The one resounding question from MLB's come-and-gone trade deadline remains: what on Earth were the Pirates thinking? The trade for Matt Morris -- a mediocre, overpaid pitcher -- to the Pirates -- a notoriously finicky, tightwadded team -- continues to make no sense whatsoever, except to prove further that Dave Littlefield is really poor at his job. That doesn't mean some, including the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's Degan Kovacevic, can't try to explain all this silliness:
So, why Morris?
And why now?
To start, rewind to Tuesday morning, hours before Major League Baseball's 4 p.m. trading deadline. The Pirates, according to Littlefield, were frustrated by an inability to pry away one of the several targeted starters on his scouts' list.
Also, there is the job factor. If Morris fares well, he can help the Pirates finish strong this season and, perhaps, convince Nutting and the new CEO coming this fall that Littlefield deserves to stay for the final year of his contract in 2008. If nothing else, he could illustrate to Nutting that, for the first time in his tenure, he could acquire a big-money player with good results.
Those are just two of the several plausible, but still ridiculous, reasons Kovacevic proposes. Like the great scientists of our time, it is noble of Kovacevic to attempt to explain the unexplainable, but really, the more and more you think about it, the deeper the rabbit hole of stupidity goes. Best not to even try sometimes.
