The Disconnect in Pittsburgh
Full disclosure: as you might be aware, I authored a book on the Pirates — Big Data Baseball — which was published in 2015. As a result, it’s possible that I write this piece with some bias.
Still, I wouldn’t have entered into that book project if I thought the Pittsburgh Pirates were run by fools, engaged in uninteresting practices, and set for a catastrophic 2014 season. To work on the project, I had to believe the Pirates were a team likely to enjoy more success.
I pitched the book following the 2013 campaign, after the Pirates’ first winning season since 1992. I felt it was a compelling narrative: the Pirates ended the longest consecutive streak of losing seasons in North American pro sports history by residing on the cutting edge of analytics and innovating new practices (like having a quant embedded in the clubhouse) while also remaining attentive to the human element. It was a story of creativity, collaboration, and peak Andrew McCutchen.
When the Pirates were eight games under .500 in May of 2014, I was concerned about the book’s future, but the Pirates turned things around and returned to the postseason. In 2015, the club won 98 games but had the misfortune of playing in a division with a 100-win Cardinals team.
Consider that this is a club that hadn’t had a winning season or entered the playoffs since 1992. Consider what Neal Huntington inherited at the end of 2007 — an organization lacking in talent and without an analytics department, some four years after the publication of Moneyball. What the Pirates engineered in 2013-15 sure seems like an impressive turnaround.
On Tuesday, the Pirates announced that Neal Huntington and Clint Hurdle, each of whom had club options for 2018 that hadn’t yet been exercised, had agreed to four-year extensions. The new deals will keep them under club control through the 2021 season. If Huntington and Hurdle remain with the club through the duration of these extensions, they’ll have been with the Pirates for 14 and 11 seasons, respectively.
For most on the outside, this would seem like an uncontroversial decision: the leadership group that ushered the club to its best run since the advent of the World Wide Web has been extended. But you wouldn’t know it by much of the public discourse in town.
If you choose, click and read some of the comments in response to this tweet from the club:
Pirates announce 4 year extensions of Executive VP, General Manager Neal Huntington & Manager Clint Hurdle.
READ: https://t.co/rxwkGDmZhS pic.twitter.com/RLX97ykWjG— Pittsburgh Pirates (@Pirates) September 5, 2017
Baseball America’s Ben Badler, a reasonable man, took notice of this.
Only four teams have won more games than the Pirates over the last five years. Now read the replies. https://t.co/SY7M3J4rg5
— Ben Badler (@BenBadler) September 5, 2017
What’s going on here? Why such a disconnect?
Part of it is simply winning. The Pirates are suffering through their second consecutive losing season. Sports are emotional.
Part of it is context.
The Pittsburgh Penguins are coming off another Stanley Cup season and the Steelers have added a couple Super Bowls this century. There’s this joke that Pittsburgh is the city of champions… and the Pirates.
Of course, those are apples-to-oranges comparisons, as the NHL and NFL are salary-cap leagues. The Penguins won a draft lottery to acquire Sidney Crosby, and the NFL is a one-position league: you either have a quarterback or you don’t. If you have an elite quarterback, it’s akin to having Clayton Kershaw throw every pitch of the season.
Small-market clubs have had it somewhat easier in recent years. As the average age of players has declined in the PED-testing era, the importance of acquiring players via free agency (which is typically populated by older players) has diminished. Still, it’s more difficult to win as a small-market club in MLB relative to other major pro sports.
Part of this hostility is conflating ownership spending with the front office.
While the front office largely determines how to allocate the payroll pie, it does not determine the size of the pie. Could the Pirates spend more? I suspect they could, though, unfortunately, we in the media can not send a FOIA request to get a look at owner Bob Nutting’s revenues and expenses. But that’s not really at issue at hand with regard to these extensions.
Part of the unfavorable view many hold of the current leadership group is also partially outcome-over-process thinking.
There are critics who point toward the Pirates’ postseason record. The Pirates haven’t won a playoff series under Huntington and Hurdle. In fact, they’ve only reached one series: the 2013 NLDS. This leadership group knows it has to improve that mark. But the Pirates faced at-their-peak versions of Madison Bumgarner and Jake Arrieta in the 2014 and 2015 Wild Card games, limiting their postseason experiences to the one-game variety. Huntington joked Tuesday how he regretted voting for the second Wild Card, as it was the No. 2 Wild Card team that knocked the Pirates out of the 2014 and 2015 playoffs.
Teams in baseball, a sport where no one player can dominate the ball, have less control over their fortunes in the small-sample formats of October. Teams dohave more control over getting to the postseason, however, and the Pirates have won a lot of baseball games since 2013, more than 25 other clubs. The best way to ensure postseason success in baseball is to advance there as many times as possible.
Part of this discontent is also likely tied to the decline of objective media.
Passion and restlessness are stoked by some local media members. The media has become less objective, more polarized, across the entire country, and Pittsburgh is not immune. Pittsburgh is no longer a two-newspaper city. It ceased being one in my time here. As reporting and fact collection has declined, opinion, agendas and extremist positions have filled the void.
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Has the Pirates’ leadership group been perfect? Absolutely not. There have been premium draft picks failures like Tony Sanchez and Pedro Alvarez. There have been trades gone poorly (Neil Walker for Jon Niese). We’ll have to see how the final year of the Francisco Cervelli extension plays out, though there was merit to the decision at the time.
Some of the club’s player-development stories haven’t gone as well as hoped. Gregory Polanco seems to have plateaued. Austin Meadows can’t stay healthy. The Juan Nicasio waivers decision was weird (and the Cardinals just acquired him Wednesday). There are some concerns that the analytical element of the front office is gaining too much influence. The Pirates don’t often win PR campaigns.
The Pirates could have done better, sure, but from 1993 to 2007, they had done much worse.
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Ultimately, fans hold significant power. They buy the tickets, they turn on the television, their eyeballs are what advertisers are after.
Attendance in Pittsburgh is down for a second straight season, from 30,847 fans per game in 2015, to 27,768 last season, to 24,241 this one. TV ratings are down significantly, as Craig Edwards noted last month. But the following graphic reveals the perception problem from which the Pirates seem to suffer, as the club’s ratings have declined far more dramatically than their on-field performance:
Said Hurdle to reporters Tuesday: “One of the first comments I shared when I got here was I felt my job was to reunite the city with its baseball team. That’s still at the top of my list. Not that we’ve divorced, by any means, but there are some people we need to get back in the park.”
