Rodriguez questions moves made after 98-win season

would operate the way that we are operating now.”

In other news, Rodriguez, who signed with the Atlanta Braves last offseason before being traded back to the Pirates in August, said the idea of possibly saying goodbye to Andrew McCutchen in a trade would be equally painful.

“It hurt last time I had to leave, and I left a lot of my boys, obviously ‘Cutch being one of the closer ones,” he said. “Yeah, I don’t want to go through that again, and it being the other way around. So, we’ll see.”

Rodriguez also described his long recovery from the injuries he sustained in a car accident in January.

“With missing five months last year, typically you take a month off, month and a half … but as soon as I got home, I took a week and I started working out,” Rodriguez said. “I started hitting a little bit, too, because I wanted to make sure the swing was feeling the same.”

Early this offseason, Rodriguez was one of the Pirates players who went to Puerto Rico on the team’s relief mission.

“Just being down there was very moving,” he said. “And in a good way, actually. You’d think you see that much poverty and people struggling, but they were so uplifting, though. Very few people were negative. Very few people were down. They didn’t allow the situation to dictate how they were going to act.”

His questions for the front office aside, Rodriguez was quick to credit Pirates staff for its work on the Puerto Rico efforts:

“That third floor [where the front-office staff is located] was crazy,” he said. “I can’t shy away from Neal. He didn’t give himself credit, but Neal was out there sweating, too. There were a lot of people we’re grateful for. That third floor was wow, it was legit.”