Talking Baseball: Vol. 15

It is not about Rowdy Tellez or his bonus. It is about what it represents.

Before I get too deep into this latest Pirates entry, I just want to give a shoutout to my friend Chris Mueller (you might know him from 93.7 The Fan) and his new Substack, Nine Straight Threes. Check it out. Give him a follow. Subscribe if you have a few extra funds. Or at least just give it a look.

Now.

On to the Pittsburgh Pirates who were again making news this week for some of the wrong reasons.

On Tuesday, just hours before they opened their final home stand of the season against the Milwaukee Brewers, they made the curious roster move to designate first baseman Rowdy Tellez and outfielder Michael A. Taylor for assignment.

If those moves had happened around, say, June, nobody would have given it a second thought, mostly because both players were wildly underwhelming for much of the season and represented the failed Major League scouting process of general manager Ben Cherington and his staff.

But they didn’t DFA them at that point. They allowed them to play almost the entire season, and in the case of Tellez, allowed him to continue to play as a regular in the lineup. Neither player had a future here, and it was only a matter of when and not if their time with the Pirates would come to an end. Still, dumping them with six games to play in the season just seemed …. odd.

Then it was revealed that Tellez was set to make an additional $200,000 on his contract when he reached 425 plate appearances for the season.

When the Pirates DFA’d him, he had 421 plate appearances.

Now, I want to preface this by saying I do not particularly care about Rowdy Tellez and his incentives. He made $3.2 million this season and got a significantly longer leash than he probably should have with the Pirates. For most of the season, outside of a month-and-a-half month stretch in the middle, he was not very good. He earned those early season boos and jeers. Did he deserve 425 plate appearances? Did he deserve that extra $200,000 based on his actual on-field performance? Honestly, no. Probably not.

So it’s whatever.

Manager Derek Shelton and general manager Ben Cherington said the bonus had nothing to do with the decision to DFA Tellez, but we all know that is bullshit. If they wanted to give other players looks and play other people they could have been doing that for weeks. They continued to let Tellez play right up until he reached the bonus threshold.

My problem with this whole ordeal is that it is simply a symptom of the overall problem with the Pittsburgh Pirates where dollars and cents are the driving factor behind every decision that gets made. Winning always has been, and always will be, secondary in nature.

The entire Rowdy Tellez experience is an example of that.

The only reason he played for the Pittsburgh Pirates this season is because he was $2 million cheaper than Carlos Santanta, last year’s first baseman who had expressed an interest in potentially returning to Pittsburgh.

Santana was a better player last year and he was a better player this year.

Santana was a 2.7 WAR player a year and a 2.2 WAR player this season. Not great. But definitely playable. A respectable starter.

Tellez was -0.6 WAR player a year ago and a -0.3 WAR player this season. Over that two year stretch the difference between Santana and Tellez was nearly SIX WINS. This year alone it would have been over 2.5 wins.

For Tellez’s entire career he is only a 0.4 WAR player — total.

“But Adam, if he’s so bad, he clearly didn’t deserve the bonus,” is probably the thought in your head right now.

Of course he didn’t! But it’s not about the bonus!

It’s about poor talent evaluation. It’s about penny-pinching every decision and not making better players a priority. It’s about the almighty dollar always winning out.

Would the upgrade from Tellez to Santana given the Pirates a chance to be a contender? No. That was not the only thing holding them back. But it would have been a small, incremental improvement and upgrade. You make a few of those, and suddenly you get closer. It would have certainly been worth the extra $2 million, especially on a team that is third-from-the-bottom in payroll and threw away millions on other bad free agents.

The Pirates also could have dumped Tellez at any point in the season without a single person caring about it. It would have been justified. It would have been deserved. It could have been an opportunity to find a better player when the team was still in a faux playoff race. It would have been celebrated.

But they didn’t. Because that likely would have cost more money, or precious prospects, or some sort of creativity and commitment that does not exist in the Pirates front office or ownership.

This is a symptom of the problem. But sometimes the symptoms are just as annoying as the problem itself.