A year of Nutting

I've been debating all day whether it's worth it or not to post about the long article in the PG today about the Pirates' first year under Bob Nutting's control. That's mostly because, from an objective perspective, Nutting's first year as the official "owner" or whatever he is of the Pirates was probably one of the best years they've had in quite some time. I don't imagine that will be a terribly popular sentiment but I don't write this blog to be popular, so here goes.

It is, admittedly, quite hard to get past the shadowy image of Bob and Ogden Nutting as the puppet masters that choked the purse strings on the Dave Littlefield/Kevin McClatchy Pirates from 2002-2006. The figures that show the gross profit of the team every year are very public and while the numbers put out by Forbes may not be 100% accurate, they're probably pretty close. Lots of people attribute the Aramis Ramirez fleecing to a mandate from the Nuttings that Littlefield cut the budget. Once you've established an identity as a Rachel Phelps type owner, that's a really hard image to shake in the eyes of the fans. Still, sitting in Wheeling and counting your money is one thing when Kevin McClatchy's name is the name branded on the team and it's an entirely different thing when it's your own name bearing the standard.

When Nutting took over a year ago, he wrote a letter to the fans and I responded on this blog with a letter of my own. I'll paste what was probably the key passage from my letter here:

Still, I'm a reasonable person and I think I'm a pretty fair guy. In fact, a lot of Pirate fans will read this letter I'm writing and tell me I'm too fair. I read the stuff you say to Dejan Kovacevic in the Post Gazette and I want to believe you. "It's my expectation to win." That's what you said. As a fan, I hope you'll forgive me if I say I have ample reason to think otherwise. Still, there's no way around the statement you've made. It's not open ended like "We Will." It says pretty clearly what you want to do with the team and it's hard for me to argue with that, because I want to see the Pirates win and I should hope that you do too. But you know what? Words don't mean anything anymore. I don't care if you say you want to win or expect to win every day. I want you to show me that you want to win. Fire Dave Littlefield. Talk to any reasonable baseball person and they'll tell you that Littlefield is an awful GM. Guess who's helped turn us into a punchline? Littlefield. If you want to win, I'd suggest you start by firing him. Next up, fire Ed Creech and Brian Graham. You profess to want a strong farm system to operate like Oakland and Minnesota. We don't have that and no one is more responsible for it than Creech and Graham.

It's crazy to read back on that letter and realize that that's exactly what Nutting did this year. He talked to reasonable baseball people, they told him that Littlefield, Creech, and Graham were bad, and he fired them. Not only that, but Kevin McClatchy left and was replaced with an actual baseball person, and Nutting took it upon himself to investigate the team's facilities in the Dominican Republic and decided that they were so bad that the team needed a $4-$5 million new academy to help scouting in the area. Mark me if I'm wrong, but most of us would've considered all of these things to be huge strides 365 days ago.

The problem, of course, is that the Pirates' team that we see 162 times every year has changed very little since Nutting took over. We made the LaRoche trade a year ago tomorrow, and that's been about it in terms of major roster changes. Sometimes as fans it's hard to see that the team on the field is the final product of a lot of things and it's not until all of the variables are fixed that the team on the field will be appreciably better.

I now feel like I need to go out of my way to say that I'm not trying to stick up for Nutting or apologize for the things that his ownership has been responsible for. I'm simply trying to view things through a more objective lens than the one that is normally used by fans. The truth of the matter is that in the past year, Bob Nutting has changed a lot of things about the Pirates and the way business is done on Federal Street, and I think it's hard to argue that the changes he's made haven't been for the better. Listen to him talk about the payroll after a year as owner (from the PG article linked at the beginning of this post):

"When the pieces are lined up for us to contend, it's my responsibility to make sure we can take advantage of it. The answer is yes. We're not going to have any artificial barrier where we can't ever be competitive. The Brewers are a great example. They supplemented only after they had the foundation built. They didn't do it three years ago. They did it last year. It's a very rational, orderly approach, and it's one I'm very comfortable with."

It's one thing to say things and it's another thing entirely to do them and because of that simple fact, I'm never going to fully trust the ownership of this organization until they give me reason to trust them (and the only thing here that qualifies is putting a winning team on the field). The Pirates are still a long ways and a lot of good decisions away from being a good baseball team. But hearing Nutting talk about the team after seeing his actions in the past year gives me the distinct impression that the guy might care more about winning baseball games than any of us ever suspected.