Talking baseball: Vol. 20

The Pittsburgh Pirates are unspeakably bad. That, and some other thoughts around Major League Baseball.

My expectations for the 2025 Pittsburgh Pirates were low. Perhaps as low as they have ever been for a Pittsburgh Pirates team when you consider the context of this season, and the fact you just KNEW they were going to waste one of the best starting pitching prospects to enter Major League Baseball in decades.

Paul Skenes should have been a source of optimism. It should have been something that gives you hope. It should have been something that made the team say, “okay … it’s time to win.”

And then they did ….. nothing.

No spending. No shrewd roster moves. No intriguing bats. No meaningful additions.

The only major addition was trading for a platoon first baseman — Spencer Horwitz — that came with a chronic wrist issue that has prevented him from playing through the first month of the season.

The roster today is worse than the roster that ended last season. They punted on one of the few seasons they are going to have with Skenes and made no meaningful effort to try and compete for a (very attainable) playoff spot.

It is shameful. It is disgraceful. And it is actively killing professional baseball in Pittsburgh. I don’t mean to be hyperbolic with that. But it’s also hard not to feel that way. This is an organization that has given its fans a lot of shit over the past four-plus decades. We have seen a lot of bad baseball, a lot of bad teams and more losing seasons than anybody else in professional sports.

Even with all of that, the general vibe around this team, and this season, is that it has never felt worse or more hopeless for Pirates fans than it is right now.

It’s a very valid thought.

They are six years into the Ben Cherington era and the team is on pace to be worse than it was the year before he was hired. The upper levels of the farm system are a barren wasteland in terms of position players and bats. Pretty much every single Major League roster move they have made over that time, and every meaningful trade they have made, has been a complete failure and a total loss.

The best Major League roster additions he has made are a couple of stop-gap, one-year starting pitchers, a handful of bullpen arms and Joey Bart.

Even Dave Littlefield and Cam Bonifay had some wins in their roster movement. I would punch myself in the face for the equivalent of a Matt Stairs or Reggie Sanders signing right now.

Not only is the team losing, but the vibe at PNC Park has ranged from downright depressing, to viciously hostile. If it’s not 7,000 people sitting in dejected silence, it is deafening “sell the team” chants echoing down after the latest on-field disaster. A year ago Paul Skenes starts were an event. There was a noticeable buzz walking into the stadium. People were into it. His starts made Pirates games feel like a real Major League Baseball game with the type of environment and crowd involvement you can get at Yankee Stadium, or Fenway Park or Citizens Bank Park. This year? Nothing. No buzz. No atmosphere. Not even a noticeable bump in attendance for him. They have already squashed that experience not even a full calendar year into it.

And that doesn’t even get into every other chaotic event that has happened, ranging from the Bucco Brick debacle, to the Surfside ad, to a fan falling out of the stands, to an usher beating the shit out of a dude with a belt (deserved, from everything I have read and heard).

It’s only May 8! That is decades worth of events jammed into six weeks!

But let’s just focus on the mess that is the play on the field.

At 12-26 (as of Thursday), the Pirates are officially off to one of the worst starts in franchise history (at least dating back to 1901). This is only the seventh time over that stretch they have not won more than 12 games through the first 38 games of a season.

• 2025: 12-26

• 2020: 12-26 (finished 19-41 in shortened season. That is a 111-loss pace over a full season)

• 2006: 11-27 (finished 67-95)

• 1957: 11-27 (finished 62-92)

• 1955: 12-26 (finished 60-94)

• 1954: 11-27 (finished 53-101)

• 1952: 7-31 (finished 42-112)

That is the company this team is keeping.

At their current pace they are on track for a 111-loss season, which would put them in the company of the worst teams in the history of Major League Baseball.

Everything about this is just beyond any reasonable comprehension.

The biggest issue, and the person most responsible for this, is quite obviously owner Bob Nutting.

Everything in sports starts at the top, and especially in baseball where spending and resources are such an important part of it. He’s a terrible owner. He sucks. He might actively be tanking the franchise in a real life Rachel Phelps situation. Who knows. It’s the only somewhat logical explanation aside from extreme cheapness.

