Does anyone have issues with the Pittsburgh SportsNet app? I tried watching penguins on it and it times out all the time and makes me sign back in. Anyone else have these issues?
We could have a whole thread on the impact of GMs above and beyond ownership. Tampa Bay has shown that excellent management can overcome all the structural obstacles to being competitive in a small market and/or with a cheap owner. Billy Beane did the same in Oakland for two decades before finally running out of mojo. I don’t think Nutting is deliberately choosing mediocre GMs, but his choices are another sign that he’s a poor owner apart from the financial constraints.
I looked up Branch Rickey’s tenure with the Pirates in the early 50s after he left the Dodgers. He was in charge from 1951 to 1955. OK —— a different era (pre-draft, minuscule salaries, etc.). In four years he added Clemente and Face from the Rule 5 draft, and signed Law, Friend, Groat, and Mazeroski. He brought Howie Haak over from the Dodgers to be one of the lead scouts. Incredible.
Joe L. Brown put the finishing touches on the 1960 champions and built the juggernaut development apparatus of the 60s and early 70s, but it was Rickey who laid the foundation.
It’s a lot to ask, but a great GM can make it work in Pittsburgh even now. They just haven’t had the talent in the front office to pull it off.
Good thing you did not include the records of the Pirates between 1951-1955. The Pirates were as bad as they ever have been - about the same as could be said about the Pirates from 2020, 2021, and 2022. The Pirates of the '50's started to turn things around the second half of the '50's. Let's hope 2023 was the first of the turnaround seasons on the way to an NL Pennant.
MLBTR writers do a great job of explaining that Montgomery at $25M would actually cost the Rangers or the Phillies upwards of $40M due to their excessive spending in past years as well as this year. There are a half dozen teams in this boat, so it opens up an opportunity for a medium spending team to make the plunge on a Montgomery or Snell. It won't help the Pirates of course. But the tax does allow more mid-tier teams into the bidding war.
It's called "competitive balance tax" for a reason. I think the Dodgers are out on him. Seems the Rangers are out too. Soon a middle tier team will sign him.
I bet you also believe every Bill on Congress is named honestly. Quit being such a rube, it’s openly known across baseball that the “competitive balance tax” is pushed by owners in the largest markets as means of increasing their own profits. I honestly didn’t think there was anyone who still fell for this.
So you're saying baseball is perfectly happy with the Nuttings of the league being super cheap, because he does not participate in salary bidding wars and helps keep labor costs down? I would never believe such a thing. I have never heard of a business that tries to reduce labor costs.
I might be wrong, but I think teams prefer to sign these last players after they report to spring training. This way they won't have to DFA any players. I noticed right after the Dodger's early date to report (Feb 8th), they immediately put guys on the IL and signed 2 more players.
Rinse and repeat on these W-L projections. Seems every one of them throw out the top 20% and bottom 20% of likely outcomes and therefore group all 30 teams bunched closely together. What's the purpose of doing that? If the Dodgers analytics aren't projecting at least 100 wins, then these click bait projections are flat out ignoring the analytics.
Lol I misunderstood, I thought these professional analytic prognosticators were telling us the expected Win-loss record for the 162 game season. Didn't realize it was throwing a dart at some median average guesstimate.
My zipper this morning is telling me 80 wins, which is a damn shame because a better offseason could easily have that around 85 if made some smarter moves
FWIW on any of these projected standings systems, the Pirates will ALWAYS have to outperform their projections and rely on the randomness of the sport.
No offense intended but this is the most banal, obvious post of the entire thread and you're getting dragged for it.
Maybe, maaayyybe at the peak of a particularly good win cycle like 2015 you end up truly out ahead of the pack. Otherwise what you describe is the unavoidable reality.
The alternative to targeting 82 (my preference would be 85) wins, of course, is the kind of disastrously long rebuild we're currently suffering through. 2-3 season each decade where you're even pretending to try to win, then rinse and repeat. Simply no other way, with the budgets they impose on themselves.
82-85 is exactly what the Brewers and Rays do with their continual churn. No other way to be consistently successful.
