"It's not often that a baseball organization can walk away from negotiations with super agent Scott Boras and say, "Thanks, Scott, thanks a lot."

That's the position the Pirates were in due to their good fortune of having Boras as the representative for the player they selected in the first round of the June amateur draft.

That's right, good fortune. Once Boras became involved, the negotiations and eventual signing of Pedro Alvarez became a media circus. Never before had so much attention been focused on the signing of the team's first pick. Usually, it's a fairly routine event, even in this age of excessive media hype.

Although the prospects of signing Alvarez always were somewhere between very good and excellent, the presence of Boras and his well-known reputation for making outrageous demands raised doubts with some that it could be done. So, when Alvarez signed minutes before the deadline last week, there was jubilation all around. The atmosphere was that of a great victory for the Pirates, when, in fact, signing the No. 1 draft choice virtually is automatic. Since the draft was instituted in 1966, the Pirates never have failed to sign their No. 1 pick.

What should have been a routine story became big-time mostly because of the involvement of Boras. The Pirates basked in the glory of this signing at a news conference Saturday, when there was praise heaped all around. You might have thought they won the World Series or advanced to the playoffs or had a winning season.

No one threw around the praise quite so outrageously as owner Bob Nutting, who had this to say about president Frank Coonelly, general manager Neil Huntington and their associates:

"It's the single best management team in all of baseball, maybe all of sports."

Just like that, Nutting placed Coonelly and Huntington at the top of the baseball heap, ahead of, among many others, the management team of the Boston Red Sox, a franchise that has won two of the past four World Series. He also put them ahead of the management teams of the San Antonio Spurs, who have won four of the past 10 NBA titles and the New England Patriots, who have won three of the past seven Super Bowls.

Not only did those teams win all those championships, but they actually -- can you believe this? -- signed all of their No. 1 draft choices."