Pittsburgh Pirates: All Time ”Flash in the Pan” Team

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Welcome to my second edition of ”Pittsburgh Pirates All-Time Lists”. In this series, I will be making my starting lineups of players that fit the criteria for whatever obscure category pops into my wonderful mind. In my first article of the series, I came up with my ”All-Overpaid Team”. Here, I will be coming up with 9 Pirates (one for each position) that, for a brief moment, looked like superstars, only to never quite regain that glory. Let’s get into it.

Pitcher: Oliver Perez, 2004

It hurts to put Oliver Perez on a rather dubious list like this, because sadly, he was not entirely responsible for his career going down hill. As a rookie in 2004, Perez had one of the most exciting individual seasons in recent memory for a Pirate. His record of 12-10 is modest, but his 2.98 ERA and 239 strikeouts (in the steroid era mind you) are not. Two of the greatest pitching performances I have seen in person were courtesy of Oliver Perez. The first was in Cincinnati, where he struck out 13 Reds over eight innings of work. The second came in Pittsburgh in the first end of a doubleheader, when he fanned 14 Houston Astros. The start to Perez’s career in Pittsburgh was magnificent, which is why, in typical Littlefield-era fashion, the Pirates had to screw it up.

After the 2004 season, the Pirates coaching staff decided to mess with Olie’s pitching style. Rather than strike fools out, they wanted him to pitch to contact, so they had him take a few MPH off his wicked fastball. Now, the purpose the organization had for doing this was not entirely nonsensical. The Pirates cared about Perez’s health and didn’t want him to burn himself out by throwing too hard too often, and that’s understandable. However, if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it. The Pittsburgh Pirates broke Oliver Perez.

Olie’s days of domination were over after 2004. The following year, his ERA skyrocketed to 5.85, and his strikeout total fell to 97 (he missed several starts after kicking a laundry cart in St. Louis). In 2006, things got even worse, as Perez started the season with a 2-10 record and an Earned Run Average of… are you sitting down.. 6.38, before he was shipped off to Queens in exchange for Xavier Nady. It’s tough to wonder what might have been if the Pirates coaches had just let Ollie be Ollie. I firmly believe that had his career had kept going at that 2004 rate, Perez could have been the first Pirate since Doug Drabek to win a Cy Young Award (I mean, why not? Freddy Sanchez won a batting title). It’s also possible that the league was able to adjust to Perez and figure him out, but I don’t totally buy that. Perez is still in the majors as a reliever for the Washington Nationals, but his career could have been so much more had he played for a different team.

Catcher: Ronny Paulino, 2006

Given the terror that the Cam Bonifay/Dave Littlefield era brought to this ballclub, 2006 was a pretty good year. The record stunk (65-97), but the team had some promising young talent. In 2006, Freddy Sanchez won the NL batting title; Jason Bay made his second consecutive All-Star appearance, and revilers Matt Capps and Mike Gonzalez both showed some serious potential. Then there was Ronny Paulino. A 25-year old from the Dominican, Paulino had a solid rookie season in 2006, hitting .310 with an On-Base Percentage of .360, all the while smacking six dingers and driving in 55 runs. It looked liked Paulino could be on his way to a respectable career, but this is the mid-2000s Pirates we are talking about. In 2007, Paulino’s batting average fell to .263. In 2008, it dropped to .212. In 2009, he played for the Marlins.

Paulino was just another member of the young blood that was supposed to give us fans hope and never developed, and Pittsburgh had to wait seven more years before they saw a winning ball-club. But it wasn’t all bad. Because Paulino flamed out, we got to watch Ryan Doumit go on the Disabled List for staring at the sun a second too long as well as get stolen on by literally every single base-runner in the National League.

First Base: Dino Restilli, 1949

Dino Restilli came in like a lion and went out like a lamb. As a 24-year-old, Restilli made his big league debut with the Bucs on June 14th, 1949. In his first ten big league games, Dino set the baseball world ablaze, smashing seven homers. It looked like Pittsburgh had another Ralph Kiner in the making, but those pesky big league pitchers learned how to pitch to Restilli: throw breaking balls. How hard did Dino fall? In his first ten games, he had seven home runs. He would only hit six more before he played his last game on June 12th, 1951, less than two years after his big league debut. Tragic.

Second Base: Tony Womack, 1997

Womack is on this list by association, as he was not a flash-in-the-pan type player. However, since I had a hard time finding any other second baseman that would be a good choice for this list, it came down to the fact that the 1997 Pirates were the definition of a flash-in-the-pan type team. ”The Freak Show” as they were known, might have been the closest thing Major League Baseball has had to a real-life adaptation of the 1989 classic ”Major League”. Kevin McClatchy’s cash-strapped Pirates came into the season with a $9,000,000 payroll and wound up falling short of a division title in the last week of the season. Womack was at the heart of the madness, hitting .278 and stealing 60 bases. While Womack would go on to play nine more seasons and play a vital role on the 2001 Diamondbacks squad that won the World Series, the team he was on was never able to build off of ”The Freak Show”.