Next month, I’m leaving Pittsburgh, where I’ve resided since 2013. I’m returning to Cleveland, my native land.
I haven’t been a full-time Cleveland resident since 1998. I can remember, however, the calls for a certain coach to be fired back in the early 1990s. I can recall his negative Q rating and very high unfavorables. That coach was Bill Belichick. Ultimately, he was fired in 1995. The team moved to Baltimore later that year, however, so it was something of a moot point.
Belichick is an outlier. To expect any athletic leader to rival the success he’s experienced with the Patriots is unreasonable. But Belichick made mistakes in Cleveland. He improved in New England. I covered Clemson University athletics before jumping to Pirates/MLB coverage. After the 2010, there was a number of vocal fans calling for the firing of Dabo Swinney. Last winter, Clemson ended a 36-year national title drought in football. There’s something to be said for patience and continuity if you believe an enterprise is led by competent people.
For example, Huntington believes the club’s scouting operation has improved since he began there. As FanGraphs’ own Eric Longenhagen wrote this week, Pirates first-rounder Shane Baz is opening eyes. Baz is perhaps one example of an improved process. While continuity for continuity’s sake is not a winning strategy, continuity can also foster improvement.
The Pirates’ farm system was ranked No. 1 overall by Baseball America in 2014. They were BA’s Organization of the Year in 2015. BA doesn’t have a pro-Pirates agenda.
Huntington and Hurdle’s job, going forward, is not going to be easy.
The goodwill is largely exhausted. Many teams have adopted practices similar to Pittsburgh’s and evaluating the same way. They’re going to have to scout and develop at a high level and think differently in some areas to find competitive edges at the margins. The Pirates lack the budget of just about every other team. Challenges abound.
Ultimately this leadership group must win again, of course. Perhaps the Pirates need to be bolder and take greater risks, as they did in the 2012-13 offseason (committing to Martin and Francisco Liriano) and in 2014-15 (when the club signed Jung Ho Kang). The process must ultimately produce better results. Still, I’m surprised that the goodwill built from 2013-15 has largely been extinguished.
My point is really this to those wanting regime change in Pittsburgh: be careful what you wish for.
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.
“We will spend when the time is right”
I believe that was the exact quote from Bob Nutting. I think that is part of the derision much of the public holds towards the leadership. The team had just come off a 98 win season where they looked like World Series contenders and they went out and got… Ryan Vogelsong? John Jaso? Sorry, but it’s hard to say the fanbase is being irrational when that sort of thing happens. It’s hard to say the fanbase is being irrational when the Indians adopted a similar approach and went out and signed Edwin Encarnacion. Hell, the Indians had a smaller payroll than the Pirates but now it’s more than $30M+ larger.
If winning 98 games isn’t the right time to start spending, then when is it?
In fairness they did spend, the payroll doubled from when NH took over to 2016. Of course that does not absolve Nutting/NH from starting 2016 with a rotation of Niese, Vogelsong, Nicasio, Locke the year after a 98 win season.
My guess would be that many small market organizations, like KC, had even greater increases in spending over that time frame. I used to defend Nutting’s spending because he made huge investments in the draft- Josh Bell as the prime example, as well as in Latin America- Heredia and a bigger offer to Sano than what the Twins offered. They found AAAA players in South Africa and Lithuania and of all places. But the Latin American spending has dried up even relative to other teams in the new regime, and the draft isn’t a market inefficiency anymore with the slot system.
Yeah I’m also confused about what happened in Latin America. Is it Gayo backlash, data on return on investment (they have hit on lower cost guys), or just being cheap. It is weird that they changed gears on this topic.
I get the frustration here, but Travis does make the point that Bob Nutting decides the size of the pie, Neal and Clint decide how it’s used. While the front office has a ton of say on who to sign and for how much, they don’t hold the purse strings. Maybe the frustration should ulitmately be with ownership and not a proven, dynamic, hardscrabble front office.
Most level headed Pirates fans (like the types who read FanGraphs) all know that this isn’t Neal Huntington or Clint Hurdle. They aren’t the problems. In fact, the work they have done given the circumstances have been herculean.
It’s the ownership. Plain and simple.
I’m not sure level headed Pirates fans exist anymore.
Bucs Dugout, which has been the most level headed Pirates blog for the longest time is now just filled with hate filled trolls. The writers tend to try to be fair but even then there is a tremendous negative bias there now. Oh well.
I went over to Bucs Dugout to see what you’re talking about, seems like most of the comments there are good to me. They want an end to the misery as well.
So my problem with this is that there’s never a good argument for who, specifically, the Pirates should have signed. Look through these FA lists and tell me who the Pirates should have gotten.
http://www.espn.com/mlb/freeagents
The top person I came up with was J.A. Happ or Charlie Morton. Maybe there’s a case that they should’ve made a run at Edwin, but a full season of him at 1B would probably be a disaster.
Neal Huntington is one of the top GM/GM-like executives in the game. He’s up there with guys like Cashman, Friedman, Mozeliak, Rizzo, Sabean, and Epstein (and others which I am surely forgetting).
But he can’t fire the owner. He’s the problem. Good luck to the Pirates trying to win with Dan O’Dowd or Kenny Williams or Walt Jocketty at the helm with Nutting as owner.
Cashman? Kindly explain how he has outperformed the wins one would expect from his enormous payroll.
As for Huntington, he has the unique distinction of drafting just two players who have achieved a career WAR > 5, over ten drafts (with a lot of high first round picks): Jordy Mercer and Gerrit Cole. Yes, the jury is still out on some of the more recent draft picks, but producing only two good players after 10 years is highly unusual. At some point, you have to seriously question what the Huntington is doing in terms of domestic amateur scouting.
Cashman and Huntington have done a great job with their teams given the weird mandates they have from ownership. One is that you can’t spend anything, the other is that you have to win a championship every year. They’ve done a great job of using the resources they do have to achieve in these odd circumstances.
I’m curious to see how they would do in different contexts, not unlike what we used to think about Friedman in his Tampa days. But they and Billy Beane do great work in weird situations that would break most GMs.
