Pirates Dead End Conversations

1-24-2025 – By Gary Morgan – @garymo2007 on X

It’s been hard to write a lot lately.

It always is when the masses have been lead to a virtual cul-de-sac of discussion. Meaning you can start to discuss anything you like, but at some point, you’re going to reach the dead end that causes you to turn around and head right back out.

Good luck talking about anything, unless it’s your own personal spin on how terrible they are. If you’ve found a new way to call Bob names or insult Ben Cherington’s intelligence, you got a shot at a nice piece. People will love it.

None who actually read it mind you, just make sure the headline is the damn point, cause that’s all you’ll get.

That’s not who I write for. I write for readers. You. So…

Today, let’s talk about all the dead ends in conversation about this team and see if we can’t find a way to talk about them anyway, regardless of who thinks it’s dumb to do so.

The team can’t win with this owner

Easily the most common here in Pittsburgh. This one makes you feel like you were dumb to even pull into the neighborhood. I mean, what could you possibly talk about after this becomes the top of your pyramid? Sure, it could be right, but if you KNOW it is, and won’t hear anything but, what are you doing here? The truth is, Bob doesn’t know very much about baseball. Oh, he knows it like a normal fan who goes to a bunch of games, but he doesn’t get into or insert himself in the nitty gritty of scouting or development.

He’s largely at the mercy of who he hires, and frankly, he hasn’t done that all that well either. He also has to know he doesn’t make it an easy job. Knowing that, he has more patience than he probably should. It worked with Huntington, may or may not work with Cherington, but the alternative looks like the Cleveland Browns, constantly churning through coaches, GMs, and the like, never letting things play out, a constant state of reset.

It’s frustrating to watch, but it’s also worked for him once and I’m quite sure he thinks it will again. As I’ve said before, the arrow is still pointed upward, it just isn’t a hockey stick progression.

I’m also of the belief, the only owners spending their own money, won’t do it forever. In San Diego, the daughter of their dearly departed owner is being sued by her family to lower payroll because as a business, it’s not working as well as they, also being shareholders, want it to. Steve Cohen in New York is tapping into his own wallet, but that too won’t go on forever, especially if it doesn’t bear fruit. A new owner in this market would likely provide very little different in spending. It could still be a smarter business man who lifts their ability. It could be a person who hires better, holds people to account with greater efficiency. But most of our complaints would remain the same.

Yeah, the owner is a problem, but the league is by far a bigger issue. You might find a cream that helps this rash, but it’ll always come back unless they cure the disease.

This team can’t develop

Yup. And there is no fixing it forever and ever. Changes to the staff, who cares. Evidence of others who developed just fine, well those guys must have gotten help elsewhere. This one is usually used for showing one’s stupidity for being excited about a prospect or young player, or to emphasize why trading any or all of them for established MLB players is the only way around it. God I hope some of you can read sarcasm.

In Marketing, there is a long standing difficulty in gauging the effectiveness of advertising campaigns. It’s often hard to tie leads back to an ad campaign, so when it comes time to justify the expense, the best you can do is kinda point to some metrics for how many eyes the publication claims landed on your ad via circulation. Maybe you have some click through data as well, but no matter what, it’s vague and your “proof” of return on investment is at least half based on faith that it lead to some of your leads.

Development isn’t much different. Take Nick Gonzales for instance, here’s a guy who got hurt a couple times in the minors, missed all of 2020 due to COVID, and showed his greatest improvement in the offseason following 2023. So who gets credit? Nick? He worked his ass off, so of course he gets some credit. Andy Haines? Well, he’s the one who gave Nick the plan heading into the offseason for what to work on. His independent trainers? Maybe, but they checked in with Haines and the team all along the journey and again, were working on Haines’ priorities.

Bottom line, ALL of that is part of the development system. All of those entities probably deserve a little of the credit.

Do they get any credit for Paul Skenes? Probably not. He’s a phenom and he didn’t need much help. The team had to hold him back a bit physically. And worked with him to develop what that roadmap looked like, but most fans aren’t giving the Pirates any credit for him. Maybe they shouldn’t. But maybe they shouldn’t for a guy who toils for 5 years and then something clicks and they make a push like Hunter Stratton.

Development and the ability to do so is an amoeba. You have to have it, and maybe the best way to look at it is like the Doctor’s creed, first, do no harm.

No team can claim 100% success, that’s just not realistic. But no team simply “can’t” either.

This GM has no urgency

The team is always and perpetually showing you they have no urgency about anything, ever. They aren’t one of the 4 MLB teams to have not spent a dollar on free agency this offseason, but they might as well be. The supposition here is that he either has no pressure applied to him, or, he’s just aloof, willing to accept table scraps.

