“The Pirates are the laughing stock of Major League Baseball.” Various media outlets (and certain former players) have been reporting such stories for the past few weeks in light of the flurry of recent trades. If they were referring to the likelihood of the team soon clinching their record-setting 17^th straight losing season then perhaps they would have a point. However, the recent trades are not something to laugh at; they are actually a good thing. The team is finally making steps in the right direction.

First of all we must all understand that the current management of the Pittsburgh Pirates is vastly different than it had been during most of the duration of losing seasons. President Frank Coonelly and General Manager Neal Huntington have only been with the team since 2007, and prior to 2007 the principal owner, Bob Nutting, had only been a minority owner. The current management squad is not the reason for nearly two decades of losing. They inherited a team that was terrible at the Major League level, terrible in the minors, and stuck in a small-market. It takes time to fix something that broken.

At the surface this might appear to be more of the same stuff that the team has done for years. Certainly the team has traded away tons of players during the infamous losing streak. A main problem though was that the old management team wouldn't fully commit to rebuilding. Every few years they would trade away some of their players for younger prospects, but they would also keep a lot of guys that were never going to be part of a winning Pirate squad. They needed to make a choice: either do a complete rebuild and tear apart the whole team, or commit to winning in the short-term and veteran talent. Instead the old management constantly found themselves mired somewhere in the middle. Adding the likes of Reggie Sanders and Kenny Lofton helped to prevent the team from losing 100 games a year, but it put them in situations where mediocrity was their upside (and upside that they failed to reach).

Compounding the issues with the idea of a partial rebuild is the fact that not every prospect succeeds. The Pirates did have situations where, if everything turned out perfectly and the prospects all panned out, they would have been successful. I even tricked myself many times into believing that the perfect storm of events would transpire that would allow the team to compete. However, it's a simple fact that not all prospects work out, so a plan relying on every prospect producing is doomed to failure most of the time. Had they done a full rebuild they would have had some wiggle room that would allow for the inevitability of some of them not working out.

The state of the Pirates franchise in 2007 was such that the needed reinforcements weren't going to come from the existing minor league squads. The current economics of baseball don't allow for the team to do a full rebuild externally, so the team needed to rebuild from the draft and by leveraging the existing Major League talent in trades to acquire younger talent that could be with the team for longer. Players like Jack Wilson and Freddy Sanchez were enjoyable to watch over the years, but the players they got in return have a much greater chance of playing for a winning Bucco team. A rebuild that only went halfway would have left the team in much the same situation as they were in previous years.

Another key distinguishing feature of this management team is that they understand how to evaluate talent much better than their predecessors. Unlike some general managers, Neal Huntington is not afraid of advanced stats; in fact he embraces them. By surrounding themselves with talented scouts as well as sabermetricians like Dan Fox (formerly of Baseball Prospectus), the front office is better equipped than the old teams were to evaluate which players are likely to help their ball club. By acquiring a large number of young prospects, they also have allowed themselves the luxury of occasionally missing on some transactions. Even the best teams sometimes make mistakes, but the old regime left themselves no margin for error. The economics of being a small-market team already give them less margin for error than larger market teams, so it is especially important for them to not be forced to rely too much on one or two key players. Not every prospect acquired in the recent barrage of trades will work out, but the team has acquired enough depth that they don't need to rely on every single one.

One can argue about the specific return of individual trades made, but the underlying philosophy of the moves is sound and something that should have been done a long time ago. The team has finally made a commitment to trying to win rather than simply striving for mediocrity. We as fans should embrace this movement rather than giving up on the team.