Special report: The Pirates' finances will leave you at a loss
Sit down for this, please: The Pirates are … losing money.
They’ve taken on debt the past couple years, including 2024.
The debt isn’t outrageous, but it’s never been higher in Bob Nutting’s 18-year tenure as controlling owner.
They’ve taken not one, not two, but three loans in the past handful of years.
I know, right?
Five months ago, after it’d become clear that Nutting wouldn't make a management change on or off the field following a fifth consecutive year of failure, I assembled an independent and paid group for DK Pittsburgh Sports to investigate, to the best of our access and ability, the Pirates’ finances. Which we’ve done, based on my 21 years on the beat, plus interviews with and information from:
• Downtown bankers
• City/county government
• People around Major League Baseball
• Former team employees
• A set of the team's complete internal books within that span
• And in the end, current team officials
Our group also built a detailed database of revenues/expenses common to all 30 teams, all set specifically to the Pirates where applicable and available. This was the part that took the most time, the most energy, the most cross-referencing, and the most adjusting along the way. But it was our foundation.
And as we passed through February and into March, as no figurative smoking gun was emerging, as our numbers strongly suggested nothing amiss in terms of profiteering, as everyone currently and formerly with the team swore Nutting still doesn’t take a salary or pay himself a dividend — something I’ve verified many times over the years — one utterly unthinkable thought began to poke through: What about all that stuff I’ve heard for a while that they’re actually not doing that great?
Look, I’m not going to lie: I expected to find what anyone would’ve expected, based on years of public — and my own — skepticism about perennially low payrolls. I’ve called, vocally and visibly, for Nutting to sell the team as recently as this past October. I’ve praised the recent Downtown fan protests and fan-funded billboards that plead for him to do so.
So sure, I was guilty, I guess, of burying whispers I’d picked up about debt and loans and the like. Just didn’t all-the-way register.
Which is when the real, revised digging began about a week ago.
THE APPROACH
Still with me?
Good, because I’m sure a bunch won’t be. Nobody, myself included, likes being wrong, especially not on an issue that’s evoked so much emotion for so long.
But I’ll share what I shared with our group at the outset: I had no interest in pursuing some predetermined outcome. I wanted this to go whichever way it went, even if it’d render the entire exercise moot with some boring, predictable result. And to the credit of everyone involved, they stuck to that. I’m proud of their work, proud of our final product.
And man, was it ever work. MLB’s economics are extremely complicated, more so than that of any North American professional sport, mostly because it’s the last one still standing without a salary cap system. Each team, to an extent, operates in its own existence, even as they’re also connected in ways. So it’s not as simple as counting tickets and buckets of popcorn. PNC Park isn’t a movie theater. And it’s not anywhere near as simple as generating some plug-and-play template that follows the same static equation for every team, as Forbes annually does to crank out its — let’s label them what they are — estimates. There has to be real interviewing, real information, through which to filter any and all data available.
Example: If the Pirates carve up their outfield concourse around Manny Sanguillen's barbecue for a whole new boardwalk-style plaza, that’s an expense well above inserting a figure to account for inflation. It's an independent, above-the-norm cost. It's not something a spreadsheet will magically make appear.
Our approach was to push in every direction for every answer we could get. And then, once as prepared as we could be, we’d take it all to the team, of course, because that’s Journalism 101. Not going to write about the Pirates without giving them fair opportunity to react and respond.
I just never envisioned the questions that’d be asked.
THE REVENUES
The Pirates collect money from multiple streams, some local, some from MLB operations that are shared by the teams, and some that mix both. Tickets and concessions, what some see as the dominant streams, don’t even account for a third of what the team makes.
The amount taken for tickets and concessions at PNC Park in 2024 was $84.8 million. That’s about $15 million lower than the Pirates’ peak at the stadium that was achieved in 2015, it’s bottom-five in MLB, and it’s only about a billion miles below the Phillies’ annual $350 million take at Citizens Bank Park.
Add $25 million from local TV money through the new SportsNet Pittsburgh partnership with the Penguins, this after the old AT&T SportsNet Pittsburgh folded in October of 2023 and both teams became broadcast nomads. The previous payment was about double that, so that took a massive bite.
Add another $16.8 million for PNC’s naming rights and other ballpark signage like the recent Edgar Snyder & Associates purchase of entrance rights by the Honus Wagner statue.