Relying on a parlay of 75th percentile outcomes from low ceiling players typically isn’t going to work out well. Particularly when your approach to prospects is targeting lower ceiling, high floor players as well.
Problem is, I’d venture to say we are one of the few teams that is run this way. Sure other teams shoot for high floors, the Guardians are an example. But they run payrolls just high enough to ensure that it works. When you can sign guys like Josh Bell or Edwin Encarnacion, as opposing to praying that Rowdy Tellez is better than replacement level, that makes a huge difference. Your successful lower payroll teams, the Rays being the best example, take more risks (Eflin) and are more transactional. The Reds offseason, gambling on Montas, is another good example. Instead of we opted to play it safe with the low ceiling and cheaper Martin Perez.
I can't believe they didn't get an option for a second year if Tellez has a breakout. It's the worse of 2 outcomes, playing this season pennywise and pricing yourself out next if your penny pull pays off.
It's even worse than you think. With only 5 years of service time, he would have had another arbitration year after this one if the Pirates had traded "cash considerations" to the Brewers for him at some point prior to his being non-tendered. His arbitration figure for this year probably would have been around the salary the Pirates are currently paying him. So... by not planning ahead and flying by the seat of their pants, they not only cost themselves a year of control over Tellez, but they also reduced his trade value if (when) they decide to trade him.
Like... all you have to do... is pick up the phone and call the Brewers GM sometime in early November and ask, "Hey... are you tendering Tellez, because if not, I'll give you a dollar for him." But this off-season was so mismanaged and haphazard... just awful GMing.
Ironically, the Rays are in a similar position, projected for 83 wins, fourth place in the AL East. They will almost always have to outperform their projections as well. This has nothing to do with aiming for .500, all of these teams need “luck”.
The Rays succeed year after year after year. The Pirates fail year after year after year. Luck? Not a chance. One knows what they're doing, the other doesn't.
What you’re not taking into account is the tendency of projection systems to push everything toward the middle. No AL team projects above 90 wins in ZiPS. The Dodgers, who look to me like a 105-win team, come in at 93. The 8-game difference between the Pirates and Rays is much larger than you’re making out. ZiPS doesn’t see the two teams as remotely similar.
That approach can work if you have a GM willing to take the risks necessary to raise the ceiling. But they’d rather have a team with a 75 win floor than a team with a 90 win ceiling.
I would say it has more to do with Nutting's sweet spot--he doesn't have to spend a lot to produce a .500 team, and a .500 team is enough to have good attendance and to keep TV ratings high enough to ensure a good next contract.
Nutting didn't fire Huntington because we hadn't been to the postseason for four years but because it was the easiest way to stem the backlash from a bad trade and the scandal involving that reliever. If Nutting cared about four-year droughts, he wouldn't be saying Cherington is doing a "fantastic" job. There's just no competitive spirit there.
I'll meet you half way on why Huntington was fired. I do believe the Archer backlash and a few other personnel moves created a backlash that made a firing the easy way out. I don't think it had anything to do with the jailed reliever. I do not recall the fans / general public etc. held any fault to that with the Owner / GM / Pirate organization. It was a terrible thing that was not baseball or team discipline related.
I don't think the FO or coaches could have done anything about the reliever, just as the Rays' staff can't be held accountable for Franco. But the reason I tie it to the firing is that Nutting needed to change the focus for business interests and there was no better way to do that than to fire Huntington and get a "fresh start".
We'll agree to disagree. I think there were 2 separate paths. I don't think the changing of the GM changed any coverage or focus on the reliever (which of course was always referenced as 'former Pirate reliever') vs. the team. Because of that I just don't think that was Bob's reasoning or his thought process. While he is bad at baseball I think he gets from a PR perspective that one stream (reliever) was out of his control and there was no changing of that narrative.
I don't think it was the main reason, but a contributing factor and perhaps Nutting would have made the change anyway. Contributing in the sense that "clubhouse culture" was and is frequently cited as a reason for the changes. Cherington and Shelton couldn't refer to it enough when they were hired and even to this day*. What does that mean? Having a criminal in the bullpen can't be a positive when referring to something so vague as clubhouse culture, or "losing control of the clubhouse".