The Devil’s advocate position is simply put, he thinks he’s right. To be clear, that doesn’t have to be me agreeing, but to pretend he is actively not trying to win is to ignore reality. He’s just not trying to do it the way you, me or many other people think he should. To me you have some obvious holes to fill and you become much less of a question entering the season. To them, they have 2-3 guys they think 1 will emerge from all over the place.

Essentially, the plan and I should say, the Stated Plan, all along has been to grow this thing internally for the most part. So when you have your team that you’ve built right around that .500 mark and you feel you have even more of that developed youth coming along or on the cusp of grabbing a foot hold, it’s very hard to shift gears and push off those players for a veteran.

This is a Pittsburgh/Small Market issue, and while some other small markets don’t like to live that way, this one certainly does.

If say Suwinski and Horwitz emerge in 2024, they probably look really smart. If they wind up giving Joshua Palacios 500 at bats and he disappoints, well, they’ll look pretty dumb. It’s a risk, and when you get a player like Paul Skenes in the fold and likely know you only have a short time with him (yes because you can’t win with Bob) you absolutely should allow it to change your thinking.

It’s not looking like that’s where his head is.

I still would argue it’s not a lack of urgency, it’s really more a lack of sharing your vision of what urgency is. To them, Paul and Jones being here right now is urgency in and of itself.

This coaching simply can’t get the job done

As many of you know, I don’t disagree. To me, if you’re going to largely stick with everything depending on internal development and growth, and you clearly aren’t seeing it come along as quickly as you’d like and refuse to bolt on veterans to give them more time, it stands to reason you should change those administering the coaching.

They don’t agree. Yet.

I take this a couple ways. First, I think it’s an admission of sorts that they haven’t given Derek Shelton good enough players to win. If you really want to be hard nosed on this, you can certainly say before 2024 he absolutely should not have been expected to work miracles. So it stands to reason, the GM responsible for the talent he had to work with is obviously going to be understanding.

That said, you’d like to think he does more with less somewhere along the line right? If you want an argument for Shelton, and something tells me most of you don’t, it’s probably that he managed a 2023 team that lost Oneil Cruz, had one established starting pitcher to a 76 win season. Conversely, he had a lot more to work with in 2024 and produced the same record.

So I look at Shelton as 1-1. He overachieved in 2023, and under achieved in 2024. I can make an argument for giving him another season, but if I have to work that hard to do it, I probably wouldn’t.

That said, it’s at least an open question, regardless of my beliefs, or yours for that matter.

The Fans Deserve Better

Man, you hear this all across sports. Even the Steelers base has been crowing about this one and while they haven’t won in the playoffs, they still get there regularly.

Everything is about scale.

Do fans deserve better? I don’t know. I mean, I’m a fan, I feel like I deserve a payoff for being a fan for 40 some years, so I’d like to think so. That said, most of the more vocal fans openly suggest you shouldn’t spend a red cent on this team, so I’m not sure what they’ve done to deserve anything. Know what I mean?

I guess I feel every team in the league feels their fans deserve better. Even the Dodgers only have two World Series in recent history to show for being stacked for like forever.

What fans really deserve is a league that doesn’t allow a handful of teams to outspend 75% of the league and still out earn them by 2 or 3 times over. Fans deserve better. True.

They deserve a league where you don’t care who your owner is because it won’t effect much of anything as it comes to the budget. A league where running your team the wisest is more important than how big your cable package is.

That’s what fans deserve.

If you want to argue over whether Bob Nutting deserves to benefit from that change should it happen, I’ll have that discussion too, because he certainly doesn’t. Not that I’ll give two craps if it happens, I’ll just be eating up the possibilities of my ballclub that I haven’t witnessed since 1992. A team on an even playing surface.

If they fire Cherington we’ll be back in a rebuild

Nah.

Not really. If anything it’ll reset the clock a bit, and of course whomever they’d hire would want to put their stamp on things likely by making a decent sized move, but this farm system and MLB club are not in a place where even a GM change would send them into another tear down phase.

This is also your single best reason to be at least a little optimistic about this club. Even if you’re frustrated with Ben and don’t think he’s done a good enough job, he’s clearly done enough to have this club in augment territory as opposed to move out and replenish. They aren’t even into real money on arbitration yet for many of their core players.

In no way should this be seen the way 2019 was. Back then, we knew there was very little coming, we simply can’t say that today. Maybe not enough, but certainly more than enough to feel like tearing down would be foolish.