The Miami Marlins signed Heath Bell to a three-year/$9 million deal last night. This is patently ridiculous: Bell is 34 years old, he's coming off of a year in which his strikeout rate took a nosedive and his peripherals indicated pretty strongly that his saves and ERA were a mirage, and he's a huge man that's probably more likely to plummet from usefulness rather than slowly decline. This is the latest in a line of ridiculous closer contracts that have been signed this winter, and with every one the response from me and lots of other Pirate fans is this: "Trade Joel Hanrahan." While I think that the Pirates should be shopping Hanrahan right now and at next week's winter meetings, I think that in the off-season it's often easy to assume that every move takes place in a vacuum and it's often pretty easy to get your perspective on these kinds of things mixed up. Consider this: if you were the fan of a team that had a fair amount of money to spend and ...
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