Trust is on Life Support and Young Players are the Only Treatment

3-4-25 – By Gary Morgan – @garymo2007 on X

Trust is earned, and this franchise hasn’t earned any.

It doesn’t get any more simple than that.

Even when the team has a good outcome, it tends to be seen as luck. If a player improves in the offseason, they get credit, fans and media dig in to show all the stuff he did completely on his own to get to this point. The player always gives credit to the team for either supporting or suggesting whatever he worked on and the story that comes out either downplays that aspect or omits it all together.

I’m here to tell you the trust isn’t going to come from any source but kids growing up. They can fire Ben Cherington tomorrow and replace him with the reanimated corpse of Branch Rickey and it won’t be manifested. Replace the owner and as soon as the excitement of “what if” subsides you’ll be left with the same lack of trust blanketed in an extra 20 mil or so every year.

The only thing that truly fixes trust in a franchise’s fan base is consistency, and sustained success.

No matter how you slice it, an outcome like that when you’re rooting for a consistent loser is almost always 5 years away.

Think about it, how much trust did you have for this club in 2016? If you’re honest, the answer is more than you had in 2012, but not enough to trust the moves the team made would help them.

And you were right.

Fans love to toss the trust word out like it’s an insult, but it’s almost always used incorrectly. For instance, say you think Henry Davis looks different this Spring and you like his chances to show up and perform this year. You post it on your favorite, or least hated, social media site and right away you get called an idiot for “trusting” Henry or the Pirates.

Well, you never said you trusted him or the team, you just said you see this kid taking a step. Right?

Trust is elusive, and frankly, there aren’t a whole lot of franchises who have it. The Yankees have a nice roster, it’s not perfect, but it’s pretty damn good. Their fans don’t trust that they are trying because they failed to retain Juan Soto, they are planning to start youngsters in their open outfield spot, third base and in the bullpen.

They also just lost in the World Series to THE team spending more than anyone in baseball last year.

They trust them to be the Yankees, and have a competitive team, but they don’t “trust” them to do everything they need to do to win it all.

The Penguins won an early Cup with Sydney Crosby then struggled to get back. Fans called for blowing it up. Trading Malkin and Letang, doing drastic things to fix this entirely broken team. Trust in management was completely eroded in only 5 short years.

Mid-season they fired coach Mike Johnston and replaced him with Mike Sullivan and they won 2 cups.

Everything they touched for a minute there was brilliant, and the franchise was trusted to do anything crazy you could think of including trading away every first round pick for almost a decade.

Here we are 10 years later, and guess what fans think.

In general, trust is a rare commodity in baseball. The Pirates have Bryan Reynolds, and Paul Skenes. I’d have to believe 99% of everyone trusts these two players to perform, at least to the level they have recently.

It takes time to develop that kind of trust and if you manage to do it in baseball, you’re either extremely consistent over a period of time or so spectacular you have simply not shown fans the possibility of the opposite is going to happen.

So when I look at the starting rotation and say I feel good about it, it means absolutely nothing to me that you don’t “trust” it. I mean, neither do they or they wouldn’t be so hell bent on making sure they have 10-12 options.

Baseball is about probability, and room for improvement.

My point is, stop whining that you don’t trust them to do this or that. You never will until or if they win. You won’t trust new management, you won’t trust a new owner, you won’t trust someone who signed here because you can’t see them doing so while having a choice to go elsewhere, you won’t trust a draft pick, even as you watch them continue to get here, impact the team and perform.

Until, or if, they win.

Period.

Look at the individual players and evaluate them. Take the emotion of trust and push it aside, because the next time you trust them would be during a parade that you don’t trust will ever come.

Let’s talk baseball. That can be pure. Quit waiting on a feeling that barely comes for teams that have earned it, especially quit using it to make others feel dumb for the slightest positive thought.

I trust that frustration breeds lazy discourse. I don’t need any more wins to know that one is real.

If you have to trust you are watching a World Series winner, you’ll never catch that dragon in this market. It’s impossible to discuss almost any aspect of this team intelligently because as soon as you make a point that requires anything developing, emerging, shaping up, it’s instantly squashed by not trusting it’ll work out.

I get it, but my god, can’t it just be nice to talk about a guy who suddenly throws 97 but barely touched 94 last year?

The only way out of this is for kids to start coming up here, entrenching themselves as MLB players and earning it together as a team.

It ain’t coming from words from management. They aren’t signing someone that changes everything. They aren’t trading for someone who fills the fanbase with trust either. Trust is earned, and trust takes time.

Time a team like this rarely has to offer. Players here have until they start costing money to impress on the team they’re worth it.

You know, cause management doesn’t trust them either.