*Of course Shelton and Cherington get it--when you work for an owner who isn't about wins and losses, job security is as simple as maintaining a happy culture.
I also think Cherington is way too cautious, almost like he's afraid to act after seeing his predecessor fired after a bad trade. He makes safe signings and safe trades, which puts almost all the impact to come from developing prospects.
I'm with Aurorus on this. I think BC knew going in that Nuttin is the least committed to winning of any MLB owner, and hence is the least inclined to impose any accountability. Not that it was NH's fault, but if it weren't for the unnamed closer, NH would still be the GM. BC just has to avoid anything super-lurid and he can lounge around with his buddies all day and never have to worry about anything, as long as he stays within Nuttin's tiny budget. If he was GM of a major league team, there'd be expectations and pressure. He's got none of that in Pgh. You can't overstate the cynicism of this FO.
They may still luck their way into contention--it's almost hard not to when 7/15 teams make the postseason and a team is mismanaged so badly that they're drafting in the top ten year after year. But when Cherington talks about the fantastic job Shelton is doing and Nutting talks about the fantastic job Cherington is doing, all I have left to hope for is that luck.
Nutting is a problem, but his cheapness is not the main problem. We just saw the Pirates waste 30 million dollars in the off-season last year (and probably again this year), and the best free agent that they could acquire last year was acquired by Nutting, not the GM. Do you really think another 10 or 20 million per year in contracts is going to make a difference for this franchise?
The main problem is Nutting's choice of GMs. The list of Pirates' front office people dating back to 2003 is like a frat (now we can include sorority) photo album from Amherst. His hires, and their hires, have been terrible. There are plenty of possible GMs out there who could turn the ship around: Sig Mejdal; Jason Macleod; Rob Metzler; Kevin Ibach; Moises Rogriguez, to name a few. Instead we end up with an endless string of Littlefields, Huntingtons, and Cherringtons.
Do you really think these hires have been mistakes? Nutting's dishonest and parasitic, but he's not stupid. These are very deliberate hires with his basic goals in mind and are driven by his cheapness. Anyone Nutting hires goes into the job knowing the one thing they have to do to keep the job is to make him look as good as possible and take the blame when things go south as the inevitably will in such a situation. Winning baseball games has very little to do with it. Cherington is doing the job he was hired to do, hence Nutting's happy with him., for now.
BC and those before him have done what the boss has demanded and kept their jobs until he needed a scapegoat. The whole thing is smoke and mirrors designed to keep the fans hope (unfortunately false hope) alive and the money coming in. Cherington's time will come once that starts to fade but the whole process will simply repeat again regardless of who the next GM or President might turn out to be because Nuttiing is driving the process.
I think it's more his choice of presidents. Coonelly came from the Commissioner's Office and it seemed more about leveraging the Pirates' standing within MLB, and Williams was an even worse hire. In both cases, it wasn't about hiring someone who had demonstrated a sharp baseball mind but about business interests. He has set up an administration with one less level of baseball knowledge, and therefore accountability, than most teams have.
Yes. It is just bad hires all the way around. If you have a shoe business and you make shoes, would you hire a steel-plant operator to run your business? Not if you had any sense. So why would you hire a hockey guy to run a baseball team?
Does anyone have issues with the Pittsburgh SportsNet app? I tried watching penguins on it and it times out all the time and makes me sign back in. Anyone else have these issues?
We could have a whole thread on the impact of GMs above and beyond ownership. Tampa Bay has shown that excellent management can overcome all the structural obstacles to being competitive in a small market and/or with a cheap owner. Billy Beane did the same in Oakland for two decades before finally running out of mojo. I don’t think Nutting is deliberately choosing mediocre GMs, but his choices are another sign that he’s a poor owner apart from the financial constraints.
I looked up Branch Rickey’s tenure with the Pirates in the early 50s after he left the Dodgers. He was in charge from 1951 to 1955. OK —— a different era (pre-draft, minuscule salaries, etc.). In four years he added Clemente and Face from the Rule 5 draft, and signed Law, Friend, Groat, and Mazeroski. He brought Howie Haak over from the Dodgers to be one of the lead scouts. Incredible.
