A small market, a Littlefield, and a team on the rise

A small market, a Littlefield, and a team on the rise

Here's a Maine Sunday Telegram article about Portland, Maine native Dave Littlefield, who is the General Manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates. Littlefield grew up in Portland and was a catcher for Portland High who was drafted by the Phillies back in 1978. His minor league career petered out quickly, but he has made a very successful career out of evaluating baseball talent.

I've always rooted for Littlefield, as I always do for people from Maine, though I haven't always agreed with his methods. For a team that always seems to be crying poverty (to be fair, they are one of the smallest markets in MLB), they have spent a fair amount of money on aging players like Kenny Lofton and Reggie Sanders when they probably should have been developing their younger players. Still, the team has been competitive, and Littlefield all of a sudden has a lot of good young talent on the team, much of it acquired through trading his expensive veterans (e.g. Jason Bay and Oliver Perez, acquired in the Brian Giles trade).

If things fall correctly, the Pirates look like the kind of team that could suddenly have all of its talent mature at the same time, and they might be making a run at the playoffs in a couple of years. This is the way that the small market teams have to compete, and hopefully the Pirates can translate success on the field into some additional revenues, which will in turn enable them to continue to compete for several more years - the model that the once-moribund Cleveland Indians followed through the latter half of the 1990's. There is more than one way to skin the "how-to-win-in-MLB" cat, and I like to see new teams show us how every once in a while.