Add another $19.8 million for suite licenses, radio rights, concerts, Bradenton revenues and other smaller fare. (Worth mentioning that the Pirates control a portion of only one parking garage on the North Shore and barely clear $200,000 on it, strikingly low for any sports team at any level. The Brewers, in contrast, clear $20 million on parking from the asphalt seas they control surrounding American Family Field.)
Total local operating revenue: $146.6 million.
OK, this is where it gets a bit weird.
All 30 teams are required to pay 48% of that local operating revenue into a general pool that gets divvied up evenly later. That way, the super-rich teams like the Dodgers, Yankees and Mets give up a ton, and the poorer teams like the Pirates, Marlins and Rays get back way more than they submitted. It’s part of baseball’s attempt at leveling the financial playing field.
So the Pirates, per this formula, put $70.4 million into this pool, and what gets distributed back to them is $121.9 million. The difference between those two amounts is a plus of $51.6 million, a figure that’s now essentially part of their national revenue.
The next two streams are much simpler, as they’re the same for all teams: National TV brings $61.1 million, and sponsorships, merchandise and other elements add up to $24.8 million.
Sprinkle on top $8.3 million from a portion of the luxury tax that’s distributed only to lower-revenue teams.
Total operating revenues: $292.4 million.
And yeah, I'd be thinking the same thing upon seeing that: It’s more than triple the Pirates’ projected active payroll of $89,074,619, per payroll expert Ethan Hullihen, heading into the season opener a week from today in Miami.
Where’s the rest, then?
THE EXPENSES
The most common mistake when attempting to analyze baseball economics is thinking that player payroll’s everything. Or even almost everything. It isn’t.
Rewinding to that one set of the team’s complete internal books that we have, player payroll accounted for exactly 38.3 percent of overall spending. The same applied to several other teams we were able to find. That’s the literal cost of doing business, and it’s pretty much the same for everyone.
What’s more, that non-player spending’s grown exponentially, not only through standard inflation.
Example: In the labor agreement signed in 2022, the union succeeded in getting all teams to pay into the day-to-day operation of their minor-league affiliates regarding lodging, meals and the like. That’s added upward of $10 million per year that hadn’t previously existed.
Another example: Spending on the MLB Draft and Latin American free-agent signings — always separate in baseball -- has erupted on both fronts, and this on top of the increasing prevalence of players from Asia and other parts of the world. Just a decade ago, the cumulative cost of an amateur class would be $15 million, compared now to $26.5 million. And no individual team, I don’t have to tell anyone reading this, has spent more on the draft in that span than the Pirates, since they’ve been, you know, terrible almost every year.
For emphasis: None of that amateur money counts toward player payroll, as it does in the NFL, for instance. It's all in the non-player category.
As for the actual player costs that count as player costs, those are accounted for within the official Competitive Balance Tax payroll figure submitted at year’s end both to MLB and the MLBPA. That includes salaries of all players who appear on the 40-man roster, plus benefits, plus a new pre-arbitration pool that was started in 2022.
The Pirates’ CBT payroll for 2024, to the penny: $122,942,572.
All other costs, including administration, staff, travel, development, draft, international, stadium ops, analytics and way more: $171.7 million
Total operating expenses: $294.6 million
Difference between operating revenues and expenses: Minus-$2.2 million
So … yeah, there it is.
WHAT HAPPENED?
Now, bear in mind, at least for those with a degree in economics, that the minus-$2.2 million comes before debt, loans, taxes, amortization/depreciation, capital expenses and other costs. So the real-life loss would be worse.
Which leaves lots to unpack ...
How does MLB go from being a $9 billion business in 2016 to a $12.1 billion business in 2024 while any of its teams struggle for any reason?
How are the Reds about to spend a projected $110.5 million toward 2025 and the Brewers are about to spend a projected $105.8 million — both in the Pirates’ division, both in smaller markets than Pittsburgh — while the Pirates are still stuck at $89.1 million, barely a tick above the $87.3 million where they finished 2024?
And to raise another question, this one having vexed me throughout this process, how did their own internal expenses rise the way they did just over the past handful of years?
One angle’s easy: The recent extensions for Bryan Reynolds and Mitch Keller took full flight in 2024. Reynolds’ pay went from $6.75 million the previous season to $14.3 million last season, Keller’s from $2.4 million to $15.4 million. That’s more than $20 million right there.