I think of those three in a different category than the Epstein/Sabean/Mozeliak/Luhnow types, who have the benefit of big payrolls but whose success is more “portable” from team to team.
As for the Pirates draft success, it’s not fantastic to only have three players with a career WAR over 5 (the two you mentioned plus Alvarez) but keep in mind it’s not like that’s the only way to improve your team. Huntington’s real skill is trades and signing undervalued FAs, and he’s done very well there.
You said he is one of the top GMs in the game. Yet he had had more draft capital than almost any other GM for 10 years, and wasted it. A top GM doesn;t spend a lot of resources on the draft and get almost no return.
He’s a mediocre GM overall, and small-market teams need more than a mediocre GM to win.
It’s funny you bring up Beane. His last couple of years, many seemed to think he was…disinterested for lack of a better word. Lots of headscratching moves. Looks similar in Pgh.
Well said Travis, the local media has completely forgotten what baseball was like pre-Huntington. They love to beat him up over drafts and player development, but offer no objective comparisons to other teams that would allow such conclusions. Nevermind that nearly every contributing player came from the system that locals like to bash.
All that aside, the biggest problem is the owner and everything Pirates is seen through that lens. There just won’t be any large scale public optimism about the team unless he is gone. Pittsburgh is blessed with the Rooney’s and Lemieux/Burkle who do everything possible to win and Nutting just doesn’t measure up.
Good point. Sports media has become a “hot take” factory with a race to provide the most critical commentary, and far too many consumers of that media regurgitate its negativity without evaluating its merits.
Actually the people of Pittsburgh do remember the Bonifay and Littlefield years. We are pissed that the team is going right back down that toilet through Huntington’s incompetence.
Yea! Right down the toilet!
We are talking about the Reds, right?
I would say that for the most part, the vehement comments against Pirates leadership is unjustified, uninformed and unintelligent. Still, simply looking at the Pirates’ moves over the past couple of years, they just haven’t been particularly inspiring. Compared to a few years ago it just seems like the team is lacking a real direction about what it wants to do.
Agree, I think NH is struggling with trying to contend with a decent roster versus another rebuild/reload in light of the Cubs jump to prominence. It is a tough call.
I wonder how much of that is owner driven. If given the option I would be curious if their fo would rebuild.
The pirates are not legitimate contenders in the central unless a lot of things go right. I think it was always pretty obvious that they would need to hit on prospects and their young mlb players would need to continue to develop. They haven’t to this point and that puts a team like the pirates in a pretty big hole.
The cubs and cardinals have been pretty bad this year and milwaukee is just going to continue to get better yet the pirates still find themselves in 4th place and 9.5 back. It’s not impossible to see them contend, but does anyone really think there is a high probability that the pirates are a playoff team in the next couple years?
Being a small market, farm driven team like they are, they can’t really afford to just wait it out, imo. They need to decide if they want to contend, and push some money in, or not, and work on moving players and starting over. The middle ground, wait and see approach can work, but if I was a fan of the pirates, it’d be my least favorite approach to take.
I am a fan, and trust me, it’s not the one I want them to take either. With the Cubs being so down this year, I kind of wanted the Pirates to go big after the sweep over Milwaukee to pull within 2.5 of the division in late July. Make a play for Gray or something of that ilk. Then you have Gray for the rest of 2017, go into 2018 with Cutch, Cole, Gray, et al, and see if you can win the division again. If you’re out of it in July 2018, have a fire sale then.
Lifelong Pirates fan- the disconnect is primarily viewed as investment- the Steelers and Pens are premier organizations in all of sports, and casual fans don’t understand the crucial financial and organizational differences between the league.
I’ll blaspheme my own town and brethren for a minute- other than us 15,000 or so Pirates fans who had some form of season ticket packages during the bad times, most Pirates fans are morons. They don’t understand how trades work- I had a serious discussion with someone who thought the Angels would trade Trout for Cutch and a minor league pitcher. They also don’t understand how the draft works, super 2 status, and Latin American scouting. So that’s why you see a disconnect. You’re not dealing with rational fans- you’re dealing with Steelers fans. And that’s why most of the anger is at Nutting- fans assume NH just does Nutting’s bidding, and Nutting is perceived as being cheap.
As a “woke” fan, however, there are very valid complaints, chief of which are the Liriano and Nicasio dumps, especially the Nicasio dump, because it means NH fundamentally misunderstood the likelihood of competing this season. The Liriano + 2 prospects return, Drew Hutchinson, was also extremely underwhelming. Giving away Keon Broxton for Jason Rogers was also dumb- even if Broxton’s rise wasn’t foreseeable, they gave up the younger and more athletic player for a 27 year old corner player with 60 MLB games or so. Diving deeper, the organization has been relatively inactive in Latin America and hasn’t produced a sleeper other than Tito Polo, and even he was a little old for his level when they got Nova for him (which was a great deal by NH- he really knows how to fleece the Yankees). I would like to see increased spending in Latin America and zero straight salary dumps- I don’t think it’s much to ask, and it’s realistic. If Marte gets back on some undetectable PEDs, he should be excellent next year, so it’ll come down to what they spend the Jung Ho Kang money on.
RE: new Latin America talent – check out Luis Escobar, Yeudy Garcia, Domingo Robles, Dario Agrazal, Lolo Sanchez, Adrian Valerio, and Jeremias Portorreal. They are still finding talent, but not going after top 20 guys for some reason. See my comment above regarding why.
Escobar is 21 and relatively short with an ERA near 4 in NYPL; Garcia had an ERA over 4 in AA at age 24, Robles is not producing in Bristol- K/9 isn’t special either; and the three hitters aren’t exactly crushing the seams off the ball. Although fun fact- Lolo Sanchez’ real name is apparently Kevin Bryan Sanchez. He must go by Lolo since Ke’Bryan is already taken in the Bucs’ system 😉
Anyways, the point is that none of those guys will rate as a top-10 prospect in the system, and while there is still good talent at the top of the system, it’s a little worrying that Latin American isn’t breaking through in the way it did during the heyday of Marte, Polanco, Herrera, and Hanson (who at one point had exceptional trade value). Elias Diaz and Jose Osuna are fine backups and could probably make numerous MLB teams, but they are 26 and 24 respectively and with noticeable holes in their games.
