Barco comes by up to AAA. Fun fact- he hasn’t let a runner on 3rd base this year. Think about that for 1 minute. Heard that on altoona broadcast yesterday.
Tough read on the final play, but Cruz doesn't have the base running skills to freeze on the line drive. Again, what is Brock doing......is he telling Cruz the scenarios? Doubtful.
Good teams generally don't have their OFers shift toward right against right-handed batters. In fact, no teams, except the Pirates when Tatis is at-bat in the 9th inning, position their OFers like that.
In this installment of “teams that started their rebuild after the Pirates, but are currently outperforming them”, the Marlins hit a walk off grand slam off of one of the best closers in the game
The Pirates aren’t doing a rebuild. Never were. They did the zero-out-the-payroll part, but nothing else they’ve done can legitimately be called a rebuild. Among many other things, a rebuilding team that was nowhere close to winning wouldn’t have one of MLB’s oldest lineups.
Well it was billed as a “rebuild” and he acquired many prospects but mostly all of those have failed to become anything except Bednar, and possibly, yet, Endy, and a couple of others…so it is a rebuild that has failed and left us with a pitiful roster with a team that cannot hit.
Yes, Nutting should sell the team, but short of that, the evidence is in: BC failed. Fire him. Fire Shelton. Hopefully hire someone with some vision and baseball acumen and get this team competitive again.
You call it a “rebuild” because “mass salary dump” doesn’t quite have the right ring to it.
Yet that’s what it is. The Bob Nutting Pirates dump players with two years left on their contracts or two years left in arb. You can set your watch to it.
They have one of the oldest lineups in part because of them missing on 7-8 young players that were expected to be the future of the team. The only one they hit on was Cruz. Aka a failed rebuild.
Revisited the Joe Musgrove trade the other day. The central piece of that trade was billed as Hudson Head. He is batting below .100 in AA and will never reach the Bigs.
Birdbrain was never interested in young players. He could, for instance, have skipped Phamine and Frazier and gone with some combination of Yorke, Suwinski, Cook, Valdez, Gorski, Peguero and anybody else he could have dug up. Wouldn't have been much of an improvement, but what conceivable purpose do Phamine and Frazier serve, other than simply making the team older? Which is exactly what Birdbrain's done for six straight years. It was never about rebuilding.
We can agree to disagree, obviously. The philosophy behind signing Frazier and Pham solely to field the cheapest possible team clearly isn’t true though, seeing as though they could choose to field the young players you listed instead, saving millions of dollars in payroll in the process..
Veteran players have their place on competitive teams. The issue is they continue to find regular playing time due to poor performance and injury. Suwinski, Bae, Davis, Peggy, etc. have all been given major league opportunity the last few years and time and time again failed to live up to expectations.
It’s ineptitude on all fronts. It also was an attempt at a rebuild and it failed.
I never said the whole idea was just to have the cheapest possible team. In fact, one bizarre aspect of Birdbrain's tenure is that he's frequently OVERPAID for guys like Phamine, Tellez and Hedges. I think this is in part to avoid too much trouble with the union (and the big market owners, who've made it clear they resent paying revenue sharing so Nuttin can put it in the family trust). The payroll probably is being kept at about the minimum they can get away with, without getting in trouble. At this stage, there's no other way to explain signing guys like Phamine and Frazier except as a sop to the union. The zeroing-out-the-payroll part came at the start, when they could offer the fake explanation of starting a rebuild.
And, yeah, the young guys have all sucked. Birdbrain's done an atrocious job on that front. But the washed-up guys he brings in all suck just as much, sometimes even more. Saying that Suwinski and Bae have failed in no way, shape or form explains bringing in Phamine. Who has the better chance of pulling off some sort of miracle turnaround, a 26-year-old who's sucked or a 33-year-old who went into decline five years ago and who's sucked? It sure as heck isn't the latter.