Another angle's not so easy, though still tangible: When Ben Cherington was hired as GM in late 2019, he committed to a sizable expansion of the Pirates' analytics department. So it might mean something that the team's official media for 2024 showed the team employing 138 total people compared to 111 in 2019, Neal Huntington's final year as GM.
Also, I'd be remiss if I didn't share, from personal experience, the absurd amount of these analytics types who are omnipresent in all phases of operations. One morning in Bradenton, Fla., last month, I could count more than 20 of them roaming the fields of Pirate City ... to observe a few pitchers and catchers milling about. And don't get me started on how many of them are routinely in the road clubhouses all the way into the real games. It's like they're revving up for math competitions, not the World Series.
The most prominent angle, though, is the most predictable: COVID. That’s when the initial loans were taken and, from what I understand, that put into play a treadmill effect that’s followed. The Pirates, unlike the Penguins, never took out a PPP loan that they wouldn’t have to pay back. They went through the MLB Trust Securitization credit portal to secure whatever funding was needed, and that’s where they’ve stayed since.
Now, I’ll reiterate: This debt isn’t seen as serious by anyone on the inside or outside. More local TV revenue’s anticipated as SportsNet Pittsburgh grows and, even if takes a while, MLB’s put a plan into motion to compensate teams that’ve lost their TV deals by as much as $15 million a year. National TV, which was flat year-over-year, should expand again. And sponsorships, which are paid out at the national level, just rode a 20% increase from 2023 to 2024, up to an all-time high of $1.9 billion.
There’s no alarm to be sounded.
OH, COME ON!
All right, go ahead and get it out of the system:
Lies! These are all lies!
Stick to sports, people!
Anything can be hidden by accountants!
Really, go nuts. Including on me. Or the Pirates. Or just Nutting. I couldn’t care less. I’ve been all over this subject for as long as I can remember, I’ve busted the team open in the polar opposite way for not spending nearly enough, I’ve blasted them again and again for how they conduct themselves on and off the field … and now this. For everyone who made it this far and kept anything resembling an open mind, that’s appreciated. Because that’s what we tried to do as a group. And what we did.
Which is why, by the time I went to the Pirates with what we had, the team could see that and reluctantly — very reluctantly, I should say — acknowledged that we were accurate in our conclusion that they’re losing a modest amount of money of late.
There can't be anyone at 115 Federal Street that I didn’t talk to about this, at some stage or other. I chose to do that without a camera or microphone with a principal aim, plain and simple, of finding out what’s truth and what’s fiction. And from there, I took every minute morsel back to our group to run it through the grinder anew to see what made sense, what didn’t and how to explain what didn’t.
I’m hoping it’s the last time. I really am.
I’m tired of this. Infinitely more important, the public’s tired of it. And to be blunt here, it should be the Pirates ensuring that, from the very top down. Nutting and everyone else needs to strive to be more transparent, more honest, more … Pittsburgh in how they communicate with Pittsburgh.
They’re horrific at it. And however horrific any of them are, Cherington’s a hundred times worse.
This doesn’t have to be this way.
Nutting’s three most profitable years as owner — not biggest revenue but biggest profit — were 2013-15, the only three years the Pirates made the playoffs, after which they peaked with a still-franchise-record $99.9 million payroll in 2016. Pause and let that sink in, then understand that his greatest failing as owner, as I’ve written for years, is being risk-averse to the extreme. Because all those sagging revenue numbers up there don’t have to be what they are. Not if there’s bigger and smarter investments. Not if there are better hires. Not if there’s more accountability.
A plan needs to be put into place to keep Paul Skenes. I don’t care how. He’s a unicorn. He’ll pay for himself so many times over regardless of what he’s compensated. Scott Boras, the sport’s preeminent agent, once schooled me on how much teams make on a legit superstar, what their real value is. He takes that presentation to owners — directly to owners — at every opportunity. That needs to happen here in some form.
A public relations plan to end all public relations plans needs to be put into place. Between Nutting, Cherington and Travis Williams, there’s no one capable of keeping it real with the people who care the most about the Pirates, which makes for one heck of a roadblock in this regard. But find a way. Get it done. What goes on now is catastrophic.
A mission statement should mandate being as open as possible. We shouldn’t have needed to come weaponized to get the information in this piece. It should’ve been shared. The Pirates can’t be caring what Rob Manfred thinks of what they say, or what Steve Cohen thinks of what they say. They’re playing an unfair game in an unfair system. They need to recognize that and resolve to fight it, not just play nice.
