A.J. Burnett Trade Includes Exicardo Cayones, Diego Moreno

MLB.com’s Jonathan Mayo now reports that the second player the Pirates are sending to the Yankees in the A.J. Burnett trade is young outfielder Exicardo Cayones. That means the Yankees will be getting Cayones and reliever Diego Moreno, and the Pirates will take on $13 million of Burnett’s salary.

I wrote about Moreno here. Cayones’ case is somewhat similar, in that his numbers look interesting, but it was clear from the Pirates’ behavior that they just didn’t think much of him. Cayones held his own in the Gulf Coast League as an 18-year-old in 2010, but the Pirates only gave him 11 games in State College in 2011. He was terrible there, and the Pirates had him spend the rest of the year back in the GCL. If they’d liked him more, they probably would have let him continue to struggle, or they would have sent him to West Virginia to start the year anyway. Time will tell whether the Pirates’ evaluations of Cayones and Moreno are correct, but they clearly don’t think they’re giving up very much here.