How the Pirates Got Here
(Photo: Chappy02)
My book Big Data Baseball was published back in 2015. For those unfamiliar with it, it chronicles the Pirates’ 2013 campaign, when the club broke a string of 20 straight losing seasons (a North American pro sports record) and advanced to the NLDS.
There was a misnomer back then that the Pirates were a young team coming of age. They were not. Gerrit Cole was the only prominent prospect who debuted that season, while 90% of the roster was composed of holdovers from 2012. The book documents how the Pirates made a dramatic pivot, in part by residing on what represented the cutting edge of analytical thought at the time.
Pittsburgh’s transformation came in the form of a three-pronged approach, based on framing, shifts, and ground balls. They were the first club to invest significant dollars on the open market in pitch-framing when they signed Russell Martin to a then-club-record, free-agent deal of two years and $17 million. (Yes, that was a record amount.) They increased their defensive-shift usage by 400%. And while they were not the first club to more frequently employ a shift, they were the first — through sequencing, location, and pitch type — to consciously spike their ground-ball rate, to coerce more ground balls into the shifts. The Pirates led baseball in ground-ball rate from 2013 to -15.
The Pirates were also on the cutting edge of communication, the first known club to integrate a quantitative analyst full-time, even on road trips, into their clubhouse. Mike Fitzgerald was there not only to enhance scouting material but to be a conduit in exchanging ideas between the clubhouse and front office. Of course, having peak Andrew McCutchen didn’t hurt either.
When the book appeared on shelves, the Pirates were at their high-water mark, en route to a 98-win season. They were viewed then as a model, sabermetric-leaning organization having engineered a remarkable turnaround. Since 2015, though, both the trajectory of the big-league club and the perception of the organization have turned south.
Ben and Jeff had me on a recent edition of Effectively Wild to discuss what exactly happened, how the Pirates got here, but I think it makes sense to share some additional words here, too.
The Pirates never benefited from the happy ending that the Kansas City Royals got to experience. They were never able to win a World Series. There is no flag that will fly forever from this leadership group’s efforts to date. They also had some misfortune, running into Jake Arrieta and Madison Bumgarner at the height of their powers in back-to-back NL Wild Card games. Over the last couple of offseasons we’ve seen the core of those postseason clubs dismantled — most dramatically so over the last week with the trades of Cole and McCutchen.
Yes, Colin Moran and his swing changes are interesting. Joe Musgrove’s velocity bump and Michael Feliz’s swing-and-miss stuff are promising elements of a return that Kiley McDaniel reviewed favorably. But even if you think the Pirates acquired some interesting pieces, these transactions still symbolize the end of something of an era in Pittsburgh and a mission that came up short not only of a World Series title but even a deep push into October.
There is a perception problem in Pittsburgh. While the recent deals have grown on this author the more I evaluate them, they nevertheless resulted in the departure of two foundational players, the face of the franchise and a former No. 1 pick, and the arrival of none.
There is outrage in Pittsburgh. A lot of it, perhaps fairly, is directed towards ownership more than anyone else.
So far, 41,878 people have signed a petition to ask Major League Baseball to force Bob Nutting to sell the Pirates. It won’t do a thing, but it might be the only time in 2018 that 40K Pirates fans gather in one place. https://t.co/kNIy1qS42B
— Stephen J. Nesbitt (@stephenjnesbitt) January 18, 2018
At a time when owners are reaping the benefits of revenue-sharing, of sky-rocketing franchise values (Forbes values the Pirates at $1.25 billion), of windfalls from MLBAM and other media outlets, Pirates owner Bob Nutting is claiming baseball poverty.
Asked Bob Nutting what it will take for #Pirates to break cycle of "develop, then sell when gets too costly."
Answer: "I think you'd have a fundamental redesign of the economics of baseball, that's not what we're going to have."#Pirates— Will Graves (@WillGravesAP) January 16, 2018
Some of this outrage in Western Pennsylvania — and even nationally, at Sports Illustrated, in a compelling piece by Jon Tayler — appears to be just.
As MLB Network’s Brian Kenny noted, what is different about the Pirates’ run than that of the Royals’ is that Pirates never got out of the bottom-third of major-league payrolls despite winning and attendance increases.
And now that once enviable core group, one upon which ownership never built, has been broken up.
This doesn’t scream out “commitment to winning from ownership.” In fact, it screams out that the economic model in baseball is perhaps broken — a point Craig Edwards, Nathaniel Grow, and myself have written and have all made recently in these pages while advocating for everything from payroll floors to replacing arbitration with restricted free agency. The largest free-agent commitment made by the Pirates between 2013 and -15 — and, incidentally, in franchise history — was the three-year, $39-million pact with Francisco Liriano. Liriano was later traded in a salary dump to Toronto in 2016.
In May of 2015, as a newspaper reporter, I asked Nutting about investing in free agents at a time when the game was trending younger.
From that piece:
“I think prudence and judgment would indicate that those long-term, late-in-career deals in any era have generally not turned out to be very good decisions,” Nutting said. “I think we’ve been right to do what we’ve done (in avoiding lucrative free agent deals). I think we’ll be even more right in the next era.”
Nutting isn’t wrong. In essence, he identified then what we are seeing to an even more extreme degree now. Teams have devalued free agency and believe they can win mostly with homegrown and pre-arbitration talent while also residing on the cutting edge of analytics. Rather than try to jump to the middle class of spenders, the Pirates’ 2013-15 success seemed to verify Pirate ownership’s belief they could win with a small payroll and without a significant financial commitment.
Was the lack of spending the culprit? It didn’t help. But there were bigger issues at play in the Pirates’ decline than free-agent spending.
While the Pirates were on the vanguard of some analytical movements, those competitive advantages soon closed. Soon every team was shifting on the majority of plays. Catcher framing is no longer a market inefficiency and neither are ground-ball pitchers. In fact, the Pirates appeared to miss the next big trend in baseball: the home-run surge.