I just don’t understand why they’ve taken a back seat in Latin America. It’s inexcusable- the only theory I have is Nutting is afraid of Jerry Reinsdorf. Nutting is the one who broke the draft with Josh Bell after all and Reinsdorf cried about it.
The LA thing is a mystery to me. My baseless theory is, within his first three years, he tried to sign Sano and did sign Heredia. Those obviously failed for two different reasons. Then you see the success of Marte, Polanco and Hanson’s prospect status take off and none of those three were big money signings. So I wonder if he just reversed course and decided to try to “spread the money around.” That hasn’t worked well at all, as they had about 2-3 barren years in a row that are felt now. As an aside, have there been any studies about LA signings and the return for the big money signings? I would assume there would be, but that’s always made me curious.
Nova’s giving up 1.4 HR/9 in PNC this year.
What do you think that number would look like in YS3, haha?
Polo ended up as the second piece in the Robertston/Frazier/Kahnle trade. Nova would not have rated in that deal.
So…yeah. Good trade for both teams.
Huntington has been good with signings — both veterans and Latin amateurs. But he has quietly pissed away 10 straight drafts. They’ve had one of the “better” minor league systems for a while now, but mysteriously every prospect busts. All in all, he is a mediocre GM. Unfortunately, with the Pirates payroll, they need far more than mediocrity in the front office.
Impressive how you know that the last 4 drafts were pissed away. It also helps your case to ignore Bell, Taillon, Kuhl and the objective rankings of the farm system. People like to point at Alvarez, but he was the best player in the draft by any ranking. He was exactly the player you draft there and you cant say he was a bust given his 2-3 win seasons when we were winning.
Remember that the Pirates have had a “top ranked” farm system for the past five years (Luis Heredia, anyone?) and still nothing exciting to show for it.
Cole and Alvarez were no brainers (top-2 overall picks). GMs win on the non-obvious picks. Literally every non-obvious pick that NH made either has flamed out or hasn’t made a huge impact yet. Yes, the jury is still out on a few of the young guys, but the jury is not out on the drafts from 2008-2012, which were disasters.
As an exercise, find me a team who has spent more (in both draft capital and actual dollars) and landed less amateur draft talent than the Pirates over the last 10 years.
I also dont think that talent identification has been the issue as they drafted Jake Lamb, Trea Turner and Walker Buehler in HS, a lot comes down to the signing rules that were put in place to stop NH’s primary talent acquisition strategy.
Sorry, but you don’t get credit for taking late round fliers on high schoolers that are impoossible to sign. None of the rules changed mid-draft.
So the sports fan masses are like the rest of the masses: driven by emotion and unable to accurately identify the processes that serve their interests.
Yeah, good thing there are geniuses like us around to at least steer things more in the absolutely right direction.
Just generally dispassionate analysis and perspective that usually gets labeled as fake news and elitism.
Yep. This is a societal problem that has gotten a lot worse in the past couple years. For various reasons, we’re all a lot more frustrated than we used to be. And we are encouraged to fight with each other online about it. It’s a collective disease. So we have less and less patience and want more and more instant gratification. Hence the screaming every time a team falls short of a title.
This isn’t a Pirates thing or even a baseball thing: people on the internet complain endlessly about everything, and cannot be pleased no matter what you do for them. And then that complaining and dissatisfaction often bleeds over into real life.
This is a human problem, not a Pittsburgh Pirates problem. People like complaining more than they like succeeding.
Speaking on behalf of all people, no, we much prefer succeeding to complaining. It’s just that the former is darn difficult at times, whereas I have way, way more opportunity to do the latter.
Truth, I find most Steeler Fans to be ridiculously negative about the team. Even those at the game generally like to bitch more than cheer.
Seems like Pirates ownership and management like losing more than they like succeding,
“People like complaining more than they like succeeding.”
I think you’re only speaking for yourself.
Huntington has been there a decade. The best players he’s brought to the org are Josh Harrison and Gerritt Cole. He fucked up the teams contention window and they’re about to dig in for another rebuild. If he stays there’s a good chance he’s looking at three winning seasons in 15 years.
He brought in some complimentary parts but done nothing to build up the backbone of an actual contending team despite insane amounts of prospect hugging. Fire his ass.
Yeah he sure has done nothing taking a laughing stock franchise and turning it into one where fans are outraged at a 78 win season.
It’s still a laughing stock franchise HTH
Here’s the dirty little secret about your (and everyone else’s) GMs: Most of their draft picks will bust. If you want a winning team you have to spend internationally, on free agents, and take on salary in trade. The fact that the Pirates have somehow managed to make a perennial contender despite this is pretty remarkable. You can second-guess some of the decisions that happened a while ago but realistically he’s done the most with the least of any GM outside of Billy Beane (and lately, probably more than him too).
A perennial contender? They have not been contenders the past two seasons. He had a nice run from 2013-2015, and I think he should be given a bit more time to see if he can turn things around, but let’s not just make stuff up now.
Fine. Perennially competitive. And the Pirates were bad bad bad before he took over. The team didn’t have a winning record from 1993 to 2007. They won fewer than 70 games five of the previous eight years before Huntington took over. Yes, it took a while to right the ship, but the organization is strong. They’ve won a bunch and recently. When they’re not winning, they’re still competitive. The pipeline looks flush. Do they think they’re going to be able to hire Dave Dombrowski to come in and magically convince ownership to start handing out $100 million free agent contracts? Huntington’s work has been excellent.
Yes, they broke the streak with him and yes, they made the playoffs. However, using 15 years of incompetence is an incredibly low bar to clear. That should never be the baseline for success. Travis and many posters seem to be saying “hey, it could be worse, ya know.” In no way should that be what an organization should be striving to achieve.
When they’re not winning, they’re still competitive…what the hell does that mean? They’re closer to last place in the division than first. That’s not competitive.
NH is a good GM, but he’s not a great one. With this ownership, they need the latter to be successful for longer than a brief spurt.
It definitely could be worse. But it almost certainly would be worse. When you have a guy who drafts a little better than average, has a great pitching development system, has one of the most advanced in-game analytics departments, signs his stars to friendly hometown contracts, and gets the better end of almost every trade…who do you think is going to be able to top that? The only way to really do that much better is to spend internationally and on free agents.