Maybe somewhere in the tiny tangle of nerve endings that Birdbrain calls a brain he somehow thought of this as a rebuild, but by any meaningful definition it's not. After six years he's still loading the lineup with aging dead weights who have zero chance of ever contributing to a good Pirates team. You don't get to call it a rebuild just because you dumped salary and acquired a few crappy prospects once upon a time.
Judging by the fact there’s only 44 comments on the game thread, most Pirates fans have either checked out or have transitioned into the acceptance stage.
I don’t want to bore anyone with my rage-driven rants and honestly there isn’t a whole lot new to say. Nutting is a grifter piece of shit, Cherington is incompetent, and Shelton is an animatronic bellhop.
I have an excuse for missing the game: my very energetic great niece tried to give me a concussion with a head-to-head hit that would draw a suspension in the NFL. (Unintended, but ask every NFL safety how that works.)
You don't see da Wabbit taking a negative approach very often. Mostly lookin' for the sunshine just over the horizon....
But goddammit... how many times do I have to suffer through a situation with a runner in scoring position and the batter that limps to the EFFING plate is Valdez, Canario or Triolo or some other absolutely wrong person equipped to drive in a run...
That’s was determined when the front office decided to add nothing this offseason, heck one step further, when they added 3 players at the trade deadline and two signed a minor league deal this offseason, unwilling to spend and unwilling to make a meaningful trade.
Seriously, though... You got 3-4 guys who can deliver, but with these roster fillers you're asking them to deliver 100% of the time! It drives me nuts. Guys on base and nobody out and up steps your 6 hitter. GAWD.
I feel sure that when whatsisname the first baseman with the broken wrist comes back we'll at least add a decent bat...
But... I mean... Enmanual Valdez as your cleanup guy? You think Enmanuel Valdez is protecting Cutch at all? You think Oneal Cruz is gonna see another pitch all season to hit? I don't think Cruz had an official at bat last night but his OBP sure is skyrocketing.
Man. I don't know the first thing about constructing a baseball team and yada-yada-yada, but I know straight shit when I see it.
Falter pitched well enough to win that game. ZERO support. Oughtta change the name to The Pittsburgh Zeros in honor of a team that STARTS Jared Triolo and his .142 batting average. And I really LIKE Jared Triolo. He just has no business in a major league batting order.
Such a baaaaad offense. You could just sense it coming. 11 left on base to the Pads 1 through 6 IP and then boom, tie game. Pirate starters have to be hating Cheringron more than us right now
8 free passes, 0 XBH’s, and 1 run. Under normal circumstances, I would say that has to be a statistical anomaly, but not with this offense. There really is no need to pitch to him.
Barco comes by up to AAA. Fun fact- he hasn’t let a runner on 3rd base this year. Think about that for 1 minute. Heard that on altoona broadcast yesterday.
Bailey......helluva an effort. Nothing's changed in 6 years, our starters know they can't make more than 1 mistake, because our offense sucks.
Tough read on the final play, but Cruz doesn't have the base running skills to freeze on the line drive. Again, what is Brock doing......is he telling Cruz the scenarios? Doubtful.
And why hadn't he already stolen the bag? Afraid to run on Diaz? 33 in a row and did Shelton give him the green light when the game is on the line?
In my opinion, the fact that he hasn’t been caught in 33 tries means he needs to run more. Hes leaving more bags out there to be had
Good teams do the little things, Padres made 2 big plays. Pirates made none.
Good teams generally don't have their OFers shift toward right against right-handed batters. In fact, no teams, except the Pirates when Tatis is at-bat in the 9th inning, position their OFers like that.
didn't realize fcl league started. nice to see rynders off to a fast start
MLB moved up the FCL/ACL seasons to effectively ensure it ends before the draft. This happened last season, IIRC.
yeah i know. it's more so i don't pay much attention to dates these days 😂
This is when I start paying more attention. I love watching the MLB development process.
same here! better than the show the pirates put on that's for sure
In this installment of “teams that started their rebuild after the Pirates, but are currently outperforming them”, the Marlins hit a walk off grand slam off of one of the best closers in the game
The Pirates aren’t doing a rebuild. Never were. They did the zero-out-the-payroll part, but nothing else they’ve done can legitimately be called a rebuild. Among many other things, a rebuilding team that was nowhere close to winning wouldn’t have one of MLB’s oldest lineups.
