Kovacevic: Never 'joy' when it came to Pedro

Pedro Alvarez will be unhappy about this.

For all his many flaws, both real and contrived, Alvarez genuinely preferred playing in Pittsburgh and playing for the Pirates. And his teammates, in turn, positively swore by him. A.J. Burnett, as sharp a judge of character as any, told me this past summer before a game in New York, “There’s no one who works harder. That guy is busting his behind to get better, and he’s doing it every single day. When a guy’s doing that, man, you’ve got his back.”

Yeah, Alvarez will be unhappy, now that the Pirates, as of 11:16 p.m. Wednesday, formally cut the cord with their most powerful, their most polarizing player by non-tendering him via arbitration. He’s now a free agent, able to sign anywhere for any price.

But here’s the thing: He’ll be unhappy about that, too.

And he’ll be unhappy wherever he winds up.

And he’ll stay unhappy from the first to the final at-bat of the rest of his career.



I was speaking with a member of the Pirates’ front office within the past month, well after it had already become crystal clear that the team — particularly Clint Hurdle — couldn’t continue with him in the fold, and that exec offered this assessment that I now feel comfortable sharing: “There’s no joy with this guy. He doesn’t love the game. He doesn’t want to love the game. It’s just a thing he does.”

I challenged the exec at that point. I countered that Alvarez’s teammates, even the hard-headed Burnett, had nothing but praise for him in this regard.

“Yeah, I’m not talking about his work ethic. I’m talking about joy. I’m talking about being happy. To be successful in this game, you’ve got to be happy about something, you know? You can’t always be pouting and knocking yourself down. The game does enough of that to you on its own."

All of us who follow baseball in Pittsburgh, myself included, have exhausted all manner of analysis on Alvarez as an individual, going back to that insane summer in which Frank Coonelly and Scott Boras dueled — and I experienced it all first-hand, as both men took turns bending my ears for months — over every millisecond of that midnight signing deadline that might or might not have been violated. It was a fiasco. It was a wild time. And Alvarez only exacerbated it by being nowhere to be seen or heard. People wondered if he hated Pittsburgh or the Pirates. He became maybe the most divisive sporting figure we’ve had since Kordell Stewart, and this was before putting on his first professional spikes.

Some loved Alvarez. Some loathed him. But I’m guessing that most of us, again myself included, simply learned to live with him.

Now, finally, the Pirates have decided that just isn’t good enough.

And as a result, they’re absolutely right to have made the move they just made.

Oh, this will be debated for as long as Alvarez is gone, no question. Every time he slugs some 600-foot bomb somewhere, the Twitter-verse and talk shows will erupt. The story won’t end once he’s elsewhere, and it won’t end even if Neal Huntington succeeds in replacing his offense in 2016.

Some will bring out the usual blah-blah about Bob Nutting and money, given that Alvarez likely would have gotten $8 million or more through arbitration. Pay that no mind whatsoever, as it's mostly unoriginal parroting. If the Pirates don’t significantly increase payroll in 2016 over 2015, take it up then. But I’m certain that won’t be the case, based on what I’ve been told and based on thick precedent. The money will be applied elsewhere and demonstrably so.

Some will go so far as to claim the Pirates should have traded Alvarez. This, of course, assumes they could have. Which is insane. As I’ve been reporting for more than a year on this site, they’ve been trying to do exactly that in all that time and had no takers. And once Alvarez would have that $8 million arbitartion salary hung around his neck, he couldn’t be given away at a flea market.

All of that is all the more reason that Coonelly, Huntington and Hurdle are to be commended. Much as this move will be celebrated by some, it’ll be panned by others. But for as much as I’ve criticized all three gentlemen for various reasons over the years, no one can deny they’ve done the unpopular when they’ve deemed it best.

Alvarez was going nowhere here.

His offensive production was essentially the same as a rookie in 2010, when he had a .780 on-base plus slugging percentage, as it was this past season at .787. The latter isn’t awful. It was actually third on the current team behind Andrew McCutchen and Jung Ho Kang, but it came with one strikeout every 3.2 at-bats, and the never-ending slumps were such that the manager could never feel comfortable putting him in a run-producing position in the order. Nor should he have, based on all statistical models.

On defense, Alvarez literally was going nowhere.

By the time he was done at third base in 2014, he was picking off paying customers left and right. His throws bordered on farcical at times. And once he was moved to first, in maybe the most unusual development of his career, a glove that had been at least reasonably reliable at one corner of the infield suddenly was disastrous at the other. He was dropping soft liners right at his letters.

My goodness, he had 133 errors to his 131 home runs in Pittsburgh!

What was left, to wait for the DH to come to the National League?

Add all that up, and it’s not a big-league first baseman, even when weighing the prodigious power.

I can’t speak to how much or how little his pouting had to do with any of this. But baseball men can. And have. And their feeling — trust me on this — is very much summarized by the exec quoted above. Hurdle feels no differently. His hitting coaches, his infield coaches have felt no differently. Baseball was and almost surely always will be a job to him. Not a passion, but a job. And as almost all of us experience in our own lives, a job can become a grind. It wears you out. It beats you up.

That exec was dead-on: There was never any joy when it came to Pedro. Not when he was drafted. Not when he held out. Not on the field. Not off the field. Not even in the public discussions of him, for crying out loud. The topic brought out the worst in so many of us.

So, wonderful. He's gone.

Now, go find a better starting first baseman. Shouldn’t be hard. There were exactly 29 of those in Major League Baseball this past summer.