What I mean by being still competitive is that they’re still a decent ballclub. There is a cost to winning consistently as opposed to a boom-and-bust cycle every few years. The only teams that can compete for championships year-in-year-out like the Yankees and Red Sox do are the ones with lots of money, and even in those cases it doesn’t always work out.
Oh yeah, it could be worse. But I don’t think thats the reason to move on (or not move on) from him at all. Making decisions out of fear isn’t really a good idea.
Let’s talk about some of those things you brought up.
1) His drafts have not been above average. If you take his first five drafts, you only have one (2011 with Cole, Bell, and Glasnow) that has been very good. 2008 was ok (Alvarez, Mercer, Wilson), 2009 was awful, 2010 is dependent on two shaky pitchers (JT and Kingham) and will likely be remembered for passing on Manny. And 2012 was bad.That’s not a great track record.
2) The pitching development…it’s been better at rehabbing pitchers, rather than developing the younger ones. Despite flashes, Cole has been inconsistent, and the jury is still out on Kuhl and the Gang. Their larger success has been with guys like Volquez, Burnett, and Liriano. Not really any young guy, other than Cole, has had that measure of success.
3) Analytics. This is tough, because this seems to move so quickly in today’s game. While they were ahead of the game in ground ball pitchers and shifting, they’ve been late to the bus stop with the power hitting and fly ball revolution. It’s going to be interesting to see if he can capture some sort of advantage in the next year or two.
As I said before, he’s a good GM. They need a great one to compete more than just in spurts.
And what I’m saying is that the Pirates are never going to compete in more than just spurts. Ever. (with one very important exclusion)
With the exception of the Yankees and the Cardinals maybe the Giants, no team competes in anything other than spurts. The Cubs, Dodgers, and Astros are trying to break this cycle but the Cubs and Astros don’t have the stomach to pay for it long-term. They’re going to go through cycles too. Even bigger market teams, like the Rangers and Red Sox, have lots of ups and downs. The Phillies made the most of their spurt, but it’s over and it’s not coming back for a long time.
Pirates are like the Indians, or Brewers (with their spurt in the Fielder/Braun heyday), or the Royals. You get a window and you get a few years where you have a shot, and then it’s over. But even that requires an owner who is willing to damn the torpedoes and just spend when they see blood in the water, which this owner is clearly unwilling to do. So that’s never going to happen with the Pirates…unless there is a new owner.
I think we agree on many things here, but maybe not on some details. Ownership may not matter; I think they could spend more, but not to the point to make it significant. Those Pittsburghers who light a candle for Lemieux or Cuban buying the team would likely not see much of a spike in spending on the team if that came to bear.
But all of those spurt teams you mentioned? Their “window” lasted longer than three years. Well, except the Royals, and they went to two WS. Even if some of those teams like Boston or Texas had a bad year in their stretch, those single years were aberrations.
So after three great years, but with no series wins, Pirates fans have gotten two poor ones and the forecast looks pretty mediocre too. While I enjoyed those years immensely, it’s kind of disappointing to think that’s all that group ended up with.
I think there is plenty of room to argue about the pipeline being flush and you don’t need dombo or $100m contracts. The astros had a really similar bad streak and have come out of it with a team that seems like it can be competitive longer than pit was and still has a very strong system. Your description of the pirates sounds far more like the realistic situation the astros are in than it does the pirates situation.
The Astros payroll is something like twice the Pirates’ and they were able to spend tons of money during their rebuild on other things. Crane didn’t just pocket the money when they stripped down the payroll (well, not all of it). The situations aren’t really comparable at all. It’s more comparable to the old KC Royals teams.
“When you have a guy who drafts a little better than average, has a great pitching development system…”
Whoa. Stop the misinformation right there.
1) On the draft: how many NH draftees have actually outperformed their draft slot?
2) On minor league pitching development: How many minor league pitchers have the Pirates developed into quality major league starters?
Right. That’s a false narrative that doesn’t hold up when given closer inspection. Of course, given the fluidity of prospects, that can change: if Glasnow, Keller, and JT end up being successful, above average SP for a few years, then maybe they can claim that. But not now.
Also, Pirates fans should take this as a warning:
From 2010-2013, then Cincinnati Reds (a team in a market roughly the size of Pittsburgh) averaged 89 wins a season, won two division titles and won a Wild Card. This was deemed as ‘not good enough’ by an angry fanbase who called for management’s head, and Dusty Baker was fired for his ‘failure.’
In the three full seasons since, the Reds have averaged 69 wins, and undergone a slow and painful rebuild. This season, the team is roughly on pace to finish somewhere in that neighborhood (61 wins in 140 games played), and there’s very little light at the end of the tunnel, short of about eight pitchers all becoming different humans between now and 2018.
Maybe Dusty Baker wasn’t a failure. And maybe we should have appreciated 3 playoff appearances in 4 years. And maybe next time we get good, we shouldn’t complain so much. But we probably will, and we won’t learn, because people are largely slow to learn and like to complain more than they like to succeed.
Dusty Baker has nothing to do with the Reds’ success, or lack thereof. Walt Jocketty was GM from 2008-15. Williams is in just his second season, so it’s a bit premature to label his efforts fruitless. Unless you are a high-spending team, almost all rebuilds will be painful.
E.g., https://sports.vice.com/en_us/article/4xzvmn/the-houston-astros-have-turned-data-into-winning-baseball
You are a good writer but you gained national recognition because you wrote a puff piece book about the Pirates and YOU want to bring up the death of “objectivity” in media?! Your self-awareness above replacement level is off-the-charts bad.
“Huntington joked Tuesday how he regretted voting for the second Wild Card, as it was the No. 2 Wild Card team that knocked the Pirates out of the 2014 and 2015 playoffs. ”
Someone should inform that genius that his team finished with the same number of wins as San Francisco in 2014, so they would have had a play-in game no matter what.
Did you read his “puff” piece?
somebody is mad online
These are the comments where I click down vote twice just hoping it will add another
You are a good writer, but recognition at the national level is achieved because of breathing pirates and I want to mention the death of “objective” in the media? The perception of yourself above the level of the sea is bad on the list.
Huntington shocked on Tuesday that he was sorry for voting for an unpredictable factor, as well as an unpredictable number. “Two teams have defeated the pirates in the years of the rebirth 2014 and 2015.
Someone has to announce that this genius will end his team with victories like San Francisco in 2014, they have to play games regardless of everything.