Joe L. Brown put the finishing touches on the 1960 champions and built the juggernaut development apparatus of the 60s and early 70s, but it was Rickey who laid the foundation.
It’s a lot to ask, but a great GM can make it work in Pittsburgh even now. They just haven’t had the talent in the front office to pull it off.
Good thing you did not include the records of the Pirates between 1951-1955. The Pirates were as bad as they ever have been - about the same as could be said about the Pirates from 2020, 2021, and 2022. The Pirates of the '50's started to turn things around the second half of the '50's. Let's hope 2023 was the first of the turnaround seasons on the way to an NL Pennant.
Hmmm bunch of top FA's haven't been signed as of Feb. 10. The luxury tax brackets are actually working despite some posters skepticism.
And what is that, exactly?
I knew this bait would draw you in!
MLBTR writers do a great job of explaining that Montgomery at $25M would actually cost the Rangers or the Phillies upwards of $40M due to their excessive spending in past years as well as this year. There are a half dozen teams in this boat, so it opens up an opportunity for a medium spending team to make the plunge on a Montgomery or Snell. It won't help the Pirates of course. But the tax does allow more mid-tier teams into the bidding war.
Clearly succeeding since he's signed with a mid-spending team, right?
It's called "competitive balance tax" for a reason. I think the Dodgers are out on him. Seems the Rangers are out too. Soon a middle tier team will sign him.
I bet you also believe every Bill on Congress is named honestly. Quit being such a rube, it’s openly known across baseball that the “competitive balance tax” is pushed by owners in the largest markets as means of increasing their own profits. I honestly didn’t think there was anyone who still fell for this.
It's math man. Dude still doesn't get what CFO's and CPA's do and how that impacts even a billionaire's choices.
So you're saying baseball is perfectly happy with the Nuttings of the league being super cheap, because he does not participate in salary bidding wars and helps keep labor costs down? I would never believe such a thing. I have never heard of a business that tries to reduce labor costs.
I might be wrong, but I think teams prefer to sign these last players after they report to spring training. This way they won't have to DFA any players. I noticed right after the Dodger's early date to report (Feb 8th), they immediately put guys on the IL and signed 2 more players.
Rinse and repeat on these W-L projections. Seems every one of them throw out the top 20% and bottom 20% of likely outcomes and therefore group all 30 teams bunched closely together. What's the purpose of doing that? If the Dodgers analytics aren't projecting at least 100 wins, then these click bait projections are flat out ignoring the analytics.
Yes median projections literally do “throw out” probabilities at the extremes what would you want them to do otherwise?
Man doesn’t understand math, gets angry.
Lol I misunderstood, I thought these professional analytic prognosticators were telling us the expected Win-loss record for the 162 game season. Didn't realize it was throwing a dart at some median average guesstimate.
Man not only does not understand math but vehemently refuses to try.
My zipper this morning is telling me 80 wins, which is a damn shame because a better offseason could easily have that around 85 if made some smarter moves
A 10-win offseason is insanely rare, dude!
My Zips says 85-77
FWIW on any of these projected standings systems, the Pirates will ALWAYS have to outperform their projections and rely on the randomness of the sport.
No offense intended but this is the most banal, obvious post of the entire thread and you're getting dragged for it.
Maybe, maaayyybe at the peak of a particularly good win cycle like 2015 you end up truly out ahead of the pack. Otherwise what you describe is the unavoidable reality.
The alternative to targeting 82 (my preference would be 85) wins, of course, is the kind of disastrously long rebuild we're currently suffering through. 2-3 season each decade where you're even pretending to try to win, then rinse and repeat. Simply no other way, with the budgets they impose on themselves.
82-85 is exactly what the Brewers and Rays do with their continual churn. No other way to be consistently successful.
No offense taken, it was so apparently obvious that it wasn’t lol
I agree, unless the Pirates are in a position they can get a lottery draft pick by being so bad. We have seen that with this front office.
Relying on a parlay of 75th percentile outcomes from low ceiling players typically isn’t going to work out well. Particularly when your approach to prospects is targeting lower ceiling, high floor players as well.