In 2017, in the year of the juiced ball and launch angle, only the Giants hit fewer home runs than the Pirates (151). In 2014, the Pirates were sixth in the majors in home runs (156). Pirates decision-makers thought after the 2014 season that we were headed away from an era of home runs and power and toward low-strikeout, line-drive hitters. (See: Royals’ and Giants’ World Series-winning teams.)
I asked Huntington about planning for the future in today’s environment last season.
“We actually had this misdirected belief that when college baseball went to the less impactful bats that we would get back to good baseball,” Huntington said. “That guys would learn how to hit and how to use the whole field with authority, learn how to hit and run… and we would get back to where we were pre-steroid era. Unfortunately, guys doubled down and tried to launch even more.
“It’s an interesting time in the industry. Is it a new normal? It’s a normal now. I don’t know if it’s a new normal, but it’s a normal now.”
It’s difficult to retain competitive advantages in part because information is so vast and deep, and best practices disseminate so quickly. The speed of change and copy-catting has never been greater in the sport. It’s also hard to stay ahead of the curve and foresee every new trend that is going to be important. In the 2014-15 offseason, not many thought we were on the verge of a run-scoring and home-run surge.
Another cost of winning is not only being copied but losing personnel. The Pirates lost Fitzgerald to Arizona, where he runs the analytics department. They lost pitching guru Jim Benedict to Miami. (He’s since joined the Cubs.)
Another issue is that the Pirates failed to develop a tremendous amount of homegrown, impact talent. While the organization selected in the top four of the draft every year from 2008 to 2011, only Jameson Taillon remains with the club. Pedro Alvarez and Tony Sanchez have long since departed and now Cole joins them. The top 20 rounds of the 2009 draft have produced -0.1 WAR to date for the Pirates. The top 20 rounds of the 2010 draft have produced 3.5 WAR — all positive production coming from Taillon.
The Pirates believe their evaluation process is improving, that Mitch Keller and Shane Baz — the latter of whom had the best fastball spin rate in last year’s draft — might be evidence of that.
But the Pirates’ 2013-15 core, which ultimately helped the club win the second-most games in baseball during that span, did not lead to a productive homegrown core in 2016 and 2017, during which the club posted 78- and 75-win seasons.
Perhaps the greatest culprit of all is that the team’s expected core players in 2016 and -17 — Jung Ho Kang, Starling Marte, Gregory Polanco, Cole, and McCuthcen — have either been absent from the field or failed to perform as expected over the last two seasons.
Between the decline of their analytical advantages, a lack of support from the farm system, the absence of key players, and an underwhelming commitment from ownership, the Pirates have entered a recession.
Now the club is plotting an interesting course.
Rather than burn everything to the ground and rebuild, as the Astros have done and White Sox are doing, the Pirates have decided instead to retool. After the Cole trade, the Pirates’ 2018 wins forecast did not change (81 wins) here at FanGraphs. The McCutchen trade dropped it to 78 wins. Rather than target high-upside prospects in returns for Cole and McCutchen, the Pirates acquired a number of players who have reached the major leagues. The hope is that they bolster the next core, one led by Keller, Taillon, Josh Bell, Austin Meadows, and Kevin Newman, some of whom have already arrived. They’re betting that the dip is more shallow than what the Marlins, Orioles, and Royals face. And the Pirates are more talented than those clubs, on paper, today.
When everyone is either a Have or Have Not, perhaps there is a market inefficiency in occupying that middle ground where fewer teams reside.
While I hope there are still instructive, timeless lessons in Big Data Baseball related to communication, collaboration, and the value of analytics, it feels more like a work of history than one of current events. It’s a reminder of the speed of change in the game, and how difficult it is to stay ahead of the curve, particularly when ownership is unwilling to fill in voids with quality free agents.
The end of the the Pirates’ 20-year drought was something to celebrate, an achievement to be sure. It required ingenuity and resourcefulness. But sustaining success in baseball is the most difficult thing to achieve in major pro sports, where one position (say, a quarterback) or one player (a superstar in the NBA) cannot be a franchise savior, a sport without salary caps and floors to level the playing field.
Getting there is one thing for a small-market club with frugal ownership in major-league baseball; staying there is quite another.
A Cleveland native, FanGraphs writer Travis Sawchik is the author of the New York Times bestselling book, Big Data Baseball. He also contributes to The Athletic Cleveland, and has written for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, among other outlets. Follow him on Twitter @Travis_Sawchik.
If my owner said, “I think you’d have [to have] a fundamental redesign of the economics of baseball, that’s not what we’re going to have” to justify not going for it when you had a contention window I would be pissed off too.
I don’t think the decline of the core players is necessarily anyone’s fault, but neither can you use it as an excuse. Of course they are going to decline, that is why you have to maximize your window when you have it.
Note that this doesn’t just mean throwing money at long-term deals on the free agent market. You could take on salary in trades, too.
You have to maximize your windows of contention. Because we have ownership that is not willing to do that, the economic model is broken and not necessarily in the way Nutting is saying.
“but neither can you use it as an excuse.”
Maybe the team can’t come out and say that their core stunk it up, but that still happened. The top three returning hitters and pitchers from 2015 – Cutch, Kang, Cervelli, Cole, Liriano, and Locke combined for 24 WAR in 2015, and then seven in 2016. Declines happen, but that is just falling off the table. It is near impossible for a team to survive a 17 WAR hit from their top players, and especially so for a small-market team. $20M of spending that offseason wouldn’t have done much.
No, I’m suggesting they should have spent more before that, when they were breaking out.
Easy to say in hindsight, but when it looks like you have a contender you gotta go all in.
Gotta spend more before that. Or make a trade that would take on money and talent.
Their payroll went from $52M in 2012 to $100M in 2016. Sure, maybe they could have afforded to spend more, we’ll never know, but they didn’t sit on their hands.
“Easy to say in hindsight, but when it looks like you have a contender you gotta go all in.”
It’s incredibly easy to say when you fall from legit contender to below average that quickly. They averaged 93 wins over those three years, so it’s not like they didn’t have enough talent on the field to have just as much of a chance in the crapshoot as anyone else. They just got some real bad rolls.
