Five Pirates Thoughts at Five – Big Love

10-7-24 – By Gary Morgan – @garymo2007 on Twitter

In case you haven’t caught on by now, every edition of this feature all off season is going to be themed by some band or performer I really like. You have to find ways to entertain yourself when you write a lot and I needed something that helped me think through things I’d like to get out there every week.

Sometimes you can get stuck just staring at a blank screen and nothing seems to come out, so coming up with a gimmick like this helps me keep the juices flowing. If you have a request for a band to be featured, let me know, so long as I like them too, I’m all over it.

This week is Fleetwood Mac, and the Title “Big Love” is because as frustrating as this team is to follow at times, they remain exactly that, my Big Love.

As to baseball, man, Playoff ball has been a blast this year and one thing is painfully obvious, most of these teams are living on anything but a plan as it comes to pitching. That doesn’t mean everyone is pitching badly, it just means they all have tired or beat up staffs and beyond a pitcher or two the plan is “find a way”.

I big love it in a way, but I do miss the marquee match-ups we used to see between two big arms who have lead their staff all season. I’m sure we’ll see that eventually as they play out, but early on it’s been a complete shuffle of everyone there is to get 27 outs come hell what may.

Let’s Go!

1. Seven Wonders

There are probably more than 7 of these if I’m honest, but hey, they wrote the song, and it’s as good a place to stop as any right?

• Isiah Kiner Falefa Starting Short Stop? Yeah, I’m not so sure that’s how I’d deploy him, but his 7.5 Million dollar paycheck tells me the Pirates probably won’t allow him to be a utility player at that rate, but I can’t see him as the starting SS on a winning team. The bat is plenty fine for the position, but his glove isn’t best suited for the spot and if we’re settling for less offense, it has to come with superior defense.
• Is Bryan Reynolds Moving to 1B? Seems to me, this is like the very first thing this team has to figure out. Before they explore free agency or trades, it feels to me like the feasibility of moving Bryan to 1B has to be at least gauged. It would be best for the team if he did, outfielders are much easier to buy than first basemen.
• Can a Hitting Coach Make an Impact if the Philosophy Doesn’t Change? I’ve described Andy Haines philosophy in the past as a very basic and true to 99% of baseball list of sentiments. I’ve also made plain this is actually a Ben Cherington philosophy. The biggest issue with Haines was his ability to identify issues and help correct them and implementing his concepts with players from AAA to MLB. I think there’s hope for sure the next hire does much better.
• What if Hayes Can’t Keep His Back in Order Again? Bluntly, if everything they’ve tried to do to help Ke’Bryan can’t both keep him on the field or help him be effective, they’ll simply have to eat his pay and either make him a bench player, trade him for whatever they can get or cut ties all together. We’ve already seen they have a ready replacement for what he’s become, what they haven’t and can’t easily replace is a healthy Ke’ contributing to the best of his ability. Tough situation, but one that must come to a head in 2025.
• Is David Bednar Worth Arbitration? The Pirates sure speak as though this is a no brainer and maybe that’s because if everyone was being honest the Pirates would accept some responsibility for how his season played out, at the very least, they’d acknowledge they made it hard for him. There’s been tipping, injury, embarrassment, and failure, to the point it’s utterly impossible to see the team offer him his full arbitration estimate, I’d much prefer they offer 20% less than he made this year and see what happens.
• Is Endy Rodriguez the Missing Link? Injecting a switch hitter with speed and pop into this lineup could really be important. That said, I want to give him the same grace we gave Oneil Cruz after missing a season. This could be a big infusion though, sometimes I get lost trying to picture where I’d put him in the lineup and how a productive Endy could lengthen the whole thing.
• Will Derek Shelton Finally Manage for Now? There’s been a plan, and like it or not, think it’s a good plan or not, Derek has been executing it along with his GM Ben Cherington. I made clear that I’d have moved on from Derek, but since they chose not to, it’s time to see if he has different in him. If the only goal becomes winning now as opposed to “getting better” or “giving opportunity”, will it look different? More importantly, will it produce different.

2. Over My Head

First, I always think of this song when I think of Christine McVie who recently departed us.

Many people throughout the years have tried like hell to understand exactly what baseball teams make and spend. They’ve tried to understand revenue sharing, who gets it, who doesn’t, who gets how much, how much of it do they use, what can they use it for?

I could go on, and on.

The truth is there are some very good sources out there for the finances of baseball, but there are just as many terrible, unscrupulous sources who pretend they have all the answers.

Only 1 source is truly vetted, both approved by the Owners and the Player’s Union and that’s the Forbes Report that comes out every December.

As it comes to the outgoing payroll implications, and should you want to know them as the season is ongoing, a Pirates fan could of course check in with Ethan Hullihen and his publicly available spreadsheet of gospel.

Even he, by far the most dedicated to the hunt for as much information as possible I know only has so much he can get his hands on.

The truth is, baseball is not obliged to have fans see what’s under the skirt.

They’ve avoided the US Congress getting their hands on their books, at least getting their hands on them and making them public. They only show what they need to show and for their own preservation they fully intend to keep it this way. In fact, it’s arguably a bigger reason for there being no Salary Cap than the Players Union, because step one of getting a cap in place is open and honest book keeping.

Book keeping that is transparent to the players would make things fair for both sides much like the other major sports leagues who can off the top of their heads tell you exactly how much percentage of revenue players get, often more than 50%. That very much so is not the current case in MLB.