Well it was billed as a “rebuild” and he acquired many prospects but mostly all of those have failed to become anything except Bednar, and possibly, yet, Endy, and a couple of others…so it is a rebuild that has failed and left us with a pitiful roster with a team that cannot hit.
Yes, Nutting should sell the team, but short of that, the evidence is in: BC failed. Fire him. Fire Shelton. Hopefully hire someone with some vision and baseball acumen and get this team competitive again.
It was actually billed as a “build”. BC refused to even say that word lol
You call it a “rebuild” because “mass salary dump” doesn’t quite have the right ring to it.
Yet that’s what it is. The Bob Nutting Pirates dump players with two years left on their contracts or two years left in arb. You can set your watch to it.
They have one of the oldest lineups in part because of them missing on 7-8 young players that were expected to be the future of the team. The only one they hit on was Cruz. Aka a failed rebuild.
Revisited the Joe Musgrove trade the other day. The central piece of that trade was billed as Hudson Head. He is batting below .100 in AA and will never reach the Bigs.
Birdbrain was never interested in young players. He could, for instance, have skipped Phamine and Frazier and gone with some combination of Yorke, Suwinski, Cook, Valdez, Gorski, Peguero and anybody else he could have dug up. Wouldn't have been much of an improvement, but what conceivable purpose do Phamine and Frazier serve, other than simply making the team older? Which is exactly what Birdbrain's done for six straight years. It was never about rebuilding.
We can agree to disagree, obviously. The philosophy behind signing Frazier and Pham solely to field the cheapest possible team clearly isn’t true though, seeing as though they could choose to field the young players you listed instead, saving millions of dollars in payroll in the process..
Veteran players have their place on competitive teams. The issue is they continue to find regular playing time due to poor performance and injury. Suwinski, Bae, Davis, Peggy, etc. have all been given major league opportunity the last few years and time and time again failed to live up to expectations.
It’s ineptitude on all fronts. It also was an attempt at a rebuild and it failed.
I never said the whole idea was just to have the cheapest possible team. In fact, one bizarre aspect of Birdbrain's tenure is that he's frequently OVERPAID for guys like Phamine, Tellez and Hedges. I think this is in part to avoid too much trouble with the union (and the big market owners, who've made it clear they resent paying revenue sharing so Nuttin can put it in the family trust). The payroll probably is being kept at about the minimum they can get away with, without getting in trouble. At this stage, there's no other way to explain signing guys like Phamine and Frazier except as a sop to the union. The zeroing-out-the-payroll part came at the start, when they could offer the fake explanation of starting a rebuild.
And, yeah, the young guys have all sucked. Birdbrain's done an atrocious job on that front. But the washed-up guys he brings in all suck just as much, sometimes even more. Saying that Suwinski and Bae have failed in no way, shape or form explains bringing in Phamine. Who has the better chance of pulling off some sort of miracle turnaround, a 26-year-old who's sucked or a 33-year-old who went into decline five years ago and who's sucked? It sure as heck isn't the latter.
Maybe somewhere in the tiny tangle of nerve endings that Birdbrain calls a brain he somehow thought of this as a rebuild, but by any meaningful definition it's not. After six years he's still loading the lineup with aging dead weights who have zero chance of ever contributing to a good Pirates team. You don't get to call it a rebuild just because you dumped salary and acquired a few crappy prospects once upon a time.
To provide clubhouse leadership that his manager is unable to provide?
Nooo, keeping the union away is the sole purpose.
Winner winner chicken dinner.