They looked like they had the talent to be competitive for at least a couple more years, and had good enough prospects that they could possibly even string out a bunch of chances at that postseason crapshoot. Sure, its a legitimate argument that they should have sacrificed those possible wins in year four and beyond for more in years one through three. But let’s not act like trying for a 15% chance instead of a 10% chance a couple times is always the obvious play over trying for more 10% chances. Choosing the latter has a perfectly reasonable argument.
If you accept that FA is at best a very inefficient way to add talent to your team, then it seems the Pirates’ big failure may be in not trading some of the previously highly regarded farm system for Cole’s & McCutchen’s from other teams. We all love prospects here and especially for small market teams, but give credit to Billy Beane and Dayton Moore: they traded their best prospects because they knew they had to maximize major league talent in their short windows.
Here’s the 2015/16 FA class. Outside of Murphy (home run!), Upton & Cespedes (some surplus), and maybe Greinke ($$$) and Zobrist and a few others, a whole lot of very bad contracts:
https://www.mlbtraderumors.com/2015/11/2015-16-top-50-mlb-free-agents-with-predictions.html
Not sure I understand why the A’s get credit for trading prospects when their 3 year postseason run wasn’t a whole lot more successful than Pittsburgh’s.
Billy Beane did what Travis Sawchik wanted the Pirates to do. Add more Major-League talent to a playoff team. It didn’t work out for the A’s, it may not have worked out for the Pirates, but Pirates’ fans seem to want to see the effort.
Neal Huntington doesn’t want this boom-bust cycle, but rather hopes a deep prospect pool gives him continually a cost-controlled 83-ish win team that occasionally spikes into the 88-win territory.
I agree.
I think it’s fair to criticize Nutting for not adding some more payroll – probably ~$20 million per year – but looking back in retrospect it doesn’t appear that would have moved the needle on being a team that made the playoffs three straight years and then dropped way back.
The other piece of it seems to be trading away prospects in “win now” trades, which I think the Pirates didn’t do because they saw a path to keeping their window of contention open a few years past 2015. That didn’t work out both because so many core players dropped off simultaneously (as both Travis and commenter cmd600 note) and secondarily because some key members of the next wave of prospects (Josh Bell, Tyler Glasnow) haven’t (at least so far) performed up to their prospect status.
Huntington’s strategy appeared to be that the best way to get a World Series win, or at least deep playoff runs, is to make the playoffs as many times as possible. I think that’s a very defensible approach, especially with how the Pirates looked going forward in that 2013-15 time frame.
While losing Kang and having Marte, Cole, and Cutch drop off likely killed many of the playoff hopes, I think a larger failure is with developing some prospects (like Polanco, Glasnow, Hanson). If people really want to open their eyes a bit and look beyond the shrug-your-shoulders misfortune many seem to be adopting, look at the 2014 top prospect list from BA and see how many of the guys there have developed into MLB producers. And if they haven’t, I’m curious how that isn’t this organization’s development failure
Beane is the most overrated exec in MLB in my opinion. Yes, I know that Oakland has harsh payroll constraints. He is still terrible.
Perhaps I’m reading your primary statement inaccurately, but you seem to be saying that since free agency is inefficient, they should have traded prospects for impending free agents. That seems even more inefficient than throwing money at players who have no strings attached and can be kept for more than a few months to a year.
Can you please correct me if I’m wrong?
The Astros’ and Giants’ acquisitions of Cole and McCutchen seem to be getting strong reviews. I would rather do trades like that than give Wei-Yin Chen a 4-year, $65M contract. Click on the MLB Trade Rumors’ link and see if you’d rather have rolled the dice on 4- or 5- year deals for those FA’s.
The Astros and Giants had more leverage than the Pirates, knowing they (the Pirates) needed to extract what they could while they still could. And from what I remember reading in multiple sources, neither team gave away their best.
The Pirates could have tried to strong-arm some team(s) in the same position during those years, I suppose that’s true. And while I can agree with maximizing a window, that really does have to be weighed against the continued health of the organization (without getting into the worth/willingness of the owner).
Giving up your best or near-best prospects to push in your chips for one year, maybe two is worthwhile in some respects and circumstances. Depends on the field, depends on your place on the bubble and upside of your players outside the stars. But every prospect you give up is one less reinforcement, one less potential success story, one less potential star two or three years down the road. And giving away multiple of them for one player just isn’t feasible most of the time, not unless you’ve already stocked the lower minors with top-end talent that will be ready to graduate by the time the window you shoved open is starting to creak.
Without free agency or trading your own stars, it’s a war of attrition, giving up two or three for one. Eventually you’re left barren.
Great article and I loved your book.
the sick thing is that they really are within striking distance of the wildcard still.
A wise FA or two (Projected at 0 WAR in LF. seems like an okay spot for a 1 yr deal FA. Lucroy would add a win at C, etc), some “bullpenning for a full regular season” pioneering, literally any of Moran’s power breakout being real, and boom, they’re past the Mets, Rockies, Dbacks, and Giants
Granted, i’m sure those four teams arent done teambuilding either
Who would you propose the Pirates sign on a 1-yr deal for LF? CarGo? Oof. Maybe Jarrod Dyson takes a 1yr-deal (but maybe not)? Curtis Granderson might have been an option, but he’s signed with the Blue Jays now.
Dyson actually was who I had in mind. He’s a guy that would remain useful even if/when Meadows arrives.
That said, i’d also listen to an argument that a Luplow-Frazier(and eventually Luplow-Meadows) platoon would be better, even if the current version of the projections don’t agree.
Everyone forgets about Osuna 🙁
I’d look at lower cost 1 year options like Daniel Nava or Seth Smith. Both are still capable of .750+ OPS and aren’t significant defensive liabilities.
I think Dyson may end up a Giant.
