a steal.  An absolute steal.  What the Mariners were thinking in giving up this much for Wilson and Snell is beyond me.  Don’t take my word for it though, there are people who know way more about baseball than I do who like this deal for the Pirates.  Just one example,  Dave Cameron of fangraphs.com says that “Pittsburgh is the easy winner of this deal.”

After the game, a second deal was made sending all-star 2B Freddy Sanchez to the Giants in exchange for AA pitcher Tim Alderson.  Alderson was rated in January by Baseball America as the giants #4 prospect in a loaded system.  Alderson was the giants #1 pick in 2007 and is considered to be an A+ pitching prospect.  While he doesn’t strike out a ton of guys (202 K’s in 249 career minor lague innings) he also doesn’t walk anyone (51 in the same 249 IP).  He’s also only 20 years old.  He may not be a top of the rotation starter, but might immediately be the Pirates best pitching prospect.

While Sanchez and Wilson will surely be missed, when looking at these deals in total, it seems to me the Pirates organization got drastically better today.  At 31, neither Sanchez nor Wilson was going to be around 2 or 3 years from now when the Pirates are a winning team.  On the other hand, they acquired several players today who could very easily be in Pittsburgh as part of a winning team in the near future.