No he won’t.
30 years nearly non stop of high draft picks and low results… and when those future all stars have to be paid they trade them for nothing…
Nutting won’t ever spend the money needed to compete.. and don’t give me small market argument.. Cleveland is even a smaller market and they have had
Multiple runs one all the way to the World Series since 1992…
Nutting won’t field a winning team ever. He makes more profit putting up scrubs…
Hey your team went 61 and 101 last year.. what should we do?!? Oh I know cut the payroll even further.
In baseball you win 1/3 of your game no matter what, lose a 1/3 no matter what and your talent and management matter for the remaining third…
Pirate won 7 games above that 1/3 last year. 7. And responded by cutting the payroll.
Nutting has shown he has zero intention of ever spending a penny more than he must.. 30 years. No farm league development, no nothing. He does not care about even attempting to field a winning team.
Until MLB forced him to sell, there is no Major League Baseball in Pittsburgh…
I am also a Pirates fan. Don’t live near the Burgh anymore but watch the occasional game on MLB.com.
There are teams that get by with low payroll and still remain competitive most years - Tampa, Oakland, Cleveland are examples, as is Milwaukee to a lesser extent.
The difference between them and the Bucs is in player development. When Tampa brings up a player from the minors they are generally prepared to compete in the majors and usually produce to their minor league projections. The Bucs brought up a bunch of rookies this year and most flopped like codfish.....most of them only know to pull the ball into the shift, thus make decent contact but produce no runs outside of the occasional homer. They seem totally unprepared for major league pitching.
Cruz and Castro appear to be figuring some things out finally, but other than that, the best rookie on the team has been Jason Delay, a weak hitting catcher but a stellar defender and framer, who would not even be in the majors if they had any other options.
So it’s not just cheapness, it’s not spending money where it counts - in getting the most from the players you have. Tampa routinely takes other teams’ castoffs (especially the Pirates) and turns them into productive big league players. Doesn’t happen much in Pittsburgh.
If the Bucs had young players produce to the best of their ability and cheap waiver pickups that get coached into temporary usefulness, they would be at least competitive in a weak division with the payroll they have now.