Yeah, like you allude to at the end, there are still many top free agents to go around, but the Pirates won’t be getting involved in any of that. At least not unless a sudden “fundamental redesign of the economics of baseball” occurs…
do we have a feel for how much money those teams can still throw around? I feel like the Mets are always up against their self imposed budget, and the Giants are approaching the tax threshold. I have no idea how much money the Dbacks or Rockies have left. They’re both right against or exceeding what they spent last year if i’m reading a few charts correctly.
What mlb should definitely not do is expanding more. If anything I would prefer 2 teams to contract or at least relocate to a better market if one is left.
We can’t expect owners to accept losing money even if they are billionaires but we also shouldn’t have to put up with uncompetive payrolls for more than a decade. Occasionally 3-4 years of low payroll in a rebuild is ok but not 15 years in a row like the Rays and As.
Imo when talking about the salary floor thing mlb should give low payroll teams a few years but then say if you can’t support a higher payroll in 5 years you have to relocate or contract.
If there are markets who can’t generate enough revenue they shouldn’t be in mlb. Would suck for the fans but not every city can have an mlb team.
Instead of thinking about expansion mlb should rather resolve the rays and As situation especially.
Pittsburgh is a great baseball town but the Pirates have the wrong ownership.
Pittsburgh isn’t a great baseball town. The Pirates are the only active franchise to never have eclipsed 2.5 million in attendance. Not in the 70s, the early 90s, or even the most recent run. They have never surpassed that mark. Every other franchise (including the much maligned Tampa Bay Rays) has done it at least once. How can you call that a “great baseball town”.
I’m a Pirates fan and I want it to be but that is simply not the reality of the situation.
Which leads to the idea of a tax floor that would work like the over salary tax. If you get under a certain amount you get a tax, then for each year you stay under it it gets worse. At some point ownership would start bleeding so much, they’d be forced to raise payroll or sell.
I also wonder if a floor tax should be related to revenue, so anyone under a particular number but still over a percentage of revenue would be safe, or at least less penalized. Say if they spend over 66% of revenue on players.
I think one of the biggest missteps for the front office was overestimating the value of being ahead of the curve. It seems the FO thought they could make a habit of winning that way while hardly adjusting payroll if at all. Problem is, as this article addresses, teams have become privy to new trends and eager to copycat; as a result there’s less marginal value out of trying new things. At a certain point you need to spend money and have good players that put you over the top, even if that means risking an overpay occasionally.
Okay, but it’s not really true that the Pirates “didn’t adjust payroll if at all.”
Here’s the link to Cot’s, where one can see that the Pirates significantly raised payroll in the 2015-2017 timeframe:
http://legacy.baseballprospectus.com/compensation/cots/national-league-central/pittsburgh-pirates/
One might speculate that the Pirates didn’t raise it “enough” given the Pirates’ revenues/profits during that time, but I’ve never seen reliable information about what the Pirates’ revenues/profits were during that time, so can’t say what an appropriate or reasonable amount would be.
You put that in quotes, but I didn’t actually say it in that way nor did I mean it…
Never said they didn’t adjust payroll, just that they thought they could get by either not adjusting it or slightly adjusting it. I would call their payroll raise slight. It brought them from 27th to 24th, and was probably the bare minimum raise to keep angry fans with pitchforks out of the office. They were never aggressive in free agency in the least.
Obviously we don’t have a balance sheet for the Pittsburgh Pirates franchise but most speculation has marked the ownership as cheap, and to me all signs point to that as spot on.
The 40-man payroll was raised ~$60MM between 2011 and 2016-17. I wouldn’t call it slight, but to each his own.
And all signs don’t support such speculation (and it “is” speculation), but I don’t have an axe to grind with Pittsburgh ownership, as I’m a fan of another team.
…Which still moved them from 27th highest to 24th highest payroll, even considering your suddenly widened time period.
I don’t think you can look at the Pirates payroll in a vacuum and say it rose significantly. If you want to get really pedantic, sure. But practically every other team’s payroll was rising around that time so I don’t really count it.
Not a fan of the Pirates either, just a fan of having a balanced, competitive playing field. The Pirates ownership has not given the team the tools to have a sustained run. All signs do in fact support the cheapness of the ownership given the size of the market and the Pirates payroll relative to similarly sized markets. The team’s valuation is middling for the MLB. Well-respected theories have been formed from less.
The size of the market is terrible. The local TV revenue is near the bottom. Pittsburgh, as a revenue base, is in a tier with Tampa, Cincy, and KC.
The only thing that would provide a “balanced, competitive playing field” for teams like Pitt is far greater revenue sharing, where money is simply transferred from top-end teams to bottom-market teams.
It’s obviously not a top market, but it is similar in size to Denver, St. Louis, and Baltimore as well. The MLB teams in those city have consistently maintained higher payrolls than the Pirates. Anyway, we know Tampa has its own issues (crap ballpark, crap location), I admittedly don’t know much about Cincy, and KC obviously was willing to spend when it was clear they could field a winner.
I’m not against revenue sharing. Ultimately it makes the game better, and I don’t care much for how some millions of dollars shuffles through the hands of billionaires. There would just have to be a way to ensure that owners don’t pocket all the money.
The Rockies are possibly a reasonably fair comparison to the Pirates. The Rockies also have a pretty low local TV contract, though they do seem to draw better than the Pirates (win or lose). The Cardinals and Orioles almost certainly aren’t.
The Cardinals’ revenue punches way above the weight of what you’d think from the size of the St. Louis market. Some of it is St. Louis being a very good baseball town, and some of it is the accidental history of baseball geography that made the Cardinals a regional team for a pretty wide area including much of downstate Illinois, parts of Indiana, western Tennessee, and Arkansas.
The Orioles do now have to divide the combined Washington-Baltimore metro area with the Nationals, but they look to have about $20 million more per year of local TV rights fees than the Pirates. Even that amount almost certainly understates the difference, because the Orioles own well over 50% of MASN. MASN carries both the Orioles and Nationals, and the Orioles therefore effectively get a piece of the Nationals’ TV revenue. Jonah Keri wrote about that background a few years ago ( http://grantland.com/features/baltimore-orioles-offseason-spending-al-east/ ), and there has been a long-running dispute (including litigation) between the Nationals and Orioles over the particulars of the deal.