And above all — WAY above all — they need to fight for that salary cap when the current agreement expires in December 2026.
Nutting wants it. Everyone in that building wants it. But they won’t tell anyone that because of the whole playing-nice thing and how that might be perceived in New York.
What about how it’s perceived right here?
Nutting voted in favor of the most recent labor agreement, which also rubbed a lot the wrong way here. I know why. But it’s the fans he should be telling.
He's been embarrassingly nervous when it comes to, well, everything. Nice guy and all, for real. The charity work’s from the heart. I’ve come to know him, and I can attest that others who know him feel likewise. But it’s not just the spending where he’s been lacking. It’s the accountability for those working under him, which I believe has contributed to this incessant culture of losing and, within that, being OK with losing, as almost everyone in the environment seems to be.
Take off the damned gloves. This franchise is about to turn 144 years old. It’s a civic institution in the same sense that our libraries, our symphony, our opera, our everything is … except that the Pirates have actually been around longer than most. Stop turning away from the fight. Stop pretending to be in the same class as these other teams when they’re treating this one like a farm operation, waiting to stick their claws into Skenes at the first opportunity.
Or, as I’ve been pleading for a while now, go right ahead and sell. Take the $1.5 billion or whatever, and turn it over to someone who’ll do what’s described above.
This ain’t it.
Plodding along with low revenues that are low, in large part, because of how the team’s been run … that ain’t it. That’s on ownership. Making money’s on ownership.
Having holes to fill at first base and corner outfield, and addressing with two cheap half-measures in a platooning reach in Spencer Horwitz ($800,000) or whatever’s left of Tommy Pham ($4 million) … that ain’t it. That’s another 76-win season, I’ll bet.
Seeing fans reluctant to get all the way behind Skenes, the most transcendent athlete our city’s seen since the debut of Sidney Crosby, or Oneil Cruz, one of the sport’s most electric performers … that ain’t it. Find a way to make money off them.
Invest. Including emotionally. It really can reap a return.
Or hey, just keep right on losing in every conceivable way. No risk in that.
THE ASYLUM
Special report: The Pirates' finances will leave you at a loss
Sit down for this, please: The Pirates are … losing money.
They’ve taken on debt the past couple years, including 2024.
The debt isn’t outrageous, but it’s never been higher in Bob Nutting’s 18-year tenure as controlling owner.
They’ve taken not one, not two, but three loans in the past handful of years.
I know, right?
Five months ago, after it’d become clear that Nutting wouldn't make a management change on or off the field following a fifth consecutive year of failure, I assembled an independent and paid group for DK Pittsburgh Sports to investigate, to the best of our access and ability, the Pirates’ finances. Which we’ve done, based on my 21 years on the beat, plus interviews with and information from:
• Downtown bankers
• City/county government
• People around Major League Baseball
• Former team employees
• A set of the team's complete internal books within that span
• And in the end, current team officials
Our group also built a detailed database of revenues/expenses common to all 30 teams, all set specifically to the Pirates where applicable and available. This was the part that took the most time, the most energy, the most cross-referencing, and the most adjusting along the way. But it was our foundation.
And as we passed through February and into March, as no figurative smoking gun was emerging, as our numbers strongly suggested nothing amiss in terms of profiteering, as everyone currently and formerly with the team swore Nutting still doesn’t take a salary or pay himself a dividend — something I’ve verified many times over the years — one utterly unthinkable thought began to poke through: What about all that stuff I’ve heard for a while that they’re actually not doing that great?
Look, I’m not going to lie: I expected to find what anyone would’ve expected, based on years of public — and my own — skepticism about perennially low payrolls. I’ve called, vocally and visibly, for Nutting to sell the team as recently as this past October. I’ve praised the recent Downtown fan protests and fan-funded billboards that plead for him to do so.
So sure, I was guilty, I guess, of burying whispers I’d picked up about debt and loans and the like. Just didn’t all-the-way register.
Which is when the real, revised digging began about a week ago.
THE APPROACH
Still with me?
Good, because I’m sure a bunch won’t be. Nobody, myself included, likes being wrong, especially not on an issue that’s evoked so much emotion for so long.
