It’s year four of Ben Cherington’s tenure as General Manager, and are the Pittsburgh Pirates really doing their due diligence by listening to offers for David Bednar or are they putting off improvement longer than they need to?
Let’s start here: Rewind to the trade deadline of 2021, Bryan Reynolds in his third season was slashing .312/.393/.528. The Pirates were listening to offers on him.
Ultimately, they decided to keep and later extend their best player. But it wasn’t always so clear. Without an extension, Reynolds didn’t exactly fit in snugly to the rebuild’s presumed timeline.