I agree with the idea that Nutting could raise the Pirates’ payroll to some degree, but I do think that the Pirates are a bit stuck on revenue beyond even what we’d think from a relatively small metro area. As a commenter above notes, the Pirates have never drawn particularly well, win or lose. They’re also pretty boxed in and prevented from developing a regional market. They run into the Ohio teams to the west and some combination of the Phillies, Orioles, and Nationals as they go east. To the south, West Virginia is one of the lowest population states. Look at the MLB TV blackout map as a rough guide to a team’s regional market (
), and the Pirates simply don’t pick up a big population in their regional market compared to most teams.
Here’s the excess of KC’s year-end payroll over Pittsburgh’s, starting with 2012, the year before each ended a long run of losing years (per Cot’s):
+$7mm, +$12mm, +$19mm, +$33mm, +$67mm, +$76mm
In that same span, Pittsburgh had a better overall record, more playoff appearances (albeit brief ones), and averaged +90K in attendance per year (per B-R).
I’m not saying KC was right and Pittsburgh wrong, nor claiming to know either team’s financial condition or near-term outlook. But you can’t deny that, of these two teams that underwent very similar flowerings, Pittsburgh chose the far cheaper path.
Almost any raise they made was due to inflation. Coonelly signed a terrible TV deal 10 years ago, and it’s still killing them.
Yep,. Remember when NH traded for Niese, and the brayed about pitchers paying the Pirates FO to come to Pgh to pitch for them. Yeah, good times. What a jag.
This. TRUTH.
The 2015 Pirates were robbed. 2nd best record in baseball and only a stupid one game playoff
And fans were robbed in 2016. Happ could’ve been signed. He went 20-4 for TOR. Vogey/Niese went a combined 12-13. The offense wasn’t horrible, albeit not TOR’s, but most starters/subs were >100 OPS+. Not saying Happ on his own could’ve turned fortunes, but that’s an 8-9 game swing if he pulled off that record in Pgh, right there with Mets & Giants at 87 wins.
To me, that remains the defining moment of NH’s hubris and subsequent downfall.
This is what I commented yesterday, albeit not this level of detail. The massive mistake was, coming off a 98 win season, not going and getting the necessary pitching to potentially put us over the hump. This decision is still one of the worst they’ve made.
What pitching was available to make up 8 games to the Cardinals, 9 games to the Wild Card teams and 25 games to the Cubs??
Both lambert and Alice Cooper are right in their own ways.
The Pirates probably should have spent some more money to fortify their starting rotation after 2015, pushing 2016 payroll up $15 to $30 million. At the time, they looked to be at a spot on the win curve where those wins would be valuable.
With what actually happened in subsequent years, however, that spending wouldn’t have made a difference on making the playoffs.
Come on, at least do the lazy counterfactual with WAR: Happ put up 3.2 in 2016, Vogelsong + Niese combined for -0.2, so it’d be about a three-win upgrade, not 8-9 (LOL).
“that’s an 8-9 game swing”
That’s uhh not how it works. I’d recommend against using pitchers win-loss totals in any discussion, let alone one at Fangraphs.
Rog already beat me to the WAR totals.
They should have signed Happ, but he would not have gone 20-4 with the 2016 Pirates backing him up.
And if the 2nd best record in baseball 2015 Pirates had made it past the stupid one game playoff against the team with the 3rd best record in baseball, they would have had to face the team with the best record in baseball in the division series. This was really unfair to all three of them.
I love how last year we are a couple games out of the division lead with a glaring need in right field. Trotting John Jaso out there 3-4 times a week. We make 0 moves – Indians end up getting Jay Bruce for free essentially
Travis, I just wanted to take a moment to thank you for not only this article, but especially your book. I always look forward to reading you and wanted to let you know. Thank you
Love that the picture used is from a game at Olympic Stadium.
Could we consider the null hypothesis here — maybe they’re just an average-ish team that’s had some good breaks and some bad ones, made some smart moves and some dumb ones? I’m not sure how you can conclude that “the economic model of baseball is broken” from a sample of 1.
“There was a misnomer back then that the Pirates were a young team coming of age. They were not. Gerrit Cole was the only prominent prospect who debuted that season, while 90% of the roster was composed of holdovers from 2012. ”
I’ll take “non sequiturs for $600, Alex”
Players don’t have to be rookies to be “coming of age”
Also, a “misnomer” is “an inaccurate name,” not “an errant belief”
No one called them “The Pittsburgh Young Team Coming of Age”
Yeah, he presumably meant misconception instead of misnomer.
Average PIT pitcher age in 2013 was 28.7 years, league average 28.4. Average batter age 27.9, league average 28.5.
As a long suffering Pirate fan I have been hoping for 5 years that Nutting would find some way to add $10-20 million to the payroll budget. Particularly after the first wild card season. The next season saw them have to go with Ike Davis/Gaby Sanchez at first and Travis Snider/Jose Tabata in right for most of the year. Those four combined for over 1200 plate appearances and contributed? a combined WAR of 1.0 An injection of $20M then could have gotten the WAR for those to slots to 4 with any luck and given them a better chance in the Wild Card round or added the three wins it would have taken to win their division.
BUT,,,
I have always said it is Nuttings team and he can run it anyway he wants. I do object to his trying to insinuate that the fans are somehow culpable by not turning out for a mediocre product thereby forcing reductions in payroll. Win first THEN you get better attendance and a better TV deal.
Great article, with lots of food for thought.
Marte, Mclutchen, Alvarez, Walker, Tabata , Cole certainly seemed like a nice core in 2013 even if they did not all make their debut in 2013. Failing to add to this by spending a bit was a fatal flaw.
Some rebuilds fail or are not lasting. Pirates, Marlins and even KC (seeing how short their period of success was).
