MIKE BURKE
Allegany Communications Sports
Depressing news out of Pittsburgh on Tuesday, though clearly not surprising since it involves Pirates owner Bob Nutting.
According to John Perrotto of Pittsburgh Baseball Now, members of the Pirates front office remain “furious” over comments Nutting made in late June when he made it sound as though the Pirates were willing to expand payroll so general manager Ben Cherington would have a freer hand in adding players prior to the July 30 trade deadline to help the team pursue a wild-card berth for the coming postseason.
“I’m not at all sure that we won’t have opportunities well in advance of the deadline,” said Nutting, who has proven himself to be notoriously cheap when it comes to operating the Pirates. “I think we should be prepared to move early. I think we should be prepared to take advantage of opportunities when they arise. I know Ben has that flexibility to look across a broader range of alternatives, options but also a timeline of when it makes sense to strike.”
Which translates to, in the immortal words of Han Solo, “It’s not my fault,” if we make no moves to improve.
Yet according to one member of the front office, Nutting’s comments were “misleading, at best.”
“Bob implied we’re going to have money to spend, and he got the fans excited,” the front-office member told Pittsburgh Baseball Now. “But he told us we don’t have any money to make any significant additions.”
The Pirates’ $86.9 million payroll to start the season was the second-lowest in the major leagues behind the Oakland Athletics ($64.4 million), but the Athletics are a team that is leaving Oakland at the end of the season and plan to spend three years playing in a Triple-A ballpark in Sacramento before moving into a new ballpark in Las Vegas in 2028; so, essentially, the Pirates, a team that is in the hunt for the postseason, have the lowest payroll of any functioning big-league team.
According to Perrotto, the Pirates will likely have to dump a salary to add an impact hitter, as multiple executives from MLB teams told Pittsburgh Baseball Now that left-handed reliever Aroldis Chapman, who has a $10.5 million salary, is being made available in trade talks.
Surprisingly, the Pirates have extended the contracts of three of their key players the past two seasons – left fielder Bryan Reynolds (eight years, $106 million), third baseman Ke’Bryan Hayes (eight years, $70 million) and starting pitcher Mitch Keller (five years, $77 million).
Just as Nutting’s comments in June offered hope for long-suffering Pirates fans, so have the extensions of three of the team’s best players. While on the surface it seems to lend security, not only for the players, but for the fans as well, understand those extensions also make those three players more appealing on the trade market because they are under team control (at reasonable rates, I might add, if Nutting signed off on them) for multiple years.
So, yeah, it’s good, and it adds a comfort level, to extend three of your best players, but it also makes all three more likely to be moved given the way Nutting does business; and that’s the bloody shame of all of this.
With the emergence of rookie starting pitcher Paul Skenes as The One in all of Major League Baseball, and with the sky’s-the-limit possibilities of a talented young rotation led by Skenes, Jared Jones and Keller, great things could happen in Pittsburgh for the foreseeable future if Cherington is permitted to add a potent bat to enhance the team’s sleepy offense.
Perrotto points out that when Cherington was hired he was told the Pirates would no longer be among the bottom five teams in player payroll. Yet five years into Cherington’s tenure, nothing has changed.
Perrotto also says that two industry sources have said Nutting has not provided Cherington with the expected dollars for payroll.
With attendance at PNC Park steadily on the rise the past three seasons, and likely to rise even more as Skenes continues to become such an electrifying presence, if Cherington is not permitted to improve the team, as he was permitted to do in 2013 when he was the Boston Red Sox general manager, it will prove to be an even larger and more damning indictment on the unabashed greed of Bob Nutting.
The Pirates’ offense is weak at second base and in the outfield, yet like any struggling offense, the Pirates offense is not that far away from being a productive one with the right mix of pop and consistency. A very real opportunity exists for this team to compete regularly and improve in a very realistic time frame.
What a shame it would be if Nutting is insistent upon sitting on his hands and being content to watch Skenes’ prime years and emergence in Pittsburgh waste away, particularly with a rotation that can one day be as good as any in the National League.
Lightning doesn’t strike twice, meaning another Paul Skenes isn’t walking through that door. Shame on Nutting if he doesn’t allow Cherington to do his job to try to harness this lightning by paying for some better lumber.
Mike Burke writes about sports and other stuff for Allegany Communications. He began covering sports for the Prince George’s Sentinel in 1981 and joined the Cumberland Times-News sports staff in 1984, serving as sports editor for over 30 years. Contact him at [email protected]. Follow him on X at @MikeBurkeMDT