But I’ll share what I shared with our group at the outset: I had no interest in pursuing some predetermined outcome. I wanted this to go whichever way it went, even if it’d render the entire exercise moot with some boring, predictable result. And to the credit of everyone involved, they stuck to that. I’m proud of their work, proud of our final product.
And man, was it ever work. MLB’s economics are extremely complicated, more so than that of any North American professional sport, mostly because it’s the last one still standing without a salary cap system. Each team, to an extent, operates in its own existence, even as they’re also connected in ways. So it’s not as simple as counting tickets and buckets of popcorn. PNC Park isn’t a movie theater. And it’s not anywhere near as simple as generating some plug-and-play template that follows the same static equation for every team, as Forbes annually does to crank out its — let’s label them what they are — estimates. There has to be real interviewing, real information, through which to filter any and all data available.
Example: If the Pirates carve up their outfield concourse around Manny Sanguillen's barbecue for a whole new boardwalk-style plaza, that’s an expense well above inserting a figure to account for inflation. It's an independent, above-the-norm cost. It's not something a spreadsheet will magically make appear.
Our approach was to push in every direction for every answer we could get. And then, once as prepared as we could be, we’d take it all to the team, of course, because that’s Journalism 101. Not going to write about the Pirates without giving them fair opportunity to react and respond.
I just never envisioned the questions that’d be asked.
THE REVENUES
The Pirates collect money from multiple streams, some local, some from MLB operations that are shared by the teams, and some that mix both. Tickets and concessions, what some see as the dominant streams, don’t even account for a third of what the team makes.
The amount taken for tickets and concessions at PNC Park in 2024 was $84.8 million. That’s about $15 million lower than the Pirates’ peak at the stadium that was achieved in 2015, it’s bottom-five in MLB, and it’s only about a billion miles below the Phillies’ annual $350 million take at Citizens Bank Park.
Add $25 million from local TV money through the new SportsNet Pittsburgh partnership with the Penguins, this after the old AT&T SportsNet Pittsburgh folded in October of 2023 and both teams became broadcast nomads. The previous payment was about double that, so that took a massive bite.
Add another $16.8 million for PNC’s naming rights and other ballpark signage like the recent Edgar Snyder & Associates purchase of entrance rights by the Honus Wagner statue.
Add another $19.8 million for suite licenses, radio rights, concerts, Bradenton revenues and other smaller fare. (Worth mentioning that the Pirates control a portion of only one parking garage on the North Shore and barely clear $200,000 on it, strikingly low for any sports team at any level. The Brewers, in contrast, clear $20 million on parking from the asphalt seas they control surrounding American Family Field.)
Total local operating revenue: $146.6 million.
OK, this is where it gets a bit weird.
All 30 teams are required to pay 48% of that local operating revenue into a general pool that gets divvied up evenly later. That way, the super-rich teams like the Dodgers, Yankees and Mets give up a ton, and the poorer teams like the Pirates, Marlins and Rays get back way more than they submitted. It’s part of baseball’s attempt at leveling the financial playing field.
So the Pirates, per this formula, put $70.4 million into this pool, and what gets distributed back to them is $121.9 million. The difference between those two amounts is a plus of $51.6 million, a figure that’s now essentially part of their national revenue.
The next two streams are much simpler, as they’re the same for all teams: National TV brings $61.1 million, and sponsorships, merchandise and other elements add up to $24.8 million.
Sprinkle on top $8.3 million from a portion of the luxury tax that’s distributed only to lower-revenue teams.
Total operating revenues: $292.4 million.
And yeah, I'd be thinking the same thing upon seeing that: It’s more than triple the Pirates’ projected active payroll of $89,074,619, per payroll expert Ethan Hullihen, heading into the season opener a week from today in Miami.
Where’s the rest, then?
THE EXPENSES
The most common mistake when attempting to analyze baseball economics is thinking that player payroll’s everything. Or even almost everything. It isn’t.
Rewinding to that one set of the team’s complete internal books that we have, player payroll accounted for exactly 38.3 percent of overall spending. The same applied to several other teams we were able to find. That’s the literal cost of doing business, and it’s pretty much the same for everyone.
What’s more, that non-player spending’s grown exponentially, not only through standard inflation.
Example: In the labor agreement signed in 2022, the union succeeded in getting all teams to pay into the day-to-day operation of their minor-league affiliates regarding lodging, meals and the like. That’s added upward of $10 million per year that hadn’t previously existed.