Bad timing of their peak window is a huge part. When 2 of the top 5-7 other teams in baseball are in your own division, you better be damn good just to sniff the play-in game. Getting the a division,pennant in either of those years would have dramatically helped the odds of a WS appearance.
The Bucs spent more money and traded more prospects than they seem to be getting credit for. They remained bottom third, but they came close to doubling their payroll.
A lot of the money went to guys they already had, so those signing can get a bit overlooked. The deals didn’t all work out, but they made sizable commitments to Liriano, Cervelli, Marte, Harrison, and Polanco, and they snagged A.J. Burnett a second time. They also paid their arbitration guys through to the end unless they were bad deals.
I know they could’ve done more. I’m just not sure that it would have changed much.
While I can understand the frustration of supporting a lower-revenue team with a tight-fisted owner, there needs to be some realism about just how much more payroll a team in the Pirates’ market/revenue situation would add.
Travis’ article is a thoughtful and pretty balanced take on what happened with the Pirates. Brian Kenny’s tweet, by contrast, appears largely ignorant on the differences between teams’ revenue/market situations.
It’s laughable to put the Cubs on that list. The Cubs are a powerhouse revenue team that have gotten up at the same level as the Red Sox and Giants with a good team and may well reach the very top Yankees/Dodgers tier with investments in Wrigley and a new TV deal in a couple years. Also, between Wrigley and the “lovable losers” history, the Cubs have a really high attendance floor that looks to be a bit over 2.6 million (last time they drew fewer than that was 1997), so they’ve got quite a pretty high revenue floor in thinking through the downside of “what if we commit money but the deals don’t work out.”
The Astros aren’t up in the Cubs’ tier, and their revenue level appears to undershoot their market size by a bit. (My personal theory is that many Sunbelt teams have this issue because of the number of transplants who moved there as adults and retain allegiances to other teams.) The Astros are still, however, an easily top half, upper middle-class MLB team by revenue. Craig Edwards’ estimates here a couple years ago were that the Astros’ TV contract pays $35 million more per year than the Pirates’ TV deal. The Astros can also look at history and see a track record of attendance around the 3 million mark for several years in a row ten to fifteen years ago. As a commenter above points out, the Pirates have never gotten above 2.5 million.
The Royals are the team on that list that’s actually a pretty reasonable market/revenue comp for the Pirates. Let’s look at where the Royals ranked by end of season payroll, however, per Cot’s:
– 2014: 19th highest, lost World Series
– 2015: 13th highest, won World Series
– 2016: 9th highest, missed playoffs (81 wins)
– 2017: 8th highest, missed playoffs (80 wins)
I think it’s fair to criticize Nutting for not spending the extra ~$20 million per year to move up the payroll ranks some, and it’s a positive that the Royals’ ownership put some money back into payroll as they got the direct (playoff attendance) and indirect (later seasons) revenue bumps from making two straight World Series. With hindsight, however, the Royals didn’t actually succeed in extending their contention window past 2015.
The big difference between the Royals and Pirates really seems to be that the Royals got much more out of their two playoff appearances than the Pirates did out of their three. With hindsight, it can look like it was pre-ordained that the Royals’ “win now” trades would have this result. Let’s not forget, though, that the Royals were pretty much one ground ball fielded by Carlos Correa and Geovany Soto not hurting his thumb in a wild card game away from maxing out at the same negligible playoff success as the Pirates.
“Float in the middle of the standings” may be a new market inefficiency, but probably not in the 2018 NL – the six good are too good and fully committed, and there are other high variance but higher ceiling rivals.
The fact that the Pirates dealt Cutch to an NL wild card rival says they think they have no shot this year.
If going forward there is such an inefficiency – a few haves and many have nots leave an opportunity in the middle, it implies that there will be low demand for non-elite position players in free agency or trade. The best teams are already loaded, and many other teams won’t really care. We will fairly often see more supply than demand as we have seen this winter.
It follows from this that how we think about or calculate WAR may need to change. It could be as simple using WAR-1 or WAR-0.n, or it may be more complicated.
This “bipolar” talent distribution may or may not be the new normal, but if it is player valuation will also have to adjust to it.
We’ll see, but I’m not sure that this year we’re even seeing a “bipolar” talent distribution of how players get paid.
Relievers are all pretty much getting the sort of contracts that we’d expect based on WAR, including the premium that we often see for late inning relievers versus WAR at other positions.
There haven’t been many position player signings, but going by Steamer’s 2018 WAR projections and typical aging curves, Bruce looks expensive relative to ~$9 million/WAR, Santana looks roughly on the mark, and Cozart looks like a relative bargain. It’s tough to see any trend there.
I’m coming around to the view that a fair number of the unsigned players aren’t going to get the contracts that we originally expected, but I’m not sure just how far they’re going to fall. If, for example, Cain, Cobb, and Lynn all get around their predicted AAV’s but for 3 years rather than 4, that implies some amount of lower expected $/WAR. I’m not sure, though, that it’s falling some massive amount.
I see a confluence of several factors that have the market to this point, and I think that it’s taken nearly all of them to tilt demand vs. supply as far as it has.
There’s of course next year’s free agent class, with teams saving money and luxury tax room for it.
There’s the point that you mention about some teams well ahead of the pack. It’s lined up almost perfectly, though, for a lot of teams to be hesitant about big free agent spending. There are a lot of divisional leaders well ahead of the field, with only the AL East looking like a really competitive divisional race and the NL Central looking competitive to some degree. Normally, though, we’d expect so few competitive divisional races to mean that a lot of teams look to be in the mix for the wild card spots. This year we don’t have that, particularly in the AL. So we don’t have much in the way of teams trying to scratch out 1 or 2 extra wins in 2018 for the divisional races or the Wild Card. I don’t think it will be a norm for both races to line up that way. Typically, either a lot of really good teams will mean several competitive divisional races, or several divisional leaders well ahead of the pack will mean lots of teams see themselves as wild card contenders.
