By my math, the Pirates have been involved in the following trades lately...

June 4: The Pirates traded Nate McClouth to the Braves (!) for Gorkys Hernandez, Charlie Morton & Jeff Locke.

June 30: The Pirates traded Nyjer Morgan and Sean Burnett to the Nationals for Lastings Milledge and Joel Hanrahan.

July 22: The Pirates dealt Adam Laroche to the Red Sox for MiLB pitcher Hunter Strickland & SS Argenis Diaz.

July 29: The Pirates dealt Ian Snell, Jack Wilson and cash to the Mariners for Ronny Cedeno, Jeff Clement, Aaron Pribanic, Brett Lorin and Nathan Adcock.

July 29: The Pirates dealt Freddy Sanchez to the Giants for Tim Alderson.

In Summation, they basically gutted a shitty team in Exchange for comperable Major league talent in some instances and a bevy of Minor League prospects in others. In total (so far) they have dumped 7 Major league players (I'm considering Snell a MLB'er for sake of argument) and about $3M and received 4 Major League players and 9 Minor League players, including...

The Braves # 8 & #10 Prospect (Hernandez & Locke)

The Red Sox #16 Prospect (Diaz)

The Mariners # 18 Prospect (Adcock)

The Giants # 3 Prospect (Alderson)

- Prospect ratings via John Sickels MinorLeagueBall.com

The Pirates, no matter how well they drafted were NEVER going to win the World Series, let alone get to the playoffs with a nucleus of Jack Wilson, Freddy Sanchez, Nyjer Morgan, et all. It has been fascinating to see them get such high returns for players that as a whole, were as bad as, if not worse than our Royals.

The Royals, no matter how well we draft are NEVER going to win a World Series, let alone go to the playoffs with a nucleus of Mark Teahen, Alex Gordon, David Dejesus, et all. It has been fascinating to see them claiming to 'stick to the plan' while flat refusing, or flat UNABLE to find a trade partner for a group of players that were as bad as the Pirates, who haved effectively held 25% of another Major League Draft in the past 6 weeks by adding 9 players to their Minor Leagues. 

What sickens me more & more as I write this, is just thinking about how barren OUR upper Minor Leagues are, and how a series of trades like this could have instantly re-stocked NW Ark & Omaha w/ real, honest to goodness prospects again. If we had traded (Royal listed with his Pirate comperable in parenthesis) Gordon or Butler (McClouth), Tejada? (Burnett), Teahen (LaRoche), Davies (Snell) & Callaspo (Sanchez) we might not have gotten the haul the Pirates have gotten in the past 6 weeks, but we would surely have a wave of potential players ready to come to KC next year, or 2010, right before the next wave of Hosmer, Moose, et all...

Stand Pat. It's the Kansas City way.