9-25-24 – By Gary Morgan – @garymo2007 on Twitter
Rowdy Tellez wound up being a poor signing for the 2024 Pittsburgh Pirates. Most fans thought it would turn out this way, you know, being DFA’d, and most wouldn’t have thought twice about it had the club pulled the trigger back on September 1st.
That’s not how the Pirates operate though.
See, the Pirates simply don’t think there are people actually paying attention. They think they’re operating in the dark, but light has long since been shined on a large swath of what they tend to think is only for their eyes.
10 years ago, had this event taken place, there’s a very good chance the story ends with a postmortem of Rowdy’s season, the very accurate conclusion being that while late in the season, cutting him was more than ok.
Pittsburgh has something that most towns don’t though, we have Ethan Hullihen, a man who keeps such meticulous and up to the day accurate payroll figures, and leaves them available to the public.
He’s so good, he predicts the Forbes end of year reports, the only MLB salary report that winds up sanctioned by MLB and MLBPA every year and Ethan might be off by 10-30 thousand.
Think about that.
This guy has contacts and gathers information we’ve never had at our fingertips about incentives baked in, timing, amounts. He figures out formulas for service time. It’s all there, and the local journalists know its so good they can’t avoid using it themselves.
Without Ethan, I’m not saying this story never sees the light of day, but it would have been a grievance we heard about in the winter, the Pirates will win that grievance. By then, most of us are tuned out. I maybe mention it in 5 Thoughts some week, get a few eye rolls, and we all move on.
Truth is, what just happened to Rowdy happens all the time to players. Players understand it, it’s part of the gig. They could perform well enough to make the team ignore it of course, but if the team underperforms, they sometimes get caught in the wash.
In Rowdy’s case, both things happened. He and the team failed.
Now, the team should have DFA’d Rowdy long before this, even a couple weeks and this is hardly a story, let alone something Pat McAfee is talking about.
The bottom line is, the only way this became a thing is the Pirates waited for the one time where you could argue with zero irony that this guy was getting screwed. 10 at bats ago, this is a stretch. 20 at bats ago, you only bring it up if you have an axe to grind. 30 at bats ago, a few fans whine it should have been 3 months earlier.
Had they done it earlier, they could actually sell that they were far more patient than another team might be, in other words, if you want a REAL shot, come to Pittsburgh.
The Pirates create issues with players and 9 times out of 10 it comes from the overriding belief that they have the benefit of stupid fans, or at the very least, uninformed. Sometimes they simply think the player is just gonna play ball, see Bryan Reynolds who simply got tired of having his leash jerked and decided to pressure these people.
They think they’re smarter than anyone else, especially us. They got caught.
Will this prevent free agents from signing here? No.
Offering less than what it takes to get a deal done is what will prevent free agents from signing here, just like always. Players don’t sign these deals believing they’re going to perform badly enough that any team would think twice about cutting them to avoid paying an escalator in a contract, just like you don’t take a job thinking you’re probably going to get fired for sucking at it.
Players don’t sign here for one reason, the Pirates don’t offer what other teams do and if everything’s even, maybe stuff like this is a tie breaker, thing is, I don’t often hear they tied on the money, so again, no, this will have no effect. They’ll either pay, or they won’t.
Aroldis Chapman was offered 2.5 million more than any offer he had on the table and signed it.
They offered more, they got the “star”. That’s how it works.
You sign a player looking for a rebound and pad it with incentives that could get him where he wants to be financially, well, let’s be real, by May Rowdy knew these numbers were going to be tough to hit based on how they were using him.
In other words, he probably wasn’t shocked, but I’m also going to bet when he got to the last week of the season he probably thought to himself, man, I guess they’re gonna let me have that first one.
I hate this stuff. I hate that my team is the very worst example in baseball of what happens when the league has no control over how much or how little a team has to do financially speaking.
Don’t cry for Rowdy, he was given more time than he earned. By all means, be disgusted by how the Pirates handle situations like this, even as you know it’s the right move to make, timing be damned.
More than anything, do realize all of this starts with the way they spend. As with just about every discussion about this team, the fish stinks from the head, and that stinky head for the life of him can’t seem to hire people who know how to no do obvious stupid things that the baseball world laughs, or in this case yells about.
Steel City Pirates 