BURIED TREASURE

Pirates general manager Ben Cherington and his baseball operations team are playing the long game. In fact, they are playing the longest game that’s been attempted in some time in Pittsburgh.

The Pirates last undertook a rebuilding effort with a distant time horizon a decade ago, when Jameson Taillon and Gerrit Cole were selected with top two overall picks in the 2010 and 2011 drafts.

Taillon and Cole headlined an historic expenditure of draft capital on pitchers. During spring training in the early 2010s, surrounded by the orange groves and citrus farms of Bradenton, Fla., the Pirates’ backfields were growing a seemingly endless crop of projectable, 6-foot-4 or taller pitchers. In three drafts from 2009 to 2011, the Pirates