We’ve also had quite a few trades (Stanton, Ozuna, Cole, Kinsler, Longoria, McCutchen, Gordon) filling spots that teams otherwise looked likely to address through free agency. We can say that’s a consequence of rebuilding, but in most years rebuilding teams simply don’t have that many good players left to trade away.
The competitive level of free agent interest can move quite a bit based on small shifts in supply and demand. If, for example, one free agent has two highly motivated teams bidding for him with a clear preference for that player versus a Plan B, then that player is in a great spot to get dollars and years. If it’s one highly motivated team, then it’s something of a staredown of who blinks first. If it’s a team that’s happy to have him, but not extraordinarily motivated, then we get situations such as Ian Desmond and Dexter Fowler both signing 1-year deals in early 2016 for less than the qualifying offers that they’d rejected.
So I don’t think that these dynamics will be a new norm that call for thinking about player valuation differently. It wouldn’t take a whole lot – a couple more teams really motivated to add a handful of marginal wins, and/or a couple fewer players available in trade – to have more normal supply/demand dynamics for several free agents.
You make several good points, and it is entirely possible that the 2018 market is an anomaly.
A “super team” does not need to get 1 or 2 win players over the winter. They have a big talent edge, and they don’t need to maximize regular season wins. Relievers are a special case because they have a huge role in the postseason, which WAR ignores, and they help to protect the health of the starting pitchers, which also has a huge effect on the post season. It is an important symbiotic relationship.
Very often, “up and coming teams” that start hot fade from tired top relievers and tired young starting pitchers new to a 162 game season.
The top relievers are fatigued in part because winning a lot in the first half of the season implies they are pitching quite often. This is what happened to last year’s Rockies (who may be at extra risk of pitcher fatigue) and they correctly responded this winter with a big investment in the top end of their bullpen
Since there are a lot more 1-2 win players than 3-4 win players (we are looking at the positive end of a bell curve), taking both the “super teams” and the “rebuilders” out of the market will often create more supply than demand for 1-2 win players (excluding top relievers).
A game of musical chairs is pretty boring if there are more chairs than players. “I have a lovely Josh Harrison for sale” may be met with “that’s nice, I think I will offer Ed Nunez or Neil Walker or Todd Frazier a contract instead for less money and no loss of other talent.” Is Josh Harrison better? Most likely, but probably not enough for a GM to risk looking bad in a trade. Teams can let the Pirates pay him for half a season and call back at the trade deadline if their cheaper plan flops, fairly confident there will be a host of sellers who at that point view their players as expenses.
Great read. Depressing for Pirates fans.
The stated plan of the Pirates to avoid big free agency contracts doesn’t work if your farm system stinks. My guess is that the same philosophy of running the major league team “on the cheap” has also filtered throughout the farm system in the form of poor player development and poor coaching. Perhaps the overall strategy of Pirates is proving to be flawed and ineffective in the first place.
A quibble on the Wild-Card Game narrative: Calling it “misfortune” to face a real ace double-counts a point — the inherent misfortune of being in a game that’s *designed* to feature such aces — and does so in a post-hoc fashion, based on the outcome.
WCG teams face stud starters more often than not. The median of WCG starters in that year is 4.1 bWAR, and the 13 with 4+ bWAR comprise half such MLB total in that span. But just 3 of 24 starts so far were CG shutouts. And plenty of studs have been touched up; median bWAR of those with the 7 worst, 11 worst and 15 worst Game Scores is all at least 4.1 bWAR.
Getting stymied by Bumgarner and Arrieta may seem predestined in retrospect, yet:
— Bumgarner before blanking the Bucs in 2014 was neither a superstar nor a postseason legend. Over his 4 full years to date, he’d ranked 12th by fWAR, 23rd by bWAR. And his 6 prior PS starts showed a 4.01 RA/9.
— Arrieta after blanking the Bucs in 2015 compiled a 4.64 RA/9 in his next 6 PS starts over 2015-16.
— Pittsburgh’s lone WC win came against Cueto, who at the time was as much an ace as anyone but Kershaw.
I think you’d have [to have] a fundamental redesign of the economics of baseball, that’s not what we’re going to have
I think Nutting is probably right. And imo the solution is to break up the anti-trust exemption (esp re the MLB teams control of the minors teams/leagues), let the different leagues themselves negotiate the media/luxtax stuff, let the teams own/share in those league revs when they are in those leagues, and have promotion/relegation (like English soccer).
Seems pretty clear to me that MLB itself is broken when half the teams are tanking on the field while raking in lux/media revenues – while taxpayers everywhere are providing excess subsidies to billionaires.
It may well be that PIT/owner is more of an occasional ‘top tier’ (Premier) team than a permanent Premier team. And would be better for them and the sport to rebuild in a lesser-caliber league than just suck on the MLB teat while ‘rebuilding’. I applaud him actually for not tanking
Can’t expect MLB or government to consider drastic changes when the industry as a whole is thriving, most teams are profitable, and 24 of 30 clubs have made the postseason within the last 6 years.
To the extent that the financial incentive to tank is a problem, it would be simpler (and plausibly achievable) to tie revenue sharing to minimum payroll thresholds.
P.S. Your case would sound better if you didn’t exaggerate the extent of tanking and revenue sharing, while tossing in the tangential point of taxpayer subsidies, which substantially predate current spending trends.
The taxpayer subsidies are not tangential at all. The anti-trust exemption is why a big rich city like San Jose now (with many billionaires and #10 biggest pop) is stuck with a class-A team in a teeny stadium where players and thus season-results are entirely out of their control while taxpayers of Oakland can be threatened by a cheap owner to pony up like a rich adjacent city. Or why Austin/San Antonio (combined pop bigger than Chicago) have only a AA team between them. And that has certainly been occurring since Polo Grounds and Ebbets Field days in the late 50’s. There is a huge subsidy difference between the smallest MLB park (31000 at Tropicana and now ‘a problem’ after only 20 years) and the largest AAA field (19,000 at Buffalo – built 30 years ago to get an expansion – and avg is more like 12,000). And the difference right now is ‘municipal infrastructure’ v ‘real estate cronyism to an MLB owner’
Of course MLB won’t change. They benefit immensely from the status quo. But the harm to taxpayers – and minor leaguers – and in a very real sense all the cities that are forced into being permanent ‘minor-league cities’ – that’s exactly where one would expect (non-corrupt) politicians to step in when the cause of it all is an exemption from a law.
