The first step under the current regime of Ben Cherington was to acquire as much talent in the system as possible.
Now after stockpiling prospects, it turned to getting them on the field and developing them to reach their potential. After a while, when you accumulate enough talent, there are bound to be traffic jams at certain positions.
One way to take full advantage of that is trade from one area of strength to help boost something in need.
We’ve seen the Pirates did into the prospect well quite a bit this offseason, trading Jack Hartman for Ji-Man Choi, Nick Garcia for Connor Joe and then more recently, Ricky DeVito for Mark Mathias.