You nailed it.
I guess he lacked the courage of his convictions..
I think the disconnect just comes down to the fact that Huntington hasn’t been very good at his job the last two years, and his excellent work the 3 or 4 years before that is being more heavily discounted by the fanbase than it is by national writers like Ben Badler. It’s all very natural, really, fans are always going to be less patient than neutral observers.
Also, most locals were never happy during ’13-15 either because they wanted all in trades and big FA signings to go for it. NH has rarely seen positive reviews by the bulk of the local yinzer population.
That is a nuanced opinion. There was absolutely no nuance in those Twitter replies.
So a GM is good or bad depending on how his team does for a single season?
Do I think the Pirates would be better off with a different GM? No
Am I frustrated with the last 24 months or so of NH regime? Yes
Getting Rivero and Nova in trades was great. Getting guys like Joyce, Freese and Rodriguez on cheap deals was great. Going from 78 wins to 98 wins was great.
Trading Neil Walker for Jon Niese was not great. Broxton for Jason Rogers not great. Signing no one to fill out your rotation other than Ryan Vogelsong was not great. Paying Daniel Hudson and Antonio Bastardo large sums of money to be among the worst RP in baseball was not great. Having no presence in Latin America is not great. Going from 98 wins to 78 wins is not great.
Things NH doesn’t control but gets blamed for… Marte and Kang idiocy. McCutchen’s relatively poor play. Polanco and Meadows being made out of glass. Nutting’s lack of spending. Coonelly’s big mouth. Hurdle’s propensity to play veterans.
I know you can’t play the “what if” game, but what if Kang and Marte play a full season and Jameson Taillon doesn’t get cancer? Surely that would be 5-6 more wins and they’d be in the heat of the Wild Card race.
Huntingdon is a perfectly cromulent GM, but his “what have you done for me lately” rating is pretty poor. Whether we like it or not, recency bias is a real thing.
NH’s “sins” really do seem to boil down to Alvarez over Hosmer/Posey and Taillon over Machado…and Taillon over Manny was an entirely justifiable position at the time!
Funny how no one ever complains that the Pirates drafted Alvarez over Brian Matusz. And sure, they’d be better if they selected Hosmer but the career WAR contributions aren’t super-different. Second-guessing draft decisions is often the easiest but most deceptive ways to bash a GM.
Alvarez wasn’t even a bad 2nd overall pick, in context! He’s thoroughly average.
The issue is that Neal had four Top 4 picks in a row, and only came away with one or two starting caliber players…and Cole’s regressed over the last couple of seasons.
We don’t really appreciate how lucky the Cubs and Astros have been to hit on just about all of their early picks.
Swap Alvarez with Hosmer/Posey or Taillon with Machado, and the Pirates are in a dramatically different place.
Drafting is hard!
Is it lucky if you’re continually messing up the pick though?
Here’s a quick question…NH has been in charge for a decade. Other than Gerrit Cole, has ANY draft pick in that time been any sort of difference maker? Their three best players at the ML level since NH took over were acquired by the previous administration. Let that sink in.
It’s not really second-guessing if the proof is in the pudding when the team has trouble putting a productive team on the field because they’ve botched some drafts. While process is important, GM’s are judged (as they should be) by how the team performs. He’s done some good things, but drafting and developing is pretty spotty.
In some ways, that really does boil down to the “What if Taillon doesn’t get cancer” question.
The kid looks like a player.
Too soon to call on Glasnow, as well.
Wilson got them Cervelli.
But yeah, Alvarez looms large.
It doesn’t really boil down to JT and cancer, because he had injury issues before that. Dude missed two years in a row prior to 2016 and pitchers are inherently risky anyway. He does look like a player, but his returns from the draft have either been minimal or have taken forever (development issues maybe?)
One thing that drives me nuts about NH is he bemoans the bad luck they’ve had the last couple years: Cutch falling off, Cole getting hurt last year, Marte/Kang/JT this year. You know what? Crap happens man, and other teams have bad luck too. That type of talk conveniently overlooks the fact that they had great luck from 2013-2015
If your concern is that he selected Taillon over Machado and Alvarez over Posey you are expecting too much of your GM. Those were perfectly logical picks, and they turned into reasonably productive players. Not everyone can have that insane luck that the Astros and Cubs had.
For example, here are the Royals’ Top 10 picks under Dayton Moore (hard to find too many teams with a real sample size):
Luke Hochevar
Mike Moustakas
Eric Hosmer
Christian Colon
Bubba Starling
Kyle Zimmer
Hunter Dozier
None of their top 10 picks were superstars and their best players are worth about 9 and 12.5 WAR respectively. Add in one excellent reliever and you’ve got your top 10. And this is a team that won the world series!
So maybe you say, “it wasn’t as good as what Theo Epstein and Brian Sabean did with their Top 10 picks” And that’s a fair criticism, but those are 2 of the top 3 or 4 GMs in the game. Is it reasonable to think that you are just going to fire the GM repeatedly until you land on a Top 4 GM?
Ahhh, the logical/defensible solution. You can go through just about any draft pick or any organizational decision today and defend it from that way. But ultimately, you’re judged by what you do on the field and whether your decisions worked out. Sure, those picks were defensible…but they didn’t work out. If, as an owner, you could go down your GM’s decisions and say they’re all defensible even if they didn’t work out, then not one of them would lose their job.
I’m not necessarily thinking that getting into “ranking GM’s” is a good idea (why the hell does everyone want to rank everything these days?). But I don’t think he’s top 5 or maybe even top 10. Since you brought up rankings, I’d say LAD, SF, CC, StL, Wash, NYY, BR, CI, HA are definitely better organizations and maybe others like CWS, SD. Some of those are admittedly bigger markets, but some (St.L, CI) aren’t. I just think he’s gotten stale.
Here’s a question…if NH is so good, how come a big-market hasn’t scooped him up yet?
Nate, you might be the only reasonable commenter in this section. Why is everyone so intent on giving Neal a pass for pissing away 10 straight drafts? Can anyone name another GM who bombed 10 years in a row and kept his job?
Someone listens to DK too much.
I’m insulted! Haha, nah I just think it’s time for a change. DK thinks NH is the worst GM who ever GM’d, and has a serious axe to grind with NH. Not sure why.