It’s not just about our players and their probable outcomes, there are 29 other teams and 725 other players.
Problem is, I’d venture to say we are one of the few teams that is run this way. Sure other teams shoot for high floors, the Guardians are an example. But they run payrolls just high enough to ensure that it works. When you can sign guys like Josh Bell or Edwin Encarnacion, as opposing to praying that Rowdy Tellez is better than replacement level, that makes a huge difference. Your successful lower payroll teams, the Rays being the best example, take more risks (Eflin) and are more transactional. The Reds offseason, gambling on Montas, is another good example. Instead of we opted to play it safe with the low ceiling and cheaper Martin Perez.
I can't believe they didn't get an option for a second year if Tellez has a breakout. It's the worse of 2 outcomes, playing this season pennywise and pricing yourself out next if your penny pull pays off.
It's even worse than you think. With only 5 years of service time, he would have had another arbitration year after this one if the Pirates had traded "cash considerations" to the Brewers for him at some point prior to his being non-tendered. His arbitration figure for this year probably would have been around the salary the Pirates are currently paying him. So... by not planning ahead and flying by the seat of their pants, they not only cost themselves a year of control over Tellez, but they also reduced his trade value if (when) they decide to trade him.
Like... all you have to do... is pick up the phone and call the Brewers GM sometime in early November and ask, "Hey... are you tendering Tellez, because if not, I'll give you a dollar for him." But this off-season was so mismanaged and haphazard... just awful GMing.
Maybe that’s why they got him so cheap…he’s betting on himself and wants to get paid as a FA next year.
I don't think he was getting higher offers.
That would a savvy, forward thinking move which we dont seem to really do lol
You are both correct.
Yeah, that was the Huntington method. Aim for .500 and hope for luck. Worked out great.
Ironically, the Rays are in a similar position, projected for 83 wins, fourth place in the AL East. They will almost always have to outperform their projections as well. This has nothing to do with aiming for .500, all of these teams need “luck”.
The Rays have demonstrated an ability to surpass their projections. The luck they need is more based on health.
A wise man once said all luck is health luck.
Me, that man was me.
The Rays succeed year after year after year. The Pirates fail year after year after year. Luck? Not a chance. One knows what they're doing, the other doesn't.
I don’t disagree, but we are talking about projection systems. Within this context, both organizations have to rely on luck.
What you’re not taking into account is the tendency of projection systems to push everything toward the middle. No AL team projects above 90 wins in ZiPS. The Dodgers, who look to me like a 105-win team, come in at 93. The 8-game difference between the Pirates and Rays is much larger than you’re making out. ZiPS doesn’t see the two teams as remotely similar.
Who is claiming the 2024 Pirates and Rays are similar?
That approach can work if you have a GM willing to take the risks necessary to raise the ceiling. But they’d rather have a team with a 75 win floor than a team with a 90 win ceiling.
I would say it has more to do with Nutting's sweet spot--he doesn't have to spend a lot to produce a .500 team, and a .500 team is enough to have good attendance and to keep TV ratings high enough to ensure a good next contract.
Nutting didn't fire Huntington because we hadn't been to the postseason for four years but because it was the easiest way to stem the backlash from a bad trade and the scandal involving that reliever. If Nutting cared about four-year droughts, he wouldn't be saying Cherington is doing a "fantastic" job. There's just no competitive spirit there.
I'll meet you half way on why Huntington was fired. I do believe the Archer backlash and a few other personnel moves created a backlash that made a firing the easy way out. I don't think it had anything to do with the jailed reliever. I do not recall the fans / general public etc. held any fault to that with the Owner / GM / Pirate organization. It was a terrible thing that was not baseball or team discipline related.
I don't think the FO or coaches could have done anything about the reliever, just as the Rays' staff can't be held accountable for Franco. But the reason I tie it to the firing is that Nutting needed to change the focus for business interests and there was no better way to do that than to fire Huntington and get a "fresh start".
