A fresh baseball season begins in earnest this week, outfitted with the traditional Pittsburgh accoutrements — a dark winter’s harvest of swelling anticipation and a six-month inventory of looming disappointment.
The Pirates Predicament, best encapsulated by their active streak of six consecutive losing seasons and only four winning years in the past 32, remains a conspicuous neighborhood sinkhole on the depraved landscape of sports economics.
While the Steelers, operating in the same market to largely the same audience on the same tract of North Shore real estate, are reportedly waving $90 million at a free agent quarterback labeled BEST BY DECEMBER 2021, Pirates owner Bob Nutting is set to pay something like $86 million for his entire 2025 roster.
Hope is a fantasy
Apples to oranges, I know, and that’s the elemental version of comparing the NFL’s arranged socialism to Major League Baseball’s abridged capitalism, or football’s salary cap to baseball’s no-limits poker, in which the Pirates always ante near the minimum.
The point is, just about any iteration of Pittsburgh’s football franchise for the past 50 years went to Latrobe thinking the Super Bowl was at least possible, while for the baseball team, the World Series is as dormant as something from the archives of the Carter Administration.
Jimmy Carter, God bless him, is dead, you’ll note, after the longest post-presidency in American history. The two presidents after him, also dead. Five more presidencies have joined theirs in history.
“America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers,” goes the James Earl Jones speech in “Field of Dreams.” “It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game — it’s a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good, and it could be again.”
There’s an implicit promise in there, lifted from the narrative of a W.P. Kinsella novel, but your Pirates experience makes hope seem more a fantasy of film and literature than any tangible aspect of these first weeks of spring. In a broader sense, baseball somehow remains perfectly capable of embarrassing itself without any reliable assist from Nutting’s corner.
Only last Friday, Commissioner Rob Manfred found himself explaining why references to diversity had been scrubbed from the CAREERS section of its web site, a cowardly capitulation to one of Donald Trump’s executive orders.
“Our values on diversity remain unchanged,” said Manfred, the same the guy who launched MLB’s Diversity Pipeline Program in 2016, “but another value that is pretty important to us is we always try to comply with what the law is.”
He saw “an evolution going on here. We’re following that very carefully. Obviously, when things get a little more settled, we’ll examine each of our programs and make sure that while the values remain the same that we’re also consistent with what the law requires.”
Where the money goes
A “little more settled” is it?
Pittsburgh pretty much settled this, as some recall, Sept. 1, 1971, when Danny Murtaugh handed the home plate umpire a lineup card that read: Stennett 2B, Clines CF, Clemente RF, Stargell LF, Sanguillen C, Cash 3B, Oliver 1B, Hernandez SS, Ellis P. Five African Americans, two Panamanians, a Puerto Rican, and a Cuban.
Only the manager was white. Six-and-a-half weeks later, the Pirates won the World Series, not for diversity, equity, and inclusion, but certainly not without the concepts.
The 21st century Pirates have scoured the globe for talent, signing players from Lithuania, India, Africa, Korea, Japan, and any other place that might produce a player who will help them improve. They’re to be commended for it.
But that isn’t to say they don’t discriminate, because as we’ve come to understand, they simply will not sign a player who is in a position to command the kind of money that would unduly burden their uncompetitive financial model, regardless of race, religion, sexual preference, or country of origin. They just won’t.
In a Post-Gazette investigation by Mark Belko published earlier this month, an amazing similarity emerged between what the Pirates pay out in salary and what they take in from ticket sales and concessions.
It wasn’t determined that one dictates the other, but the story made pretty clear that all other income — from local and national TV deals, the MLB arrangements with gambling sites, the luxury tax money shared by teams that actually do sign top shelf talent — is not used for acquiring superior personnel.
The Pirates insisted it wasn’t accurate, and said all of that money “is being reinvested in the ballclub in some form or fashion.”
Even if you swallow that, it’s pretty evident that in no form or fashion are the Pirates spending money in ways that change all the losing.
Deflating highlight
It’s pretty deflating when the highlight of the offseason around here is the ballclub’s announcement that it will again partner with PNC Bank in their Going to Bat for Small Business Program, in which they “use their unique platform to help these businesses boost brand awareness.”
Dandy. I happen to know a popular small business maybe the Pirates could do something to support: The Pirates.
In the meantime, enjoy PNC Park and try to remember, bad baseball beats the hell out of no baseball. Maybe this year they won’t set the franchise record for striking out again.
Gene Collier’s previous column was “Our long day's Republican journey into night.”
First Published: March 25, 2025, 9:00 p.m.
Updated: March 26, 2025, 1:41 p.m.
