Trouble for the Welfare Queens

Wilbur sums up the gathering suggestions that the next CBA will not shovel so much money in the direction of Pittsburgh.

One thought about the current payroll. Bones busted me for making some unclear comment in praise of DL for fielding a team that's built around giving chances to young guys and B prospects at half the positions and throughout the rotation.

Arguments that the Pirates' scouting and player development were not world-class are compelling, I think, simply in light of the talent that's been available on the field. My sense is that any time there is "regime change" within an organization, the new regime is pretty likely to screw things up pretty good for several years. Everyone has to make and learn from their own mistakes. The last few drafts have looked OK to me, and we do have Zach Duke, so I'm not sure that the drafting and player development remains the problem it surely was some time ago. It takes several years to judge a draft, right, and the current crop of the youngest guys, which includes Walker and McCutcheon, looks promising. So I'm no fan of arguments that we need a new owner & GM because I expect any new owner, most likely, would go back to screwing it up.

Acquiring players is one thing. Another thing is actually playing prospects at the major-league level. It can't be wise, I believe, to field a team that has prospects at every position. I'd guess that context has a lot to do with development. I'd rather see a player mature with habits of winning as opposed to improving with habits of losing. You may not win if you throw in some veterans on one-year deals, but you will surely lose if you tour the country with 25 college players.

This gets to the payroll. Clearly you want, as a team, to get the most value from your payroll dollars. This means exploiting the first six years of a player's career -- his indentured servitude, we might call it. To give up, right now, on low-cost players like Jose Castillo, Chris Duffy, Oliver Perez, and Paul Maholm, does not strike me as wise roster management. Some of these guys will have to come through for the Pirates to ever field a team that wins as many games as the high-payroll all-star teams assembled by more successful franchises.

It's also clear that a team should not invest much money in long-term deals. The good players, these days, always get long-term deals. I don't want to see the Pirates sign any pitcher, for example, to a five-year deal. The risk is too great.

The issue to me is not the payroll. If the Pirates were to have raised the payroll that much in the past offseason, it would have required that they spend their money less efficiently. About the only scenario I could concoct where they wisely blow huge sums of money involved the Pirates persuading another team to engage in a salary-dump that doubled the Sean Casey proportions. It's not going to happen; the Phillies will not trade us Bobby Abreu & his two remaining years for Oliver Perez and Craig Wilson.

The payroll is where it is because the team is (a) carrying a lot of indentured servants and (b) not participating in the market for free agents that demand long-term deals.

So the issue is this: what do they do with the rest of the money? If payroll is covered by revenue sharing, what do they do with the gate receipts, the TV money, the other ways they raise dough? We've been told the Pirates were in a lot of debt. If that's the case, have they paid it off? If they have, all of the remaining money should go into coaching, scouting, and player development. As I've said before, the Pirates need to become a research university of ball teams if they plan to contend with smaller payrolls. And, the owners and staff are entitled to some compensation. There are other ways of investing money; no one can credibly argue that the Pirates' owners have an ethical obligation to make nothing on their investment. We could never have a baseball team if that was the climate.

Until I know for sure that the Pirates' owners are "making money hand over fist" -- I don't think anyone has access to their finances and can prove that -- then all this hating on the small-franchise clubs strikes me as little more than the knee-jerk conservative mumbo-jumbo about bootstraps, hard work, and the good reasons we should hate on welfare mothers and further grind them beneath our heels. Of course the wealthiest teams want to grow their competitive advantage by choking off the revenue sharing. Duh. You don't get rich by giving your money away to competitors.

Why should fans sympathize with these most wealthiest owners? Both Wilbur Miller and Joe Sheehan seem to suggest that it's the Pirates and Royals who are in the wrong. How do they know that? Is this not jumping to conclusions? And if we are going to jump to conclusions, why are we choosing this of all conclusions?

Do the fans of the Yankees and Red Sox really want competition that is not competitive? If so, why don't those teams become the Harlem Globetrotters, and hire a team of patsies to trounce six days a week? Is that what the fans want?

There's no doubt that money plays a role in the kind of talent a team can field. We could point at the Steelers -- football's most popular franchise -- and argue that the Pirates can't really use the "small market" excuse. If the NFL would let the Steelers have their own cable channel, it would be available, by popular demand, in every quarter of the country.

But there's also no doubt that the Pirates are laid pretty low, and they are not going to become the Steelers of baseball this season or next or anytime soon, even if they win the World Series this year and next.

So what do the fans want? Because there is a perception that the owners might be profiting "excessively" from the team, now we are all to side with Steinbrenner and Red Sox?

Not me, man. Steinbrenner does not get an ounce of sympathy from me. I want more parity and competition. It will be hard enough for the Pirates to compete for the services of the best players graduating to unrestricted free agency, even with the current CBA. With this proposed CBA with reduced revenue sharing, teams laid low by incompetence and ill luck will have an even smaller chance of getting back up.

And it's not about the owners. Owners are a necessary evil. So too, these days, are many of the better players. The game and the CBA should be about the fans. Only fans of the Red Sox and the Yankees would be well served by a "winner takes all" CBA.

Pirate fans should be penalized because their owners were incompetent? C'mon, get real. The victor has gotten plenty of spoils under the current CBA. As fans, we have to get real about the next CBA and stop accepting whatever nonsense the victors want us to believe without study or reflection.