Kovacevic: Lights are on at 115 Federal, but is anyone really home?

SAN DIEGO -- Brief and to the Point ...

• Tony Watson is a wonderful human, and he served the Pirates well, taking the ball day after day and amassing 450 appearances over seven seasons, most of any reliever in Major League Baseball, while pitching at an elite level for a significant portion of that span.

He'll be missed in every way.



• Watson wrote the following, of his own volition, and asked the Pirates to distribute it:



• Watson was a ninth-round draft pick under Dave Littlefield. There now are zero Pittsburgh draft picks in the current bullpen.

• Watson was making $5.6 million. He had to go, one way or another, same as Jared Hughes was told by Neal Huntington himself that his contract would force his release if he didn't pitch well in, um, Grapefruit League ball. Hughes was making $2.83 million.

• Watson will now join an outrageously loaded roster in Los Angeles. Because of that, there's a possibility Watson will meet Hughes, another Littlefield draft pick dumped this year because of his contract, in a National League Championship Series between the Dodgers and Brewers. Either of those gentlemen winning a World Series ring would be just the greatest thing of all the great things.

• Littlefield was GM in Pittsburgh for six years, four fewer than the current front office. The drafts under Littlefield and Ed Creech brought Andrew McCutchen, Neil Walker, Steve Pearce (who belted two grand slams last week for the Blue Jays), Rajai Davis, Matt Capps, Nyjer Morgan, Paul Maholm, Tom Gorzelanny, Zach Duke and, of course, Watson and Hughes.

• To repeat, that's six years for Littlefield vs. 10 for Huntington, Frank Coonelly, Kyle Stark and Greg Smith. And the current front office had the additional pleasure of picking at No. 4 overall (Tony Sanchez), No. 2 (Pedro Alvarez), No. 1 (Gerrit Cole) and No. 2 (Jameson Taillon), the most favorable positioning of any team in their span.

• To emphasize: Littlefield wasn't good at drafting. He just fared better than these guys.

• Littlefield was fired by Bob Nutting in 2007, primarily for having allowed the Latin American system to go terribly underfunded. Nutting initiated his own investigation to uncover what he needed to make the change, then followed through himself in overseeing the building back of the Pirates' presence in the Caribbean. His penny-pinching reputation has always been accurate, but he was directly, passionately engaged in all processes at the time.

• The 2007 version of Nutting would have taken one glance at the current front office's draft record and fired them in the next split-second.