The Pittsburgh Pirates made two trades Tuesday, shipping disgruntled utility player Eric Hinske to the New York Yankees and dumping outfielder Nyjer Morgan and reliever Sean Burnett to Washington for reclamation projects Lastings Milledge and Joel Hanrahan.

The Pirates got the better of the deal in terms of upside. Morgan has proven to be a solid-but-unspectacular prospect and at 29, he’s probably showing you about what you are going to get from him. He’ll reportedly upgrade Washington’s defense while providing the fan base with a couple minutes of conversation before they nod back off to sleep while waiting for the Washington Redskins training camp to start.

He also appears to be miles more stable than Milledge, the centerpiece of the trade. Despite his head-case tendencies, at five years younger than Morgan, Milledge has the far greater upside of the two.

Don’t get me wrong. For a rebuilding team, I like young upside more than middle-aged mediocrity. Still, the deal perplexes me because it wasn’t a month ago that the Pirates traded away Nate McLouth, a young, All-Star outfielder, who by most accounts was popular with the team.

Sure, he’s a centerfielder too and the Pirates had Andrew McCutchen in the minor leagues putting up numbers that required his recall.

But McLouth was signed to a reasonable deal through 2011. The combo of McLouth and McCutchen would have given the Bucs a nice power/speed tandem for the top of the lineup that would have teamed well with the LaRoche brothers as fixtures in the lineup.

McLouth couldn’t move to left field? It’s not like Morgan, Delwyn Young, Brandon Moss and the also-traded Hinske were providing such sock-knocking play that they would have needed to stay in the lineup following a McCutchen recall.

Now the team has added the enigmatic Milledge, who has upside that is only exceeded by his dark side. He’ll likely immediately get a shot when he recovers from a broken finger. But his antics have reportedly irritated teammates from the past. To me that’s not an upgrade over the opportunity the Pirates had to plug McCutchen and McLouth in the outfield together to form their own version of the M&M brothers.

The Pirates have not had a winning season since 1992. While this version of the team seems to at least have a hint of how to get there (they did have a winning record the second half of 2008) they won’t get there in any hurry by continually trading solid players for prospects, especially two years before their contracts call for big salary increases.

Not everyone agrees with me – Cleveland GM Mark Shapiro understood it. I guess I did too – I just don’t agree with it, in this case. These are the types of guys you have to start keeping around at some point if you are truly planning to build a winner. In this way, if I was a Pirates fan, the last month would have been extremely frustrating to watch.

And so the rebuilding continues.