ST. LOUIS -- Oh it'll be bad, all right.
Albert Pujols will take JT Brubaker deep. Yadier Molina will throw out three baserunners. Adam Wainwright will stride off the mound with seven scoreless innings, with barely a bead of sweat to show for it. And this old town's self-declared best fans in baseball will stand and roar, loud and lovingly, throughout.
Worse than bad. It'll be a bleeping nightmare.
Because it won't stop with the Pirates' 136th season opener today, 4:15 p.m., at Busch Stadium. The Cardinals will take three of four out here. And the Cubs will spoil the home opener Tuesday before seas of empty blue seats at PNC Park. The Nationals will be in town next for more damage. Then the Brewers, some folks' National League favorite, up in Milwaukee. Then Wrigley. Then the Crew again. Then the Padres.
Sixty wins. That's what I've got. One fewer than last year. Another epic embarrassment.
And yet another step backward at the only level of the organization that ultimately matters.
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Look, I get it. I know what's being planned, and I respect not only the approach but also the better part of the execution to date. And just in case I'd forgotten, in my two trips to spring training in Bradenton, I had intensive one-on-one conversations with Derek Shelton, with Ben Cherington, and with Bob Nutting, too. They're all very much on the same page. As is the entire operation, it seems.
They're building up the minor-league system, which now universally rates among the top three or four in all of baseball, with both quantity and quality, compounded by an emphasis on high-ceiling type of talent. This should've been happening for a decade and change under Neal Huntington and Kyle Stark -- rather than trading Gerrit Cole for a truckload of Colin Moran -- and it wasn't.
Once more, this is the right way. And to date, the results have been, at the very least, encouraging.
And yet, none of what I just typed in the preceding three paragraphs prevented ownership and management from pushing a hell of a lot harder to enhance the product in Pittsburgh. Meaning to sign something more than Yoshi Tsutsugo, Roberto Perez, Jose Quintana ... and I can't even remember who else. Nothing prevented them from picking up more than a pinky finger to address very real, very visible needs at -- here it comes again -- the only level of the organization that ultimately matters.
Not. One. Thing.
Could they have worried that a veteran might block a prospect who's ready to play?
OK, go ahead and name the right fielder Shelton will write onto his lineup card today. And bonus points to anyone who predicts it'll be Jake Marisnick, the 31-year-old with the career .228 average who was scraped off the sidewalk just yesterday.
No, really, what'll be the justification for entering a big-league season without a big-league right fielder?
Or any anchor to the starting rotation?
Or any meaningful middle relief?
Sure, one or even a couple spots could be placeholders. Right field might well belong to Oneil Cruz once he safely avoids Super-2 arbitration status and arrives from Class AAA Indianapolis, in that order. One of those rotation spots absolutely will go to Roansy Contreras, once he goes through the same.
But who else, pray tell, is about to bang down the figurative door in Indy?
The notion of blocking prospects gets blown up on sight. Other than center field and third base, as Shelton himself acknowledged through Grapefruit ball, that's it as far as positional footholds.
What else might've justified this?
Anything?
Oh.
Right.
Money.
As if that could conceivably be a justification at this stage of Nutting's stewardship of the franchise.
The Pirates' opening day payroll for the 40-man roster, per my accounting, will be $49.2 million. That presumes Bryan Reynolds will win his arbitration case, as he should, and it adds up all the requisite players on the injured lists, plus the $3 million buyout of Gregory Polanco that goes on this year's books and all else.
That's pathetic. That's a literal punchline.
And there's no benefit to it, including, believe it or not, financially.
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My spring conversation with Nutting wasn't on the record, but I'm quite comfortable retelling here one thing I'd shared with him, if only because I've already written it and spoken it countless times over this long offseason: Plant the flag.
My belief remains that, as unpopular as the Pirates in general and their owner specifically have come to be in Pittsburgh, most fans would be on board with Cherington's approach if only there were even the slightest semblance of an endgame in view. If they could envision anything at all that'd ... my goodness, just begin building up some trust.