3rd Base: Warren Morris, 1999

Although Morris was a second baseman, he will move to 3rd due to Tony Womack’s inclusion on the team. Morris will always be a hero in Baton Rouge due to his walk-off home run to win the 1996 College World Series for LSU. For a moment, it looked like he could become a hero in Pittsburgh too. As a rookie in 1999, Morris hit .288, blasting 15 big ones while driving in 73 and posting a respectable OPS of .787. His performance was good enough to place him 3rd in the NL Rookie of the Year voting for that year. However, this was as good as it got for ”Wo Mo”. Morris only played two more seasons in Pittsburgh before moving the Twin Cities in 2002, followed by a move to Detroit in 2003. The 2003 season would be Warren’s last in ”The Show”, as he retired before his 30th birthday.

Outfield: Garret Jones

Similar to Jack Wilson, Jones is a good guy who is popular with the fans, and his inclusion on this list can be up for debate. Jones did have more than one good season in a Pirates uniform; however, he was never quite as superhuman as he was in the summer of 2009.

As fans should remember, Garret Jones made his Pirates debut on June 30th and set the world on fire, becoming just the second player in MLB history to hit 20+ home runs after July 1st. Because of how good Jones was and how bad the Pirates were, fans couldn’t help getting a little carried away. The reality was that there was no chance that Jones would ever build upon what he accomplished in 2009. While Jones was a decent hitter for the Bucs until his departure in 2013, (2012 was particularly a good year), he never became the power-hitting superstar that the Steel City wanted.

Outfield: Nate McLouth

Let me take you back to June 4th, 2009, the date the Pirates traded Nate McLouth. The city went unscrewed with rage, and to this day, I don’t fully understand why they did it.

From 2005-2007, Nate McLouth was a ”meh” player. Nate did have a decent statistical campaign in 2007, but hitting .258 with 13 home runs doesn’t exactly scream ”super duper star”. In 2008, McLouth had the best year of his career, finishing with a .276/.356/.497 line with 26 Bombs, 94 RBI, 23 stolen bases and a Gold Glove to go with it. McLouth had a great year, but here’s the problem: it was just one year

McLouth started the 2009 season hitting .256 with nine dingers and 34 RBI. Neil Huntington, figuring that A. The Pirates stunk, and B. McLouth’s trade value was only going to go south from here, sent McLouth to the Atlanta Braves in exchange for Jeff Locke, Charlie Morton, and Gorkys Hernandez. As mentioned before, the city erupted in rage, and while I understand some of where the fans were coming from (I was one of them; I was also 11), a lot of the fan reaction still bothers me as we are approaching the 7-year anniversary of this deal. McLouth was a decent player who was a star for a brief time, and that was really about it. I’ve never met Nate McLouth, so I can’t tell you how he is off the field, but I know he didn’t endear himself with his personality the way Jack Wilson did. He wasn’t a perennial star like Jason Bay was, and he wasn’t born in the area like Neil Walker was.

The hostility of the fans also exposed how narrow-minded of a fanbase the Pittsburgh Pirates had in 2009. If we knew our baseball, we would have known that A. McLouth wasn’t a special player and B. The Bucs had a blue chip prospect in AAA who played the very same position as Nate McLouth.

But hey, we wouldn’t hear much about that guy, would we?

Outfield: Jose Tabata

The 2010 Pirates were not good. In spite of their 57 wins, however, there was hope for the future. Neil Walker, Pedro Alvarez, and Jose Tabata were three rookies who looked to lead the Bucs back to prominence. I pose a question to my fellow fans; If somebody had told you, in 2010, that 2/3 of ”The Calvary” (as Rocco DeMaro called them) would not pan out anywhere near as planned and the club would still experience a Renaissance over the next five years, would you have believed them? My guess would be no, but that is indeed what happened.

Acquired from the Yankees as part of a massive hull that the Pittsburgh received in exchange for outfielder Xavier Nady, Tabata was a blue chip prospect of whom big things were expected. He made his Major League debut on June 9th, 2010 in Washington DC, and his rookie campaign was solid. In 2010, Tabata’s slash line was .299/.346/.400. In my opinion, Tabata’s career began to go downhill on June 26th, 2011. Here, on a beautiful Sunday afternoon at PNC Park, Tabata beat out a bunt single to lead off the Bottom of the 1st against the Boston Red Sox. Unfourtanly, the hit came with a price, as Tabata suffered a left quad strain and was carted off the field, resulting in a stint on the 15-day DL.

Shortly after Tabata’s return from injury, he was greeted with a 6-year contract extension. After he signed on the dotted line, ”neck lips” was never able to become the superstar that we had all hoped. Over the remainder of his Pirates career, Tabata would be no more than a 4th outfielder for the bulk of the time. There is also evidence that Jose landed himself in Clint Hurdle’s doghouse, as fans were puzzled as to why Tabata would riding the pine for inferior outfielders such as Jaff Decker.

Some of Tabata’s downfall was due to laziness, some due to lack of opportunity. Regardless, Tabata’s career in the City of Bridges was underwhelming.

That’s a wrap

Thank you for reading. If you have your two cents, spend them in the comment section below!