Another example: Spending on the MLB Draft and Latin American free-agent signings — always separate in baseball -- has erupted on both fronts, and this on top of the increasing prevalence of players from Asia and other parts of the world. Just a decade ago, the cumulative cost of an amateur class would be $15 million, compared now to $26.5 million. And no individual team, I don’t have to tell anyone reading this, has spent more on the draft in that span than the Pirates, since they’ve been, you know, terrible almost every year.
For emphasis: None of that amateur money counts toward player payroll, as it does in the NFL, for instance. It's all in the non-player category.
As for the actual player costs that count as player costs, those are accounted for within the official Competitive Balance Tax payroll figure submitted at year’s end both to MLB and the MLBPA. That includes salaries of all players who appear on the 40-man roster, plus benefits, plus a new pre-arbitration pool that was started in 2022.
The Pirates’ CBT payroll for 2024, to the penny: $122,942,572.
All other costs, including administration, staff, travel, development, draft, international, stadium ops, analytics and way more: $171.7 million
Total operating expenses: $294.6 million
Difference between operating revenues and expenses: Minus-$2.2 million
So … yeah, there it is.
WHAT HAPPENED?
Now, bear in mind, at least for those with a degree in economics, that the minus-$2.2 million comes before debt, loans, taxes, amortization/depreciation, capital expenses and other costs. So the real-life loss would be worse.
Which leaves lots to unpack ...
How does MLB go from being a $9 billion business in 2016 to a $12.1 billion business in 2024 while any of its teams struggle for any reason?
How are the Reds about to spend a projected $110.5 million toward 2025 and the Brewers are about to spend a projected $105.8 million — both in the Pirates’ division, both in smaller markets than Pittsburgh — while the Pirates are still stuck at $89.1 million, barely a tick above the $87.3 million where they finished 2024?
And to raise another question, this one having vexed me throughout this process, how did their own internal expenses rise the way they did just over the past handful of years?
One angle’s easy: The recent extensions for Bryan Reynolds and Mitch Keller took full flight in 2024. Reynolds’ pay went from $6.75 million the previous season to $14.3 million last season, Keller’s from $2.4 million to $15.4 million. That’s more than $20 million right there.
Another angle's not so easy, though still tangible: When Ben Cherington was hired as GM in late 2019, he committed to a sizable expansion of the Pirates' analytics department. So it might mean something that the team's official media for 2024 showed the team employing 138 total people compared to 111 in 2019, Neal Huntington's final year as GM.
Also, I'd be remiss if I didn't share, from personal experience, the absurd amount of these analytics types who are omnipresent in all phases of operations. One morning in Bradenton, Fla., last month, I could count more than 20 of them roaming the fields of Pirate City ... to observe a few pitchers and catchers milling about. And don't get me started on how many of them are routinely in the road clubhouses all the way into the real games. It's like they're revving up for math competitions, not the World Series.
The most prominent angle, though, is the most predictable: COVID. That’s when the initial loans were taken and, from what I understand, that put into play a treadmill effect that’s followed. The Pirates, unlike the Penguins, never took out a PPP loan that they wouldn’t have to pay back. They went through the MLB Trust Securitization credit portal to secure whatever funding was needed, and that’s where they’ve stayed since.
Now, I’ll reiterate: This debt isn’t seen as serious by anyone on the inside or outside. More local TV revenue’s anticipated as SportsNet Pittsburgh grows and, even if takes a while, MLB’s put a plan into motion to compensate teams that’ve lost their TV deals by as much as $15 million a year. National TV, which was flat year-over-year, should expand again. And sponsorships, which are paid out at the national level, just rode a 20% increase from 2023 to 2024, up to an all-time high of $1.9 billion.
There’s no alarm to be sounded.
OH, COME ON!
All right, go ahead and get it out of the system:
Lies! These are all lies!
Stick to sports, people!
Anything can be hidden by accountants!
Really, go nuts. Including on me. Or the Pirates. Or just Nutting. I couldn’t care less. I’ve been all over this subject for as long as I can remember, I’ve busted the team open in the polar opposite way for not spending nearly enough, I’ve blasted them again and again for how they conduct themselves on and off the field … and now this. For everyone who made it this far and kept anything resembling an open mind, that’s appreciated. Because that’s what we tried to do as a group. And what we did.