Hurdle is a hands on manager, he has had is hand on many of the losses in his tenure. Shifts are good if you know how to use them properly, bullpens are good if you how to handle them properly and benches are important if you know who belongs on them and who belongs on the field. Since Hurdle is so poor at handling all three I wonder how the Pirates have won as many games they have in the time period you mentioned Travis!
Travis,
Ending an article with “those wanting regime change in Pittsburgh: be careful what you wish for” shows your bias, no need to wonder if it is there.
The Pirates now appear to be in the equivalent of the “35-win NBA h*ll” that teams in that league wish to avoid at all costs.
The team has made loads of operating income in recent years, according to Forbes, and yet, the front office appears to be penny pinching to the extreme, as with the Nicasio release and Gerrit Cole “raise” debacle.
And, yet, you wonder why fans would be concerned about 4 more years of this?
Well being a 35-win team in the NBA is a disaster because your options to get stars is by (a) being the Lakers or (b) tanking and then getting a top-3 pick. Are you suggesting that the team do a full-tear down and trade everything of value? Or that by firing Huntington, the owner will suddenly transform into a Steinbrenner? The first is likely to alienate the fan base even more, and the second is never happening. You’d have better odds of success trying to convince Henry Hillman to buy the team.
Ownership is the largest problem, but NH did himself no favors by declaring 2016 a “bridge year,” right after they won 98 games. The problem right now is a lack of commitment in either direction: rebuild or try to make one last go with Cutch and Crew. I lean towards the former because I think they have some assets (Cole, Cutch, Rivero) to flip that might make the rebuild a bit quicker than some might hope.
Then again, it took NH six years to get the team over .500, while others like Luhnow and EpHoyer did it in four years. So, I don’t have too much faith in the man right now.
Epstein did it in 4 years by signing guys like Scott Feldman to real money and then flipping them for parts (and by robbing Billy Beane blind for Samardzija, and by Luhnow being a moron and drafting Appel over Bryant).
Luhnow did it in 4 years by inheriting Springer, Keuchel and Altuve.
NH inherited Cutch, Marte, and Walker. Every GM walks in with some talent, no matter how far away. So we have Epstein robbing the A’s to get Russell, and NH botching his best asset (Bay) and getting nothing with his one big inherited MLB chip. Not really a point in his favor.
Look, NH did some great things, but I think after 10 years and 2 bad year, the landscape had changed a good bit, both for the team and within the division. Every GM’s act gets stale after awhile.
Why are people comparing GMs who have payrolls that are orders of magnitude apart? My grandma could build a .500 team with top-5 payroll.
Honestly, this sounds like normal fan reaction to me. Long-suffering fans, like Pirates fans, want some success. They finally get a winning team and the result is three straight first round playoff losses, including two one-and-dones followed by an immediate return to mediocrity including the franchise player suddenly falling apart right before their eyes. That feels a lot like being mocked and it hurts. People who are suffering are not usually the most rational and patient people.
To be fair, I constantly see fans calling for Mike Tomlins job, and they actually (sort of) ran Mike Johnston out of town, so it’s not like the two good franchises are immune from it.
And, don’t get me wrong, it’s certainly not just Pittsburgh, there’s probably only one or two or three(?) fanbases in the world that isn’t in a near constant civil war over who should be fired. New England Patriots, Alabama Crimson Tide, and I dunno Real Madrid and/or Barcelona? Probably a bunch of sports I don’t know anything about too.
The Orioles provide a second example of this same phenomenon. Baltimore fans endured fourteen straight losing seasons before Dan Duquette became the general manager, have experienced exactly zero losing campaigns in the five full seasons since then (and are on pace to avoid doing so again), yet Orioles “fans” routinely bash Duquette and call for him to be fired. The reality is that simply winning games isn’t enough for this entitled generation, you have to win championships as well.
Point to me to the part where Baltimore declined by 20 wins in a year then? The frustration with NH I have is there is no clear direction. Travis tried talking about this with the “soft sell” at the deadline. I don’t really think that works.
NH seems to be muddling along, hoping that his own guys play better and the prospects hit on their most optimal outcome. As a card carrying member of the “Gregory Polanco will be Dave Parker 2.0 club” let me tell you how unlikely that is to happen. He has to make difficult decisions, and he seems unwilling or unable to do so.
Baltimore declined by fifteen from 2014 to 2015, but if you really want to argue that five extra games justifies outrage, feel free.
And then Baltimore bounced back into contention in 2016 and this year. Don’t see the Pirates rebounding next year. Even with Kang and Marte, this team was projected to be about .500. Now with no Kang, and the clock ticking on Cole and Cutch, it doesn’t look great.
Pittsburgh has a young core of major league talent as well as four minor leaguers who ranked in the top 100 of FanGraphs’ midseason prospect list (#14, #18, #89, & #98).
They have some interesting players who could be part of a core, but I don’t see one young player to build around. Cutch is in his walk year, Marte isn’t that young anymore, Polanco isn’t that good to begin with. About the only position player to get excited about is Bell, and he’s going to have to hit very well. Luplow may end up being a sleeper, as he’s (along with Bell) seemingly the only guy in the system with any power at all. Moroff may be a decent utility guy with pop (Sean Rodriguez II).
The pitchers…that feels like it should be better then where they are. JT’s had a rough year, Glasnow had a horrible year in the majors (although far too early to give up on), and Kuhl should be in the bullpen. Williams has been a bright spot, but even so, he’s still a back-end guy.
That’s kind of the essence of the problem…the Pirates are filled with a roster of guys who are “not bad.” But that’s not going to win anything. Couple that with the fact that their best position player prospect couldn’t stay healthy or hit this year, and I really think they need to trade Cutch, Cole, and Rivero and do a mini-rebuild.
Eh, I don’t think that this is a generational thing. It is the refusal of fanbases to understand that a General Manager oversees more than just the drafts and trades. The General Manager does a lot that we can’t see, and while I know that’s sort of a copout there’s something to be said for being a good manager.
Oh, man, those Twitter replies. Now I can see how Cardinals fans were able to work up the nerve to call themselves the best fans in baseball.