We'll agree to disagree. I think there were 2 separate paths. I don't think the changing of the GM changed any coverage or focus on the reliever (which of course was always referenced as 'former Pirate reliever') vs. the team. Because of that I just don't think that was Bob's reasoning or his thought process. While he is bad at baseball I think he gets from a PR perspective that one stream (reliever) was out of his control and there was no changing of that narrative.
I don't think it was the main reason, but a contributing factor and perhaps Nutting would have made the change anyway. Contributing in the sense that "clubhouse culture" was and is frequently cited as a reason for the changes. Cherington and Shelton couldn't refer to it enough when they were hired and even to this day*. What does that mean? Having a criminal in the bullpen can't be a positive when referring to something so vague as clubhouse culture, or "losing control of the clubhouse".
*Of course Shelton and Cherington get it--when you work for an owner who isn't about wins and losses, job security is as simple as maintaining a happy culture.
Obviously, Nutting is the main problem. But the Rays have severe budget limitations and they don’t aim for 75 wins like BC does.
They’re targeted for 83.
Losses?
The Rays.
I also think Cherington is way too cautious, almost like he's afraid to act after seeing his predecessor fired after a bad trade. He makes safe signings and safe trades, which puts almost all the impact to come from developing prospects.
I'm with Aurorus on this. I think BC knew going in that Nuttin is the least committed to winning of any MLB owner, and hence is the least inclined to impose any accountability. Not that it was NH's fault, but if it weren't for the unnamed closer, NH would still be the GM. BC just has to avoid anything super-lurid and he can lounge around with his buddies all day and never have to worry about anything, as long as he stays within Nuttin's tiny budget. If he was GM of a major league team, there'd be expectations and pressure. He's got none of that in Pgh. You can't overstate the cynicism of this FO.
They may still luck their way into contention--it's almost hard not to when 7/15 teams make the postseason and a team is mismanaged so badly that they're drafting in the top ten year after year. But when Cherington talks about the fantastic job Shelton is doing and Nutting talks about the fantastic job Cherington is doing, all I have left to hope for is that luck.
I guess that’s a good indication they’ll likely stay far away from Bauer.
Nutting is a problem, but his cheapness is not the main problem. We just saw the Pirates waste 30 million dollars in the off-season last year (and probably again this year), and the best free agent that they could acquire last year was acquired by Nutting, not the GM. Do you really think another 10 or 20 million per year in contracts is going to make a difference for this franchise?
The main problem is Nutting's choice of GMs. The list of Pirates' front office people dating back to 2003 is like a frat (now we can include sorority) photo album from Amherst. His hires, and their hires, have been terrible. There are plenty of possible GMs out there who could turn the ship around: Sig Mejdal; Jason Macleod; Rob Metzler; Kevin Ibach; Moises Rogriguez, to name a few. Instead we end up with an endless string of Littlefields, Huntingtons, and Cherringtons.
Do you really think these hires have been mistakes? Nutting's dishonest and parasitic, but he's not stupid. These are very deliberate hires with his basic goals in mind and are driven by his cheapness. Anyone Nutting hires goes into the job knowing the one thing they have to do to keep the job is to make him look as good as possible and take the blame when things go south as the inevitably will in such a situation. Winning baseball games has very little to do with it. Cherington is doing the job he was hired to do, hence Nutting's happy with him., for now.
BC and those before him have done what the boss has demanded and kept their jobs until he needed a scapegoat. The whole thing is smoke and mirrors designed to keep the fans hope (unfortunately false hope) alive and the money coming in. Cherington's time will come once that starts to fade but the whole process will simply repeat again regardless of who the next GM or President might turn out to be because Nuttiing is driving the process.
I think it's more his choice of presidents. Coonelly came from the Commissioner's Office and it seemed more about leveraging the Pirates' standing within MLB, and Williams was an even worse hire. In both cases, it wasn't about hiring someone who had demonstrated a sharp baseball mind but about business interests. He has set up an administration with one less level of baseball knowledge, and therefore accountability, than most teams have.
Yes. It is just bad hires all the way around. If you have a shoe business and you make shoes, would you hire a steel-plant operator to run your business? Not if you had any sense. So why would you hire a hockey guy to run a baseball team?
Two 👍!!!
Totally agree.