Pittsburgh Pirates

Baseball's regular season ended today. No big surprises, I guess. Red Sox and Yankees both in the playoffs? Whoa, shocking, that the teams with the biggest payrolls got in. The Cardinals and Angels? Everyone knew they would be good (although the A's would have beaten the Angels if the A's had been healthy). It's a little disappointing that the Padres ended up with a winning record. A playoff team with a losing record would have been entertaining.

And the Pittsburgh Pirates ended with what I believe was their 13th consecutive losing record.

Now, you're probably thinking, "Why should the Webbed Toe give a rat's rear about the Pirates? The Dodgers are his team." True, true, the Dodgers are my team. But the Pirates are the canary in baseball's coalmine and they're dying.

The Pirates are a proud franchise. They are one of the old, old teams. I think that they were in the first World Series (losing in 8 games -- yes, 8, they played best of 9 at first) to the Red Sox, I think. Honus Wagner played for them, getting his mug on those little cigarette cards that are now the most valuable sports memorabilia in the world. They sucked for much of the first half of the 20th century, but made the World Series at least a couple of times. Babe Ruth hit his called shot off them in the 1932 World Series. They picked up considerably, I think, with integration. Their pitcher Harvey Haddix is the only pitcher to lose after pitching a perfect game for nine innings. Haddix actually was perfect into the 12th in a 1959 game, then walked Hank Aaron (I think) and Eddie Matthews hit a home run, but passed Aaron on the bases somehow, so the game ended 1-0 with Haddix on the short end. They won the World Series in 1960, upsetting the Yankees with Bill Mazeroski hitting the only Game 7 walk-off home run in the history of the World Series. They got Roberto Clemente in the late 1950's and he played for them until he died in the early '70s. In 1971, they were the second team to win a World Series after being down 3-1 (I think that the Tigers in 1968 were the first), beating the Orioles. In 1979, they did the same thing to the Orioles again, riding Willie Stargell and singing "We Are Family." (I remember that World Series particularly well because my mom went into the hospital to have my brother The Philosopher two months premature just before that Series and we shuttled back and forth to Valley Children's in Fresno pretty much very day for a month until The Philosopher came home.) They had those really good teams in the late '80s and early '90s with Barry Bonds, Andy Van Slyke, Bobby Bonilla, Doug Drabek, John Smiley, Jose Lind, managed by Jim Leyland, that just couldn't get out of the NLCS. They also have what looks like a great park that was built in the last 5 years or so.

But they are screwed now.

Basically, they play in a market that is too small to generate the revenue that they need to be competitive. Among teams of the three major sports, baseball teams depend most heavily on their local revenue streams to generate the cash they need. Pete Rozelle set the NFL up properly back in the '60s when he convinced the owners to split the revenues from their first network contract evenly. That makes it possible for Green Bay to compete with the New York teams. The NBA teams split up the network money evenly, I think, as a result of the league almost going belly up in the late '70s (that's when they put in the salary cap too). The teams have local revenue streams and that might be a serious problem at some point.

But baseball is there right now.

The teams split network revenues from the one game a week that Fox shows and ESPN's couple of games a week and Fox's contract for the playoffs and World Series, but every team has way over a 100 games a year that are broadcast on its local outlet and that money stays with the team. This means that the Yankees make so much money that they have their own network on New York's cable system, while the Pirates and the A's can't make enough money to keep the guys that develop from their farm system.

This in turn means that a lot of baseball teams have to struggle, struggle, struggle just to be marginally competitive. The Brewers are like that, but I view that as karma derived from Bud Selig's incompetent performance as commissioner and his willingness to turn the formerly exalted office of Commissioner of Major League Baseball into the owners' stooge. The Tigers are like that, but they haven't been interesting since, like, 1987 and they missed their big chance by building a lousy new stadium. They Royals are like that and they even replaced the Astroturf in their nice stadium with grass. The A's are like that, but they employ a genius as a general manager, Billy Beane, and have performed miracle after miracle to stay competitive. (We're not counting new teams that haven't managed to be competitive. The Rockies are doomed because they play at 5,000 feet. The Devil Rays are doomed because of that awful place where they play and to which their owners tried to take the Giants to.)

But it is the Pirates that really make me sad. A lot of it is that they're in the National League and I have always much preferred the National League. (Down with the DH!) Part of it is that I remember that 1979 We Are Family team very well. Part of it is that they have cool, old-school uniforms. Quite a bit of it, though, is that they have tried to do things right. They built what looks like a really nice new stadium with cool, kind of blond brick that has a view of downtown Pittsburgh. They've done a decent job developing players from their farm system that they have lost because they didn't have the money to keep them -- Barry Bonds (couldn't pay him as a free agent in '92), Bobby Bonilla (lost to the Marlins as a free agent in "96, I think), Doug Drabek (lost to the Astros as a free agent at some point), Jason Schmidt (traded to the Giants), Jason Kendall (traded to the A's, of all people), Kris Benson (Mets, free agent). And they keep losing. And they never seem to have any hope of getting better.

It seems like there is almost no way the Pirates are going to get significantly better for more than a fluke year or so unless they move. It would be a terrible thing if they moved. It would be akin to when Art Modell dragged the Browns out of Cleveland, a total travesty. Perhaps even worse is that the Pirates aren't going to get any better if they move. There's not really any place for them to go. There really aren't any good-size cities out there to which they could move where they would have much of a hope of being more competitive. The Expos got moved to Washington, D.C. (that was a good move, a mercy killing of the unfortunate Expos, really) and the runner-up for getting them, I believe, was Portland. Portland sounds like a nice city, but it doesn't seem like it's really big enough to generate the bucks to make a baseball team competitive.

So it sure seems to me like the Pirates are doomed unless baseball changes. Baseball must change. It must. We need to see the Yankees and Braves in the playoffs every single year like we need a hole in the head.