Been There, Wrote This
Dance Of The Last Resort
By John Menho

Poor Dave Littlefield.

The Pirates' general manager has a dual mission: To build a championship contender in the long term while trying to make the team respectable enough today to hold fans' interest. The goals often conflict with each other and Littlefield has a budget that makes it tough to properly tackle either project.

The Pirates can't just tear it down and start over. Not only have they played that card, they've done it more than once. The first rebuilding started in 1993 when the team's best players - Barry Bonds, Doug Drabek, John Smiley and Bobby Bonilla - were all gone after three consecutive divisional titles. Al Martin, Carlos Garcia, Steve Cooke and Paul Wagner proved to be unworthy replacements and the Pirates muddled along until it was time for another implosion.

That came in 1996, when Kevin McClatchy's group took over and soon slashed the payroll to somewhere around $11 million. It was the start of a five-year program that was planned to have the Pirates returning to contender status just in time to open their new ballpark. Getting more than $200 million of tax money proved to be easier than building a team. The money they didn't have to spend on the ballpark wound up in the pockets of Pat Meares and Derek Bell.

Littlefield, who arrived here in the middle of the 2001 season, inherited a mess. The Pirates had been failing at both ends of the spectrum: They put a mediocre team on the field and didn't spend enough to build a player development system that would produce low-cost talent.

While the Pirates were cutting the major league payroll, they were also shorting the budget for finding and developing talent. In two drafts they selected 100 players and got exactly two major leaguers - Kris Benson and Rob Mackowiak, a disappointing starting pitcher and a utility player.

Too often the Pirates drafted players they could sign instead of players they thought could actually play. There is no better illustration than Clint Johnston, the team's top pick in the 1998 draft. Johnston was a lefthanded pitcher of scant promise, projected as a possible middle reliever. In other words, he was maybe Joe Beimel. But he was willing to sign for $1 million. The Pirates gave it to him so they could have a headline for a day.

Keep blowing opportunities like that and there's suddenly need at the major league level. The Pirates threw their limited money at the scratch-and-dent leftovers in the free agent market. It worked beautifully in 2003 with Reggie Sanders, Kenny Lofton and Jeff Suppan but it wasn't quite as efficient with Mike Kingery, Jacob Brumfield, Doug Strange and too many others.

The Pirates have an interesting group of pitching prospects bubbling under at the upper reaches of the minor league system. There don't appear to be a lot of position players on the horizon but Littlefield can always broker some of his pitching for bats. It's a constant tightrope act but Littlefield has to be accustomed to it by now.

Perhaps nothing summarized the Pirates' plight more than their courtship of Randall Simon for a second consecutive off-season. The Pirates traded him to the Chicago Cubs last July and, truth be told, weren't especially sad to see him go. He doesn't have a lot of power, he's not very strong defensively and he's something of a high-maintenance personality.

But they brought him back for 2004 because they didn't have a better option. It took a while to get him signed. Simon kept waiting for a better offer from a better team. The Pirates kept hoping to land a better player. They came together under familiar circumstances.

It's the Dance of the Last Resort. And the Pirates are Fred Astaire.

In other matters...

¥       The generous attendance figures announced by the Penguins suggested they had a policy of counting fat people twice.

¥       Sometimes you feel like your head is going to explode if you pick up a newspaper and see another of those annoyingly chirpy "Duquesne basketball is finally on the right track" stories.

¥       According to rookie radio analyst Phil Bourque, 35 percent of the penalty calls against the Penguins were really, really borderline. The rest were just blatantly bad.

¥       You may have missed the shakeup in the Pirates' ownership group, which the team didn't bother to announce. Racing impresario Chip Ganassi has departed. That's a shame because it always seemed like a good idea to have him drive the team bus and get the traveling party from the North Side to the airport in less than 10 minutes. More to the point, mysterious money man Ogden Nutting seems to have even more influence with his son, Robert, now joining him on the board.

So if this season goes south as the past 11 have for the Pirates, they have a dandy potential slogan: The 2004 Pirates: We've Got Plenty Of Nutting.

John Mehno can be reached online at: johnmehno@lycos.com