The Pittsburgh Pirates have been saying all of the right things during the winter, and according to the national media, they've even been involved with some of the top players on the free agency market.
Again, as I've said many, many times at this point, talk is cheap in some sense.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s Paul Zeise put out a great piece about how he feels about all of this noise. In his defense, he's been around Pittsburgh and understands it pretty well, especially knowing that Bob Nutting is very cheap.
He doesn't want to hear anything about the players they're interested in, and would rather see them go out and actually make a move instead of giving information to the media to suggest that the team is trying to get better.
“First we had respected national baseball writers Jeff Passan and Ken Rosenthal reporting that the Pirates have a desire to spend money and are getting in on free agent players like Josh Naylor (to whom it has since been reported they never offered a contract) and Kyle Schwarber, a guy who hit 56 home runs and is estimated to command somewhere in the neighborhood of $30 million a year.
“That was clearly spin and finding friendly media types to leak stories out there. Heck, they did such a good job of spinning that into positive PR, I would suggest whoever in the Pirates organization is responsible for these leaks apply for a job in Washington D.C. because our current elected officials could use a hand in creating positive press,” he wrote.
This is one of the better pieces about the Pirates in a rather long time from Zeise, as he said exactly what every fan should be thinking.
It's never a bad thing to hear teams involved in rumors, but let's be honest here for a second, the Pirates aren't the New York Yankees.
When you see the Yankees in rumors, they often find a way to get the job done. Now, there are some other factors we probably have to consider when it comes to the Pirates.
If this team wants any hope of landing decent players, they'll probably have to overspend. That could cause some problems, but then they can't come out and say that they’re trying to do all these big things and not accomplish them.