Ownership is the thing that is going to prevent the Pirates from ever reaching a level that is comparable to, say, the Los Angeles Dodgers and New York Yankees, and it is shameful in 2025 to not have a payroll that is anything below $100 million.

But here’s the thing: Nobody expects the Pirates to be the Dodgers or Yankees. I don’t think anybody is asking for that.

But why can’t you be Cleveland or Milwaukee? Why can’t you spend like Detroit or Baltimore are this season? Why can’t your GM find good, cheap players like so many other teams around baseball? Why has his front office that has invested so much money in analytics and research been so bad at developing players and finding bargains? What the fuck are they looking at?

All we’re asking for is competitive. Make the playoffs. Compete for the playoffs. The bar is literally on the floor.

I know there is a focus on the financial disparity in baseball between the haves and the have nots, but it is easier to make the playoffs in Major League Baseball right now than it has ever been in the history of the sport. There are 12 teams going in every year. If you win 84 games you are in the race. If you win 86 games you are probably in the playoffs. This is not asking a lot.

We have seen teams with less than 90 wins make the World Series.

The door to the playoffs has never been more wide open. And the Pirates can not even come close to it.

What makes it even more frustrating is they have two players in Skenes and Oneil Cruz that are not only performing like All-Stars, but they are also making absolute peanuts compared to their production level.

Cruz is flirting with a 40-40 pace, has a top-25 OPS in all of baseball and is starting to become the hitter they envisioned him to be. His defense is still a problem (and both he and the team have to figure that out) but the bat absolutely plays. He’s an All-Star. He is a legitimate All-Star.

Skenes might not be as dominant as he was during his rookie season, but he still has a sub-2.8 ERA and is still pitching like an ace. He has a 2.77 ERA right now. I know that is in the top-20 range right now, but a 2.77 ERA over a full season usually ends up in the top-five. He has been excellent.

Combined — COMBINED — these two guys make less than $1.8 million this season.

It should be impossible to have two players this good, and this cheap, and somehow get worse as a team.

The Pirates have not only managed to get worse, they appear to have become dramatically worse.

While ownership is, again, the biggest culprit in this mess, ONLY blaming ownership takes too much heat off of Cherington. And that man frankly deserves no such grace from a baseball and team-building perspective.

He has been here for six years and not developed a single hitter, despite taking one with a No. 1 overall pick and several others with top-10 picks. There is no immediate help on the horizon. The money he has spent, he has spent horrifically. Including his time in Boston (a real organization with real resources), he has been an MLB general manager for 10 seasons. He has produced a losing season in nine of them (somehow the one outlier, non-losing season produced a World Series. We need an ESPN 30-for-30 documentary on that).

Now in his six seasons in Pittsburgh he has already produced two 100-loss seasons, had a third that would have been a 100-loss season and is on pace for a fourth.

That’s not ALL on ownership.

Especially since the previous general manager worked under the same owner and at one point built a team that was second in the Major Leagues in wins over a three-year stretch.

It’s not easy to do here. It’s not easy to do anywhere like this. But it’s possible. And it shouldn’t be acceptable to be THIS bad with so little hope.

Somewhat related: ESPN’s Jeff Passan wrote an article this week looking at the next round of players due for mega-contracts in the nine-figure range.

The Pirates had two players make the cut.

Passan projects Cruz’s next contract to be in the $200 million range, and Skenes to be in the $400 million range and perhaps even the $500 million range.

The pisser is there is almost zero chance that either player gets that money in Pittsburgh.

Which brings me to the next point: Ben Cherington is going to get fired. Eventually. Perhaps after this latest failure of a season. Maybe even before it ends.

The first thing a new general manager is going to do is walk into their Federal Street office at PNC Park, look at their Major League roster, look at their farm system, look at the contracts Cruz and Skenes are going to command over the next few years that they will never be able to pay, and conclude that trading them is the most sensible long-term option. It may not happen next year. Or the year after. But it will happen. Then it is all back to square one with a new general manager.

Now let’s talk about some other random Major League Baseball thoughts from around the league….