Pirates validated with Andrew McCutchen decision as Rangers bring down hammer

The Pittsburgh Pirates’ winter decision on Andrew McCutchen was always going to be emotionally complicated. Now, with the Texas Rangers designating him for assignment on Wednesday, it looks a lot more defensible from a baseball standpoint.

McCutchen leaving Pittsburgh never felt clean. After all, he wasn't just another veteran moving on. He was the face of the franchise’s revival, the player who helped drag the Pirates out of two decades of losing and back into October. He was the 2013 NL MVP, a five-time All-Star and the heartbeat of the best baseball Pittsburgh had seen in a generation.

Sentiment can explain why fans wanted McCutchen back. It could not justify forcing him onto a roster where the fit was no longer obvious. Pittsburgh had younger players to evaluate, lineup flexibility to protect and a 26-man roster that could not be built around nostalgia. If McCutchen was not going to have a clear role, bringing him back just to sit occasionally or block another bat would have been unfair to everyone involved. (The same can easily be said about Marcell Ozuna, but I digress.)

Texas took the chance instead, and for a moment, it looked like McCutchen might have one more run in him. He opened the season with hits in five straight games, homered, doubled twice and briefly looked like the same professional hitter who has survived every stage of his career through intelligence and preparation.

But after that, the decline became impossible to ignore. After that hot start, McCutchen hit just .100 the rest of April and followed it with a .188 mark in May. Overall, he produced a .192 average, a .277 on-base percentage and a .537 OPS with only three extra-base hits. For a player whose value is tied almost entirely to his bat at this stage in his career, that simply was not enough.

Andrew McCutchen's baseball future may be in question after Rangers DFA, but his Pirates legacy is secure

Of course, this doesn't erase anything McCutchen meant to Pittsburgh. If anything, it reinforces why the Pirates’ decision was so difficult.

McCutchen isn't some random aging veteran; he's one of the most important players in franchise history. In 12 seasons with the Pirates, he hit .281 with a .372 OBP, an .839 OPS, 248 home runs, 875 RBI and 186 stolen bases. Almost singlehandedly, he changed the entire energy around the organization. But legacy and roster construction are different conversations.

The Rangers bringing down the hammer does not make McCutchen’s Pirates tenure any less meaningful. Nor does it justify the Pirates letting him twist in the wind all offseason only to slam the door on him at the last possible second. It does, however, validate Pittsburgh’s read that the baseball fit was no longer there.

The Pirates chose the harder, colder decision over the sentimental one. Painful as it was — and poorly as it was handled — they were probably right.

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