The fans rooted for Reynolds through a 101-loss catastrophe that sees him ascend to being an All-Star starter ... only to then watch him get nickel-and-dimed via arbitration. I don't care that it was a mistake/mishap, as I reported a week ago from Bradenton, because it never needed to get close to that point. He should've been offered a long-term extension, and it should've been plenty enough to get ink to paper from both parties.
The fans applauded on those sporadic occasions that the 2021 team didn't stink, occasionally even showing a modicum of hope. A Mitch Keller start here. A David Bednar save there. Rodolfo Castro whacking those five home runs fresh up from Altoona. It wasn't much, but it was something ... only to have naive hope doused with zero significant additions toward 2022.
Heck, the fans clamored for Cruz and Contreras, then lauded their late-season arrivals in 2021 ... only to have them shipped back to Indy for clerical purposes -- management's claims to the contrary notwithstanding -- while most every other team joyfully announced in recent days that their top prospects would be promoted.
Not to make this about the fans. They're part of it, of course, but the bigger part, and one that's always got to be independent, is the team itself.
But that suffers, too.
If one presumes that any money being saved right now will be spent later, once Quinn Priester and the pitching cavalry arrives, then it's also fair to wonder why the Pirates wouldn't prioritize making more money in 2022.
For sure, TV revenue rules, but ticket sales, concessions and so forth can still make a massive difference in a big-league team's overall budget, and there sure won't be much of that once the city gets a load of this roster and the early results. No chance. And this is insanely idiotic from the team's perspective. As I've laid out in previous writings, PNC Park, being among the smallest stadiums in the majors, could be a cash cow. A superior product could justify raising prices, rather than remaining the cheapest in all of sports. The limited seating can create "ticket tension," as sports execs call it, especially on weekends. I could go on.
And yeah, before anyone asks, it would amount to way more than what's made from sitting back and collecting revenue-sharing checks. It really would, and I'm not guessing at that.
Also, way, way, way more than setting up a couple of new hot dog stands on the outfield walkway.
There's maybe an even bigger potential boost to baseball ops.
Beyond the obvious feel-good of winning more often and maybe even competing within what's widely expected to be a mediocre NL Central, there's a sense of momentum that can fuel individual performance, not just in Pittsburgh but all the way down the system. Prospects aren't developed in isolation. They read and hear the jokes about the Pirates, and they do so at the same time they've got coaches and instructors preaching about "the Pirates' way" of doing things and taking pride in being part of this organization. Imagine how much more easily the message gets received when that feeling is genuine, not forced.
Heck, for that matter, imagine how much more easily it'd be to keep the better players in Pittsburgh for a longer stretch.
I don't get this. I never have. I hope I never will.
It feels fear-based more than anything, and that, very clearly, falls wholly on Nutting.
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So, uh, here we go.
I'll repeat that it's going to get good, eventually, from the baseball sense. The system's as strong as it's been in my two decades of covering. And that'll be wonderful in 2024 or whenever.
At the same time, we're now entering the third year since Nutting did the right thing and fired everyone, the third year of the Cherington/Shelton era. And we're still waiting on the most minuscule sign of progress in Pittsburgh. Not just regarding the team's record, but also -- and maybe more important -- who gets "better at baseball," to borrow the playful slogan Cherington and Shelton applied to this past winter's Florida workouts.
Reynolds recovered brilliantly from a down 2020, though that season was only two months long and Reynolds has been hitting since he rolled out of the womb.
Ke'Bryan Hayes, hampered by a wrist injury, took a step backward.
Any other hitters to cite here?
How about a pitcher?
Fun trivia: Name the one pitcher Oscar Marin's made better in his two-year tenure.
Not-so-fun answer: Nobody.
And now, add to that no worthwhile additions to the 2022 roster, and continual avoidance from everyone involved about setting any sort of goals for this team, or even a timetable toward the future and ... well, this is the part where Pujols licks his lips and digs his cleats into the box.
