THOSE guys

With 2006 having been over since some time in mid-April, people have understandably been focusing on 2007 for quite some time now. As the Pirates have put up a good record since the All-Star break, people have understandably gotten more and more optimistic about 2007. There's been lots of discussion about the young pitching staff and how good they might be, about the Pirates poor run differential over that time period and what that may mean, and about the abysmal performance. There's a time and a place to discuss that, but it's not now or here. Instead, I want to talk about the one thing that people have been ignoring. It's the biggest obstacle that the Pirates have to winning baseball in 2007. I'm talking about the people that run the team.

Kevin McClatchy has been the public face of the team since 1996, and he always gets lots of blame for everything that goes wrong. Thusly, people are quite excited about what would appear to be the decent prospect of him not returning next year. I don't think this is much to get excited over. From '96 until around 2001, McClatchy did little more than speak for a coporate board of owners whose main goal was to get a stadium built and to get the team out of debt. Once they made progress on that front, Ogden Nutting started buying more and more shares of the team (he's been on the board since McClatchy first bought the team in '96). The Nuttings (Ogden's son Robert is now chairman of the board) own most of the team now (twice as much as McClatchy), but as most of you know, they're notorious recluses (they don't even have Wikipedia pages, likely because they removed them themselves) and they keep McClatchy around to play the role of Baghdad Bob. If McClatchy leaves, it's not a sign of things changing, it's a sign that the Nuttings have decided to stop lying to us. Bad things will keep happening, it's just that people will stop trying to tell us that the sky is still blue.

Since McClatchy has been involved in the team, there's been a pretty obvious way of doing business. The first thing to do is to hire a GM who won't upstage the owners, and who will be a better businessman than baseball man and not draw attention to himself. Next to Cam Bonifay and his southern drawl, no one was going to look stupid. Unfortunately for Cam, Jason Kendall, Kevin Young, Pat Meares, and Derek Bell drew a little bit too much attention from the public, and those moves (which were all bad business moves, not just bad baseball moves) ended up getting Cam canned. On to Dave Littlefield. DL is just cocky enough to come off as stupid. I've said in the past that I don't think Littlefield is stupid, in fact I think the opposite. His contract extension was picked up this offseason, not because he's succeeded at building a good baseball team, but because he's done his job, he's built a team that's a successful business model in the terms of dollars and cents. The GMs, in turn, hire managers that succeed at making them look smart. Gene Lamont, Lloyd McClendon, and Jim Tracy have never thought circles around anyone. The final illusion was on display at Piratefest this February, McClatchy came off as a good guy concerned about baseball and the fans, Littlefield came off as an asshole, and Tracy came off like a moron. This wasn't by accident.

I'm not pretending I'm breaking any ground here. I know most people read the PG story about the Pirates' finances last summer. The point I'm getting at is this: the Pirates have been run with one goal in mind since 1996, to make money. They've become more exagerrated in that goal since Littlefield was hired in 2001. As I've said in the past, they go out of their way to pretend like they're trying to compete when it helps them make money, mostly because it's easier than actually trying to compete. What sounds more like a Littlefield/Nutting move, trying to put together a package of a young pitcher and maybe a guy like Jose Castillo to try and pry Adam LaRoche away from the Braves (as Corey at New Pirates' Generation is continually advocating, which seems like a pretty good idea to me), or paying $6 million for Ryan Klesko to take at-bats away from someone and pull a Burnitz? The problem is that this isn't a Littlefield move, it's a Nutting move. Trading away guys like, say, Maholm and Castillo for someone like LaRoche open the team up to criticism on lots of fronts. Maholm and Castillo may blossom elsewhere, LaRoche may not perform well here. Signing Klesko lets us say "Well, he's always been a good hitter, we figured if we moved him from PetCo to PNC the power would come back. We knew injuries were part of the variable, but it was a risk we had to take." They will ignore the fact that Klesko will take the winter off, try to "play himself into shape" and have a generally negative disposition towards playing in Pittsburgh, they only care about the impression that will be made by signing him.

The problem with the Pirates starts at the top. You can't fix the problem in the middle, because it's a trickle down effect from the top. As long as the owners aren't committed to winning, it will be reflected on the field. Every year the Pirates go through a period where it looks like they don't want to be on the baseball field. Some years (like last year) it's the second half, some (like this year) it's the first half. It seems like everyone that signs a long term deal with the team gets incredibly lethargic at some point afterwards. Maybe Jack Wilson didn't play good defense this year because he bulked up too much, or maybe it was because he realized he'd just signed his life away to play losing baseball. By the time Jason Kendall left Pittsburgh, he hated the Pirates and everything associated with the organization. Ever since Reggie Sanders and Kenny Lofton, every free agent we sign takes the same approach that Burnitz and Randa have, play themselves into shape in the offseason and spend tons of time on the DL/bench in order to collect a paycheck. Only Raul Mondesi has managed to not get away with it. The Nuttings are not going to let 72 games change their business model because it's one that's been working for much longer than that, and that's something that no Pirate fan should forget this offseason.