And me saying that half the teams are tanking is no different than the article itself saying that ‘stuck in the middle’ may be a new market inefficiency.
I don’t like taxpayer-funded stadiums either, but the anti-trust exemption isn’t why those markets don’t have teams.
Quite simply, there is no anti-trust precedent out there that would compel a league to expand. The NBA and NFL don’t have anti-trust exemptions, and there are similarly markets that could support an NBA or NFL team but don’t have one. Most notably, L.A. didn’t have an NFL team for a period of about 20 years.
I think that the impact of baseball’s anti-trust exemption is highly overstated. It’s a quirk of the old Supreme Court ruling that the NFL, NBA, and NHL don’t have baseball’s broad anti-trust exemption. The Sports Broadcasting Act gives those leagues a limited anti-trust exemption for the purpose of negotiating joint broadcast rights, which is used most extensively by the NFL because all NFL games are part of the league’s national TV package.
All of those other sports have economic arrangements that broadly resemble baseball, with differences here and there. They have CBA’s that provide for entry drafts (including restrictions on draftees’ first contracts that clearly underpay younger players relative to veterans), various elements of team control and limitations on player movement, and various limits on spending (all three of those leagues have a salary cap of some sort).
The NHL also has an extensive system of affiliated minor league teams. The NBA’s minor league system (the G League) is less extensive, but it is an affiliated minor league. The NFL doesn’t have any affiliated minor leagues. College football and basketball of course serve as de facto but non-affiliated developmental leagues
A promotion/relegation system simply doesn’t exist in any major North American sport, and I don’t see it happening. All of these leagues have evolved in a manner where the shift to such a system would simply be too radical.
NFL and NBA are quite easily able to control a ‘farm system’ via the NCAA level (which is itself exempt in the way that matters – ie player pay and ‘jobs’) and they do have the exemption for the media contract. They do so via a draft rather than a direct 5+ year control of the players but the effect is much the same. I just find it stunning that Americans don’t see how our pro sports structure (which includes the league being owned/controlled permanently by the individual teams) doesn’t really have an impact.
Germany has 56 fully-pro soccer clubs that can dream of winning the national championship within 3 years – and 31,000 clubs that, theoretically, can win someday (or more likely scout/develop/trade a local hero who can).
England has 68 fully-pro clubs that can have a 3 yr dream – 4000/5000 clubs with a theory chance and local scout/develop/trade hero.
In baseball we have 30 with the 3yr dream – and the 250 or so others can’t even control their own league results or players. This is monopoly101.
PIT is a ‘marginal’ city – 26th largest SMSA and 63rd largest city. Obviously there are many cities like that. More if the megacities themselves had more threat of significant intra-city competition. It is nuts that the only baseball option in the US is MLB or permanently dependent irrelevance.
I’m commenting before I read this article, just to say how excited I am to read Travis’ take a few years after Big Data Baseball at this particular moment for the Pirates.
I’m commenting after just having read this article. Very well done, as usual.
So much talk this offseason of dire problems looming for MLB based on recent financial trends … I see points of concern, but at least two major problems with much of the discussion:
1) The trends in question are largely quite recent, like the broad commitment to avoiding the increasingly harsh luxury-tax penalties.
2) This above all: The past 6 years saw some of the best competitive balance in MLB history. It’s not just that 24 of 30 clubs made at least one postseason appearance, which is partly due to the 2nd wild card. It’s also this:
I figured each club’s W% in rolling 6-year spans since 1962. Out of 51 spans, the most recent one has the:
— 13th-lowest max. W% (.575, Dodgers)
— 9th-highest min. W% (.439, Phillies)
— 6th-smallest spread from max. to min.
— 9th-smallest standard deviation (.038).
Both min. and spread for 2012-17 stand alone of the 20 spans since the ’93 expansion.
Even the extremes of this span come with caveats: The Dodgers’ 5 division crowns have produced no championships and just one pennant; while Philly’s downturn followed 5 straight division crowns and 9 straight winning years, with a WS title, two pennants, and the #2 W% in the prior 6-year span.
The Phils have a decent outlook for the near future, while the next two worst teams in this span (Twins and Rockies) each claimed a wild card last year; and those three have been among the few spenders this offseason.
And no NY or LA-area team has won a WS in the last 8 chances, the longest such streak since Babe Ruth wore Red Sox.
There may be serious problems — there usually are! — but none of the above looks like a system that’s “broken.”
Maybe that’s all threatened by the latest CBA and related trends. Maybe we’ve truly entered the age of superteams. But it’s too soon to know. By the time that case is proven, it will be time for a new CBA. And perhaps by that time, the players will find a new visionary negotiator. Marvin Miller’s second critical insight — that “conceding” 6 years of team control would make artificial scarcity, and so yield more total salary than a freer free agency — worked well (if not fairly) for 40 years, but that cat is finally out of the bag.
The Pirate’s basic problem isn’t an inability to sign FAs. Everyone knows they and other clubs like them have to build a solid core from within in order to have a chance to compete. They are never going to match LA or the Yankees in signing established stars. FAs can make a difference but only if they can supplement the core the team builds .
But in an unguarded moment Nutting explained their problem in a nutshell. When home grown talent gets good he’s not going to pay *them* either. Cole and Cutch are just the latest examples. That’s what he meant when he said a fundamental redesign of baseball economics is necessary for the Pirates to compete, and added “that’s not what we’re going to have”.
Clear, isn’t it? The Pirates can’t keep what they build and they can’t sign the best players other teams develop. Save a lightning bolt of luck, the Pirates are *never* going to the World Series as long as he owns them.
He has to go. Anything anyone–starting with the fans–can do to accomplish that is warranted.
They stopped making trades with the Yankees