No. 25: Pittsburgh Pirates
Can the Pirates win without spending money?
There are three teams in baseball that have never had a $100 million payroll. You can probably name the other two because they’re pretty famous for not spending money. There are the Oakland A’s, who invented Moneyball, and there are the Tampa Bay Rays, who took Moneyball and supercharged it.
Then there are the Pittsburgh Pirates.
Many years ago, when I was a columnist in Kansas City—a team that also gained some notoriety for not spending — I came up with my “Baseball Magazine Law.” That law is: If you’re in a fantasy baseball league, and you’re given half the money that everyone else has for the auction, the surest way of losing is to use the same baseball magazines everyone else uses.
Now, magazines are mostly dead, alas, but the principle stands. The A’s did things differently because NOT doing things differently guaranteed failure.
The Rays do things differently because NOT doing things differently guarantees failure.
The Pirates… they don’t seem to do things differently at all.
And failure inevitably follows.
The Pirates have had four winning records this century—three of them in a row from 2013 through 2015. Those were the glory years. Did the Pirates do anything different leading up to years? I don’t think so. What I think actually happened is this: Baseball does offer SOME benefits to being stinky. One of those benefits—and this is less true now than it was—is that bad teams get high picks in the draft. The Pirates had a top-12 pick TWELVE times between 2000 and 2013. Twice they had the No. 1 pick, and once the No. 2.
They missed plenty—John Van Benschoten and Bryan Bullington and Brad Lincoln and Daniel Moskos and Mark Appel—but they also hit some. You have to hit some, right? Their 2013-15 teams were led, of course, by Andrew McCutchen (11th overall pick in 2005), and featured hometown hero Neil Walker (11th overall pick in 2004), and their power source was Pedro Álvarez (2nd overall pick in 2008). Their ace was Gerrit Cole (No. 1 pick in 2013).
The Pirates also signed Starling Marte out of the Dominican Republic and he developed into a Gold Glove winner and an All-Star. They drafted Tony Watson in a later round, and he became a top-notch reliever.
Now, that’s not enough—you can’t win just with homegrown kids—and the Pirates were shrewd in picking up relatively low-cost veterans who performed well. They signed Francisco Liriano after he had a couple of miserable seasons in Minnesota, they traded for Mark Melancon when he was still affordable. They traded for high-priced A.J. Burnett but had the Yankees eat most of the salary. And they actually spent a little bit of money—$17 million—signing catcher Russell Martin to a two-year deal.
All of this made the Pirates pretty good. I mean, you don’t want to get carried away with HOW good they were—they never even won the division. But they were pretty good.
Then, pretty quickly, they weren’t good at all again. They obviously didn’t even try to keep Cole; that was a non-starter in Pittsburgh. They traded away McCutchen. Another super-high draft pick—Jameson Taillon, the No. 2 pick in 2010—got good, got hurt and got traded. And the brief era of good feelings ended unsatisfyingly.
And the Pirates took from all this the absolute wrong lesson—keep spending nothing, keep being bad, try to land at least some of your super-high draft picks—the ones you’re willing to pay for—and hope to get lucky.
And…