Which is why, by the time I went to the Pirates with what we had, the team could see that and reluctantly — very reluctantly, I should say — acknowledged that we were accurate in our conclusion that they’re losing a modest amount of money of late.
There can't be anyone at 115 Federal Street that I didn’t talk to about this, at some stage or other. I chose to do that without a camera or microphone with a principal aim, plain and simple, of finding out what’s truth and what’s fiction. And from there, I took every minute morsel back to our group to run it through the grinder anew to see what made sense, what didn’t and how to explain what didn’t.
I’m hoping it’s the last time. I really am.
I’m tired of this. Infinitely more important, the public’s tired of it. And to be blunt here, it should be the Pirates ensuring that, from the very top down. Nutting and everyone else needs to strive to be more transparent, more honest, more … Pittsburgh in how they communicate with Pittsburgh.
They’re horrific at it. And however horrific any of them are, Cherington’s a hundred times worse.
This doesn’t have to be this way.
Nutting’s three most profitable years as owner — not biggest revenue but biggest profit — were 2013-15, the only three years the Pirates made the playoffs, after which they peaked with a still-franchise-record $99.9 million payroll in 2016. Pause and let that sink in, then understand that his greatest failing as owner, as I’ve written for years, is being risk-averse to the extreme. Because all those sagging revenue numbers up there don’t have to be what they are. Not if there’s bigger and smarter investments. Not if there are better hires. Not if there’s more accountability.
A plan needs to be put into place to keep Paul Skenes. I don’t care how. He’s a unicorn. He’ll pay for himself so many times over regardless of what he’s compensated. Scott Boras, the sport’s preeminent agent, once schooled me on how much teams make on a legit superstar, what their real value is. He takes that presentation to owners — directly to owners — at every opportunity. That needs to happen here in some form.
A public relations plan to end all public relations plans needs to be put into place. Between Nutting, Cherington and Travis Williams, there’s no one capable of keeping it real with the people who care the most about the Pirates, which makes for one heck of a roadblock in this regard. But find a way. Get it done. What goes on now is catastrophic.
A mission statement should mandate being as open as possible. We shouldn’t have needed to come weaponized to get the information in this piece. It should’ve been shared. The Pirates can’t be caring what Rob Manfred thinks of what they say, or what Steve Cohen thinks of what they say. They’re playing an unfair game in an unfair system. They need to recognize that and resolve to fight it, not just play nice.
And above all — WAY above all — they need to fight for that salary cap when the current agreement expires in December 2026.
Nutting wants it. Everyone in that building wants it. But they won’t tell anyone that because of the whole playing-nice thing and how that might be perceived in New York.
What about how it’s perceived right here?
Nutting voted in favor of the most recent labor agreement, which also rubbed a lot the wrong way here. I know why. But it’s the fans he should be telling.
He's been embarrassingly nervous when it comes to, well, everything. Nice guy and all, for real. The charity work’s from the heart. I’ve come to know him, and I can attest that others who know him feel likewise. But it’s not just the spending where he’s been lacking. It’s the accountability for those working under him, which I believe has contributed to this incessant culture of losing and, within that, being OK with losing, as almost everyone in the environment seems to be.
Take off the damned gloves. This franchise is about to turn 144 years old. It’s a civic institution in the same sense that our libraries, our symphony, our opera, our everything is … except that the Pirates have actually been around longer than most. Stop turning away from the fight. Stop pretending to be in the same class as these other teams when they’re treating this one like a farm operation, waiting to stick their claws into Skenes at the first opportunity.
Or, as I’ve been pleading for a while now, go right ahead and sell. Take the $1.5 billion or whatever, and turn it over to someone who’ll do what’s described above.
This ain’t it.
Plodding along with low revenues that are low, in large part, because of how the team’s been run … that ain’t it. That’s on ownership. Making money’s on ownership.
Having holes to fill at first base and corner outfield, and addressing with two cheap half-measures in a platooning reach in Spencer Horwitz ($800,000) or whatever’s left of Tommy Pham ($4 million) … that ain’t it. That’s another 76-win season, I’ll bet.
Seeing fans reluctant to get all the way behind Skenes, the most transcendent athlete our city’s seen since the debut of Sidney Crosby, or Oneil Cruz, one of the sport’s most electric performers … that ain’t it. Find a way to make money off them.
Invest. Including emotionally. It really can reap a return.
Or hey, just keep right on losing in every conceivable way. No risk in that.
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