Pirates owner Bob Nutting spent Friday evening at PNC Park mingling with fans, taking questions and accepting feedback regarding the substantial changes he’s made this offseason. Pretty much all of the interactions were surprisingly pleasant, with some season-ticket holders wondering when/if Nutting will add to the team’s payroll.
That same question was posed to Nutting later during a one-on-one interview with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and Nutting said he believes that’s a perfectly reasonable thing for Pirates fans to ask at this point, especially considering they’re again expected to have one of the lowest payrolls in Major League Baseball this upcoming season.
“It’s a core issue and one we’re spending time working on,” Nutting said. “I think what we want to make sure is when we have an opportunity to really put the foot on the gas, we’re able to do it. I think it’s important that we don’t rush. Some of the worst decisions that lots of teams, not just the Pirates, have made have been trying to rush, trying to accelerate, not taking time to do full due diligence, not taking time to really evaluate where we are.”
This squares with something manager Derek Shelton said on Wednesday night — that the Pirates are trying to figure out what they do and don’t have before doing anything substantial.
Nutting built upon that thought Friday, as he criticized several of the Pirates’ past processes and the results they’ve been unable to pull out of some of their players.
“I’m not sure we know how good every one of our players can be,” Nutting said. “We absolutely have challenges in our development system in terms of processes. We absolutely have challenges at the major league level in terms of information and ways we communicated with players.
“A real frustration point for me last year was that we had too many players who performed at one level here and a higher level with another club. They were coached differently. They got different information. And they performed at a higher level.
“We don’t know how good our players are right now. I think we need to give Derek, [general manager] Ben [Cherington], our analytics team and our coaching staff a chance to see what we can bring out of our players, not only at the major league level but at Triple-A, too.
“We need to make sure they’re performing at a level that maximizes their ability. They deserve that as players. Certainly the organization deserves it.”
Call this the Austin Meadows/Tyler Glasnow problem. Or even trace it back to Gerrit Cole, who was good but not freakishly great while wearing a Pirates uniform.
Nutting and the Pirates are hoping that new pitching coach Oscar Marin will modernize how they prepare pitchers. It’ll be on Shelton to create a different culture and have the Pirates improve upon their fundamentals, which has been another glaring weakness. Hitting-wise, they need to find some additional power, and they need to be better developing talent at the major-league level.
And until that point, until the Pirates know what is fixable and what is not, Nutting appears to be OK slow-playing this. Fans of the Pirates want him to act now, to sign legitimate major league talent, and there’s certainly a logical argument for doing that.
It also makes sense, given how hard and far the Pirates tumbled during the second half of 2019, that Nutting would want to wait and see if anything is salvageable, even if it’s simply to flip a veteran player for a couple prospects.
It would also make sense if Nutting takes what he stands to save this year and repurposes it in 2021, once the Pirates have a better handle on what they’re doing under this new regime.
“We do not have enough talent to be as good as we need to be,” Nutting said. “We have a lot of good players. We have a lot of players who are going to be better this year than last year given the changes in the coaching staff and their own maturation.
“I think we have a solid core, but we need to build around it. We need to supplement. That’s going to come from international signings, the draft, trades, and we need to do it throughout the organization. That will take some time.”
What Nutting also doesn’t want to do is for the Pirates to get too far ahead of themselves. Although he didn’t describe it by name, it appeared he was referencing the Chris Archer trade from 2018, when they gave up Meadows, Glasnow and Shane Baz despite a record of 56-52 that had them sitting three games out of the NL’s second wild-card spot with just a 17-percent chance, per Fangraphs, of reaching the postseason.
Taking a chance like that again, especially right now, is not something the Pirates can afford to do, Nutting essentially said, while admitting that he’d rather take a little too long than jump the gun on doing anything move-wise.
“I don’t want to second-guess or pick specific trades, but some of the worst moves that we have made came out of an artificial sense of urgency,” Nutting said. “We were willing to trade really high potential future [players] for a little bit more now. Those [trades] have generally not worked well for us.”
Jason Mackey: jmackey@post-gazette.com and Twitter @JMackeyPG.
First Published: January 25, 2020, 3:00 p.m.
