Nutting is Cheap, and that Really Changes Nothing

2-15-24 – By Gary Morgan – @garymo2007 on X

Every year someone writes some exposé about not only how cheap Bob Nutting is, but how incompetent he and his organization have been and in fact are. It’s really never anything fans weren’t aware of, just combining things to show the sum is much worse than they might have assumed. Adding some more meat on already bleached and picked to death bones.

The latest is from the Athletic, a subscription sports site that I’m sure many of you are subscribed to, if you are, read it for yourself. Even if you aren’t, you’ll see quotes from it and repostings for the next month at least. Even winning won’t stop it.

There’s nothing wrong with the piece, it’s well researched, well thought out, just not anything that really raised my eyebrows, maybe with the exception of delaying a trade to save 30K, lol.

Some people will read things like that and really learn some things, but mostly they just provide fuel for people who already want to make Pirates fans feel like crap.

I say that because, the article changes nothing. They don’t expose any criminal enterprise, in fact, they rarely have much more than antidotal stories that help illustrate how cheap he is, or how dumb they are, or how easily they could have…

You get it.

They also never address the system that allows for all of the worst things a baseball owner might want to do. Everything Bob does is sanctioned by the league. If you don’t control the top, you can’t control the bottom.

These articles mean whatever they mean to you, I’m not trying to speak for everyone here, just myself. All they mean for me is when I write a piece about Oneil Cruz next week, until the article blows over, half my comments will be quotes from it that don’t pertain to the piece I’ve written, or overtly asking me how I can be a Pirates fan.

It sucks. But it is what it is. It’s not as though I can deny or would even want to deny what Bob Nutting is.

People who choose to support this team, I’m guessing you if you bothered to click on an article that didn’t call for a firing squad or Mark Cuban, well, we already know all of this, we just choose to deal with it.

For me, I love baseball, and I mean the game itself. I’d watch just about any level of the sport and growing up in Pittsburgh, the Pirates, bad as they’ve been, are my team.

I know what Bob Nutting is. I know what he does and doesn’t do. And yes, I do probably know a bit better than your average fan. I’ll say this, it’s more Bob’s fault than I originally thought when I started doing this. Let’s say when I started I probably blamed the league 75% and Bob 25%, and now I’m probably more 50/50.

I used to say a new owner would pretty much be the same in this market. Now, I could see improvement, better management, higher highs here and there with a new one.

So, I’ve evolved on this, as I evolve on everything.

Now, how do I see past that? Well, I kinda don’t.

Being a Pirates fan, in this system, with this owner who is operating well within the rules that this Collective Bargaining Agreement allows and isn’t at all interested in selling, how could you?

First, you have to accept that winning a championship is going to be extremely hard, but you have to allow a shred of hope that all the bricks fall in the right order, somehow, some way, some time.

Without that shred of hope, you aren’t a fan, you’re a historian.

If you don’t have that impossible to extinguish but barely flickering light inside you, buried, even hidden, there is no fandom. You can love the teams you’ve watched win, you can love the history, be proud of it, celebrate it, pine for it, but if you can’t see even a Mega Millions style shot at winning it all, you might as well open a museum.

Even if you lie about that sliver of hope online to save face. Look yourself in the mirror, if you can tell yourself there’s just no way, period, can’t happen. OK, you’re a fan of the legacy, but going through the motions at best now. Don’t worry, your secret is safe with you.

I start there. For me, there is a narrow path for a team with the obstacles the league offers, and a poor owner, but there is a path.

I think back on this rebuild often, because for better or worse, my writing is tied to it, I started right before they did, and yes, it is a rebuild, even if it hasn’t gone as quickly as you’d like, even if you think it’s going to fail.

I’ve always known Ben Cherington would be restricted in how he could get this done. And I’ve watched Ben Cherington be restricted in how he attempts to get this done.

I’ve also watched him know what he was walking into and approach it exactly as he wanted to given the owner. Note, I mean to say, he’d love more resources, but knew what he was likely going to deal with.

For that reason, I’ve always looked at his job as assembling as much high end talent as he could and getting it to time up. I expect their first winning team to have a payroll under 100 Million.

Meaning, when they produce a winning record, they will have developed or acquired those bones for very little. From there, he’ll be allowed to add a bit more payroll but I’d be shocked if they were ever higher than 15th and I’m being generous leaving the 20’s.

Still think you’re informing me about how bad Nutting is?

Even so, the path he’s taken has taken them exactly where they are. A talented young team, short on starting pitching with quite a few possibilities on the way and a couple guys locked up through the end of the decade. Too long, hey, you can change that about as easily as the owner.

That glimmer of hope flickers a bit brighter for me when I look at the lay of the land from a bit higher. Ground level, it’s not ideal but as you pan back you start to see the framework for how this thing might just come together.

Not saying when, not predicting some crazy rise this year, just saying the act of acquiring talent to work with has provided a lot of players to work through.

In all that, I see unforced errors, at least in my mind, and I try to point them out. I see missed opportunities, or slight forks in the road where I might have gone the other direction, and again, I’ve tried to always be up front about it.

I don’t think Cherington is a proven GM for a market like this, with an owner like this. How could you be? If you want that, you keep Huntington until he retires. I just can’t deny what I see when I look at the overall system near the league and the roster itself. They are undoubtedly better positioned to give this a go than they have been arguably since 2012 and I’d argue better supported by prospect depth, especially on the mound.

This team is going to win. They might not win this year, but they’ll be better, and next year even better than that. Will they ever reach the very top? Well, that’s where the hope part comes in. Because when you build a team that is in that conversation, you’re in regardless of how you did it, you probably just don’t get to stay there as long as the rich kids.

If you expected Cherington to come to Pittsburgh and arm wrestle Bob into spending a bunch of money so he could turn this ship around in 3 years AND improve the system and change the culture and get the payroll up over 150 million, well, maybe you do need articles detailing how little Bob Nutting spends, and how often he actually makes it harder than it needs to be.

I look at this team with a bit of optimism because quite honestly, I think I see reason to. When and if I don’t, I think I’ve shown that too. Overall, the arrow is pointing in the right direction, we just have yet to see if it ends in a plateau or a peak, acknowledging the former is more likely.

Hey, you take these types of stories how ever you like. I appreciate learning whatever I did from it, but for me, there are a lot of stories to tell the day before the first Spring game I’d prefer telling, at least that story isn’t written already.