The same thing is happening this year with the Twins. Although they’re having a huge turnaround in the first year of their new regime, the biggest local blog is full of posts calling Falvey and Levine a “disaster” and a “failure,” while questioning their parentage. Similarly, at least 60% of the roster has been the subject of posts to the flavor of “DFA _______” or “trade him for anything you can get, but just get rid of him.” It’s almost funny, because it sometimes seems that the better the team plays, he harder fans take the inevitable bad plays, innings and games. Recently, they were on the losing end of a one-hitter. Well, of course, right after the game came a post blaming Eddie Rosario for losing the game by having a bad at bat and saying that he should be traded, even though Rosario just had one of the best months in the league (and it almost always takes more than one player to lose a game in a team sport).
The Twitter posts slamming these signings are the sad triumph of emotion over reason. We live in an age where it seems like people are most willing to listen to the argument that is given with the most anger, regardless of fact or context.
How do these “fans” blame ownership or management for the team’s loss of two of its best players to a steroid violation and repeated social violations? If both of these players behave and perform normally, the Pirates would probably be two games out of the wild card instead of 7.5.
(Kang – Freese) + 0.5*(Marte – Jaso) = 5.5 wins?
The chart should show winning percentage change from 2015. That’s when we set an attendance record, only to see Nutting tighten the purse strings. Alvarez, Ramirez, Walker and Burnett all came off the books. And we got… Niese. Rather than make some serious trades or spend some money, they punted on 2016 and the fans knew it. They did nothing this past off season either. They did nothing to replace Drunk Ho Kang even though they knew about that well before the season. They did nothing to plug the hole during Marte’s suspension. They punted on 2017, too. So there is no disconnect on the fans’ part. We’re not paying to watch them master the art of financial flexibility at the expense of trying to win.
Just another member of the press trying to pee on Pirates fans legs and tell them it’s raining. Here are some stats for you. 3 winning seasons in 10 years. That’s not good. The Brewers are on pace for their 5th winning seasons in 10 years. So are the Cubs. The Cardinals are having their 17th winning season in the last 18 years. And they have done it as a mostly mid market team (St. Louis is the 61st biggest city in the US while Pittsburgh is 63rd). The Reds only have three in the last ten, but what I’ve seen of them this year against the Pirates tells me they are closer to their next winning season than the Pirates are. Since the creation of the NL Central in 1994, the Pirates have 0 division titles. None. They choked away their chance to win it in 2013 and played badly at the start of 2014 and 2015 and didn’t play well enough when they did start playing well to win the division. Meanwhile, the Reds have 4 division titles (1994, 1995, 2010, 2012), the Brewers have 1 (2011) the former member Astros have 4 (1997, 1998, 1999, 2001). The Cubs will have five after this year (2003, 2007, 2008, 2016, 2017) and the Cardinals have 10 (1996, 2000, 2002, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2009, 2013, 2014, 2015). After 10 years and free reign to run the organization how he wants, he should have done better and at least won a division title. One wild card game win isn’t good enough and the Pirates should be doing better than this loser who can’t win a division title.
But sure Cleveland guy let’s keep him Huntington around until he’s 75, because he did have three above average 2nd place finishes in a row.
I’ve seen a lot of comments here on the 2015-2016 changes, and it kind of boggles my mind.
“The Pirates tried to fill their pitching holes with Jon Niesce and Ryan Vogelsong!” – Okay, but do you remember the free agency period of 2015-2016? To remind you, a pitcher the Pirates were connected to early on was Scott Kazmir. Kazmir got $48M over 3 years from the Dodgers, proceeded to post a completely predictable 4.19 xFIP 1.2 WAR season, and has been on the 60-day DL all year in 2017. Did you want the Pirates to go $50M over 3 years for him? Or maybe J.A. Happ, late of the Pirates, who got $36M over 3 years and has put up xFIPs of 4.18 and 4.12. The contracts going to back-end starters that offseason were insane, because that’s all that was available and teams went crazy trying to plug holes. The Pirates looked at the situation, and instead of handcuffing themselves for years chose to trade for a Niesce and take a flier on a Vogelsong.
Of course, none of that really matters, because any complaints about Niesce, Vogelsong, or almost anybody on their roster in 2016 is missing the forest for the trees – the problems with the 2016 Pittsburgh Pirates can be laid at the feet of exactly two players: Andrew McCutchen and Francisco Liriano. Together, they were projected to be worth ~10 WAR. Together, they provided the Pirates less than 1.0 WAR. Those 9 wins move the Pirates from a 78-win team to an 87-win team, and possibly a wild card based on tiebreakers.
In 2016 you had a insane market for starting pitching, which would leave any small market team hamstrung for years, and the Pirates saw two star-level players regress to replacement level over night. And they still won 78 games. Frankly, in my view 2016 is a feather in Huntington’s cap.
Yeah, losing 20 games off the previous year is certainly a feather in his cap. Gimme a break. If the market is insane, then trade. And don’t fetishize years of control which they did in the Walker deal. Trade for someone who’s stuff wasn’t declining. There’s also no guarantee that Happ would have pitched like that in Pittsburgh either. Easier league, easier park…
Travis, Pittsburgh radio has defended the Pirates until this year, with the exception of Madden, who has hammered them for years but now its justified. 98 wins and rolled out a bottom 5 rotation the next year. I get that theres a budget they work within, but they blew their window of opportunity, not us. They’ve (ownership) even had the nerve to indirectly place the responsibility on the fan base. “Fill the seats and we’ll spend.” No thanks. Give me a reason to spend. And as you mentioned, we have the Penguins and Steelers who win with regularity and do and spend what it takes. Pitching is the most important position to the success of a baseball team, and he (Nutting) revealed what was important to him when Vogelsong, Niese and Locke toed the rubber.
With all that said, the idea that its Hurdles fault is asinine. Anyone who blames him, or Huntington w/o acknowledging his handcuffs, is a total idiot.
And IMO Joe Block is pure torture, thats why TV ratings are down 😉
I wouldn’t call Pedro Alvarez a failure, just a relative disappointment compared to what was expected from him.
The Cubs drafted Kris Bryant and Kyle Schwarber. The Pirates drafted Pedro Alvarez and Tony Sanchez. One of those is a good front office. One is not.
It doesn’t help that the excellent reliever they gave away last week immediately found his way to a division rival and now has just closed out two saves (one a four-out job) against the pirates this weekend.
…or that they decided to waste Steven Brault in Indianapolis all year.