“It’s interesting that all the talk about how the “big-money” era of MLB has ruined the competitive balance of the league overlooks the fact that exactly the opposite is true.”
You will get absolutely no argument from me.
The Pirates are simply leeching off MLB’s system. They could be as competitive as Minnesota, Tampa Bay (a team that holds its own in a division with the bloody Red Sox and Yankees), California, etc. Hell, even Cleveland hasn’t done that bad during the time Pittsburgh has been on it’s 17, soon to be 18 year streak of consecutive losing seasons. Milwaukee shows some flashes of brilliance every now and then .... they are in a smaller market than Pittsburgh.
The Pirates cried poor from 1993 until they got “Taxpayer Park” in 2001. From there, they simply kept their mouths shut and let the money pour in. The minute Nutting virtually took control in 2003, we traded Aramis Ramirez and an older, but very effective Kenny Lofton for a block, a rock, and an AIDS victim ... the commisioner’s office should have blocked that trade (in all fairness, we got Jose Hernandez ... a guy they had to bench towards the end of the year since he was about to break the strikeout record for a player, Bobby Hill who was a failed prospect, and someone else, a pitcher whose name I forget). From that point forward, we’ve done nothing but dump salary the instant the team is a free agent or two from at least resembling something called winning.
The Pirates will tell you it’s “for the future” ... the truth is that they like to cut their players that are MLB “capable” (and there aren’t many) and go for the cheap “prospects” that lack talent. What’s maddening is that the welfare system MLB uses has no salary floor, so if ticket sales go down, their share of the welfare goes up. The team merely exists when it should be contracted.
They still are $90M in the hole from what I gather. Of course, when they were a garbage team in Three Rivers Stadium, that was a real problem. Now that they are worth around $300M, that $90M is not that big of a deal. Still “cry poor” is the mantra of the idiots down at 110 Federal Street, Pittsburgh, PA. The morons in this area still go to games there too. That has got to stop before there is going to be any real change.
Steinbrenner at least ran his team like a business ... if he saw a hole, he’d plug it. He built the Yes Network and, quite frankly, he had earned the right to spend a ton of cash on players given MLB’s economic system. He took plenty of risks to get the Yankees where they are today. While I personally hate the team and the players ... it’s just “hate” in the sense that I love watching these Goliaths fall to underdogs :-). Trust me, if the Pirates had a Steinbrenner running that team, I’d be in heaven.
Teams like the Pirates are more concerned about whining and screwing over their fan base with false promises. The useless MLB commissioner plays a huge role in teams like the Pirates leeching off the system. Instead of playing the cards they are dealt and getting the team back to some level of normality, they are free to cry and dismantle theirselves anytime the get near the threshold of having to spend a few $$$ to make the team a bit more than a AAAA franchise.
Teams like the Pirates are in the business of using “baseball” to sell their firework shows. Once they sink to that level (no self respecting baseball person wants anything to do with that cesspool of a team), they should contract the team and/or force the owner to sell to someone who’d run the team like a baseball franchise instead of a marketing gimmick.
I loved the Pirates growing up, but, anymore, Red Sox or Rays baseball is a hell of a lot more fun to watch :-). I never thought in a million years I’d like AL “baseball” :-).
Sorry for the rant ... I just hate seeing a bunch of crybabies that do NOTHING to fix the problems when plenty of solutions exist.
I read something very interesting in the last couple of days about George Steinbrenner and his role as a key player in the "free agent era" in MLB. The Yankees' first big signing in the modern era was Catfish Hunter, who they signed to a five-year, $3.8 million deal in 1975 after Hunter was declared a free agent by an arbitrator in a breach of contract dispute with A's owner Charlie Finley. It turns out that Hunter was being offered more money by at least two teams -- including possibly even $1M more over five years by the San Diego Padres (who were then owned by McDonald's founder Ray Kroc).
But Hunter signed with the Yankees because they were willing to structure the deal exactly the way he wanted it . . . with only $750,000 as his total salary over the five years, and the rest paid to Catfish Hunter and his family in various forms -- including a $1 million signing bonus, fifteen years of deferred salary (he was still getting paid under those terms well into the 1990s, even though he retired in 1979), a $1 million life insurance policy, and annuities for his children to pay for college. Sometimes I wonder if the Yankees under Steinbrenner's leadership were able to sign players like this back in the 1970s because they were among the few teams at the time that were comfortable with the kinds of complex deals that would eventually become commonplace among professional athletes.