Woeful Pirates hope hectic winter brings better times

	Perennial .300 hitter Sean Casey takes over for the ineffective Daryle Ward at first base for the Pirates. Andy Lyons/Getty Images

Nobody is going to pick the Pittsburgh Pirates to win the National League Central this season. Line the Pirates up against a wall in Bradenton, Fla., during Spring Training next month, when optimism will be running at its out-of-its-head highest, and even the Pirates won't pick themselves to win their division.

But all the work that the Pirates' front office has done this winter isn't about winning a division or a league pennant. It's not about getting to .500, someplace the Pirates haven't been since Barry Bonds left 13 seasons ago. Though, sure, .500 would be nice.

No, this is simply about getting going in the right direction. Winning more games than they have recently. Getting close to .500. After one of the most expensive couple of months in their history, one of the busier and more interesting swap-and-spend offseasons in baseball this winter, the Pirates are just trying to get back into the game.

"We feel good about the talent we have," says the team's general manager, Dave Littlefield. "Now we have to push that talented group to achieve more. We have to win more games."

The Pirates are an interesting case. They are undoubtedly a member of baseball's lower class -- along with the Royals, the Brewers, the Tigers, the Devil Rays and a few others who visit the dumps now and then -- that hasn't won recently and has little hope of winning in the future. Every once in a while, things change among these teams. For instance, the Royals won 83 games in 2003, their first winning season since '93. The Brewers reached .500 last season, their first non-losing season since '92.

But the Pirates and those others are still small-market teams with small-market payrolls that have to have everything go exactly right to compete for a division title. Even in what Major League Baseball likes to trumpet as a golden age, with six different World Series champs in the past six years, with revenue sharing and record attendance and all sorts of money from satellite radio and the Internet, teams like the Pirates lag behind.

This winter, Littlefield has tried to change that. With money in his pocket, a challenge from team ownership to spend it wisely and more talent on his roster than most have given Pittsburgh credit for, Littlefield has gone about reshaping the Pirates with a series of trades and several free-agent signings that have given the team more hope than it's had in years.