The Pirates are MLB’s Shady Oaks retirement home.
Judging by the fact there’s only 44 comments on the game thread, most Pirates fans have either checked out or have transitioned into the acceptance stage.
I don’t want to bore anyone with my rage-driven rants and honestly there isn’t a whole lot new to say. Nutting is a grifter piece of shit, Cherington is incompetent, and Shelton is an animatronic bellhop.
I have an excuse for missing the game: my very energetic great niece tried to give me a concussion with a head-to-head hit that would draw a suspension in the NFL. (Unintended, but ask every NFL safety how that works.)
At least we know they probably weren’t in the stands as once again there was hardly anyone there (and yes, there was the rain delay but still…).
Pretty pissed off.
You don't see da Wabbit taking a negative approach very often. Mostly lookin' for the sunshine just over the horizon....
But goddammit... how many times do I have to suffer through a situation with a runner in scoring position and the batter that limps to the EFFING plate is Valdez, Canario or Triolo or some other absolutely wrong person equipped to drive in a run...
Jesus...Effing....Christ!!!!!!!
BB
My melt-down was last nigth and it continued today. After going back with 1979and counting today, I feel better. Thanks for letting me vent!
Yeah. Last night was about my final straw with these guys.
Mine too. That being said, I will be driving 3 hours to watch the Pirates play Tuesday and Wednesday in Saint Louis. People often question my sanity.
That’s was determined when the front office decided to add nothing this offseason, heck one step further, when they added 3 players at the trade deadline and two signed a minor league deal this offseason, unwilling to spend and unwilling to make a meaningful trade.
you got that right.
Seriously, though... You got 3-4 guys who can deliver, but with these roster fillers you're asking them to deliver 100% of the time! It drives me nuts. Guys on base and nobody out and up steps your 6 hitter. GAWD.
I feel sure that when whatsisname the first baseman with the broken wrist comes back we'll at least add a decent bat...
But... I mean... Enmanual Valdez as your cleanup guy? You think Enmanuel Valdez is protecting Cutch at all? You think Oneal Cruz is gonna see another pitch all season to hit? I don't think Cruz had an official at bat last night but his OBP sure is skyrocketing.
Man. I don't know the first thing about constructing a baseball team and yada-yada-yada, but I know straight shit when I see it.
Falter pitched well enough to win that game. ZERO support. Oughtta change the name to The Pittsburgh Zeros in honor of a team that STARTS Jared Triolo and his .142 batting average. And I really LIKE Jared Triolo. He just has no business in a major league batting order.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGHHHHHH!
________________________________
"Shhh! I'm about to defy you."
-Wabbit
Wow, bad day for Reynolds. Responsible for 7 outs.
Truly incredible feats are happening daily.
But in only 5 ABs! Efficiency! Nuttin's putting him in charge of supply.
Love how Block called Tatis "the winning run" not "the go ahead run". Acknowledging the odds the pirates could get one more
14 base runners and the Cheringtons could only get one home. What terrible luck!
It's uncanny how much bad luck they've had.
A Bednar wild pitch with a runner on 3rd and 2 outs. Seems very on brand for the 2025 Pirates.
Such a baaaaad offense. You could just sense it coming. 11 left on base to the Pads 1 through 6 IP and then boom, tie game. Pirate starters have to be hating Cheringron more than us right now
Does Dumbo even realize what a GIDP is?
When does Cruz see another strike in a competitive at bat? 2027?
He’s getting the Barry Bonds treatment because he is literally the only offensive force on the entire team.
8 free passes, 0 XBH’s, and 1 run. Under normal circumstances, I would say that has to be a statistical anomaly, but not with this offense. There really is no need to pitch to him.
Why risk losing 3-1 against a team that isn't built to win otherwise?
Never, if all they can do is GIDP behind him.
While not giving him a chance to steal….
Barco promoted to Triple A
Every inning feels like Groundhog Day. Most boring offensive team I’ve ever seen.