Numerous sites have tried of course, but Statista, Spotrac, whatever you choose, they simply don’t have access to all the things MLB teams pay for, let alone what is sanctioned under the CBA or acceptable use for Revenue Sharing funds.

Essentially, it’s above your head, my head and everyone who isn’t directly involved in the business that is baseball and even then, you probably only have the information for the organization you work for.

The simplest way to put this is, if you’re just a fan, trying to dig up everything you can, please trust me when I tell you actual teams of smart financial investigators have given up on what you proudly push on social media as though it’s easily solved.

You don’t know. Period.

It’s above your head. And yes, Bob is still cheap.

3. Big Love

There’s one reason we Pirates fans keep on keeping on. We love them.

For some of us, it’s become more about hating ourselves for how much we love them or because we can’t stop watching. For others, it’s remembering the triumphs of the club in your youth, eclipsed by years and years of wishing just once your kids could experience what you did.

Much of the time it feels like the people running the team don’t share in our affection.

This franchise is bigger than this ownership group.

The history is incredible, with roots that stretch all the way to the very origins of the game itself. For many of us, our parents passed on the love and most of them inherited it from their grandparents.

My grandfather used to love telling me about the city when Maz hit his famous World Series winning homerun against the Yankees. This Sunday it’ll be 64 years to the day. My Dad told me about when he was a young man in the Navy and met Roberto Clemente loading up for a mission trip, one of these trips would one day cost him his life but that chance meeting represented the one baseball story my typically disinterested in sports father would share with his baseball crazy son regularly.

My own children watched the last Pirates team who made the playoffs with me and neither of them understood why their father fell to his knees when they lost their last opportunity. They’d just watched me go through a divorce, move back in with my parents and have to take a pass on paying a bill to take them out to Burger King, and according to one of them, losing the Cardinals series was the first time they saw me cry.

That’s nothing to be proud of, it’s just how I was brought up. Maybe being a Pirates fan helped teach me my emotions were my own and not to be flaunted, either way, this team is deep inside of my everything.

If only those in charge could absorb even 10% of that feeling about this franchise, perhaps they’d understand why one more shoulder shrug about not winning isn’t a nothing burger we should all just accept.

4. Landslide

The Pirates Bullpen was a force of nature. An unstoppable force rolling down hill with absolutely nothing capable of stopping it from tumbling until the inertia finally dried up at the bottom of the run.

It always starts with something big. For the Pirates, it was the very foundation of the Bullpen, David Bednar collapsing and under his wake, every fiber of what kept this bullpen together had nothing to latch onto.

Oh, they tried. They tried Aroldis Chapman, and Colin Holderman, even Dennis Santana for a time, but there was no way any of them were prepared to be the foothold. They all tried and they all had spells where they were absolutely the best pitcher in the bullpen, but none of them were the anchor of the unit that tied everything together, the rock that everything else grabbed onto when things were at their worst.

Once this bullpen no longer had the steadiness of one spot they could always turn to, suddenly nothing was steady. It happens that way sometimes and this entire year was an exercise in futility as it came to a solid ramp to closing out games, all stemming from not having anyone who was a lock to put the final stamp on things.

Nothing easier you can do to make a team look like there’s nothing they can do right faster than to roster a bullpen that can’t finish games.

Every team will go through a stretch like this, but for the most part unless they were completely understaffed and outgunned to begin with, they remain blips. I don’t know about you, but when just about everyone thinks a unit should perform in a certain way and then said unit doesn’t, chances are the team was adequately prepared even if the results ultimately weren’t there.

No excuse there, but believing you have what you need and being shown you were wrong isn’t the same as believing you’ll find a way to get enough out of what you know isn’t enough.

5. Go Your Own Way

People love to see themselves as independent thinkers.

Those who don’t allow others to define their beliefs, or allow groupthink to dictate their feelings.

Thing is, that’s a hell of an ask for most of us. We’re influenced by things every day, even when we don’t think we are.

Peer pressure, celebrity endorsements, “experts”, or even your favorite journalist stating their opinion, maybe for some of you, even just someone sharing their opinion like me, are all examples of influence, some you recognize as such, others you just take in regardless, never the wiser they’ve cast any influence in your direction.

When you look at this team and decide how you feel about their chances next year, the rest of this decade, even just this offseason, I’d just like to say the only way to be sure you are forming your own opinion is to not be afraid to hear or see as much information as you possibly can.

If you’re mad about the way this team performed in 2024, you aren’t alone, just make sure you’re mad about things that actually made you angry, not what others told you to be angry about. Just because someone tells you the reason X, Y or Z happened is because “they don’t care”, well, it might be 100% the case, but it also might be the conclusion that someone came to based on information you might see differently were you so fortunate as to have heard or seen.

More than that, as you make your comments all over the place, keep in mind, most of everyone you’re commenting to have listened to the same exact sources you have. At least change the words, at least take some steps to make the thought your own as opposed to just parroting what someone else said.

There’s plenty of reason to hold ill will toward this club, but if you want to really make people laugh, be sure to comment all day the verbatim headline from some hit piece earlier that day.

It’s going to be a long offseason, the team made the decisions they made, even if we think they’re wrong to make them.

Personally, I’m not going to start my evaluation from a standpoint of everything is wrong and it can’t be salvaged. The alternative is “Owner Bad…Me Give Up”.

It may be true, but to me it’s boring as hell.

I wanna talk ball, that’s the plan moving forward, but what would a Fleetwood Mac themed 5 thoughts be without some really deep looks at our own issues?