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Disgruntled after enduring thirteen consecutive seasons of losing baseball, we became IrateFans in May of 2006. What is an IrateFan? It is an angry Pittsburgh Pirate fan, a vocal Pirate fan. We came together in order to call for the current ownership group to make an honest effort to field a competitive team or, failing that, to sell the team as soon as it feasibly can. We believe that nothing less than an authentic commitment to winning, championship baseball could repay the Pirate fans, the citizens of the region and of the state for everything they did for Kevin McClatchy, the Nuttings and their partners. We are a movement. Our strength lies in our numbers, and the movement continues to increase in size with every Nutting Pirate blunder. The essay below develops these ideas in greater detail. (last updated on 6.23.2007) BEING a Pirates’ fan is not very simple or easy these days. It’s difficult because rooting for the Pirates frustrates and angers some of us. We are frustrated and angry because the team — our team — posts sub-.500 records every season while the
McClatchy partnership — the team’s legal owners — floods the local town square with propaganda, empty promises and fireworks displays. For McClatchy, his par But it’s not just the chronic losing which greatly bothers some of us. More and more Pirates’ fans are beginning to suspect the McClatchy partnership has specialized in something besides losing baseball games. We believe it has dedicated its best efforts to maximizing short-term profits at the expense of providing the fans with a quality product — which ironically, would probably make the team more profitable in the long term. And we hold this belief despite McClatchy’s occasionally petulant claims to the contrary (on this issue, see here, here, here and here). We find these profits bothersome because the partnership’s profit-taking — which is to say, its rent-seeking and profiteering — adds economic injury to the fundamental insult we suffer as Pirates’ fans. Our injury: We know that our team support contributes in to the profits pocketed by the partnership. Our insult: As Pirates’ fans, we knowingly root for a certain loser while also taking guff when others ridicule our team preference and our team. * * * * * * * In recent years the pain caused by this injury and insult has only intensified. This more forceful and insistent misery was caused by the player payroll reductions implemented by the partnership over the past few seasons (2003-2005), decreases meant to ensure what the partnership believes to be an acceptable return on their investment (on which, see this and see the discussion below). The cuts have been steep; the payroll trend has pointed downward, as this chart shows. It’s because the cuts were severe that the team’s payroll for the 2006 season remains 19% below the franchise’s high watermark the partnership established during the 2001 season ($ 57.7M). The 2004 payroll fell 44% below that baseline. We believe these reductions made for a substantial change in direction for the organization. Their size and effect suggest the partnership couldn’t and wouldn’t even try to win championships. Quite naturally the partnership neglected to tell the team’s fans that they meant to profit more than they had been from the willingness of many Pirates’ fans to support a chronic loser like the McClatchy Pirates. Rather, the partnership and their general manager, David Littlefield, sold these payroll cuts to the fans as ‘fiscally responsible spending’ and as a strategy meant to achieve ‘financial flexibility.’ They spun their cuts as
Whatever Littlefield might have actually believed he was doing, the upshot of his maneuvering and the organization’s new strategy was rather predictable and forms the base for our summary judgment: The McClatchy Pirates continued to lose games on the field just as they continued to spend far less on their players and less per win than most teams in baseball. The greater significance of these facts can be found in the result they produced: The partnership made money from the use of these methods! This outcome seemed inevitable in 2003 and certainly seems unavoidable when considered in retrospect. We believed this result inevitable because players who are market bargains are not always players who can help their teams to win games and championships. At times these bargain players will be merely replacement players. As such, they would be one among many similar players (see this for the economic significance of the replacement player idea). We believe it to be obvious that having many replacement or league average players on a team imparts little or no competitive advantage to that team when it takes the field. Such a team would be, at best, mediocre. Mostly it would be less than mediocre, all other things being equal. These players are only cost effective for the organizations that employ them (assuming team revenues remain constant). If the partnership’s effort to create a prudent and financially flexible organization were at all successful, as it seems to have been, we can reasonably expect that this success would not appear on the field as a winning baseball team. How could it when the partnership implanted a strategy which committed its operations staff to acquiring replacement players or players who were nearly so? If, in other words, the implementation of this ‘frugal and flexible’ strategy has proven to be an effective business plan for the McClatchy partnership , it also has proven its worth as an ineffective strategy for an organization to use when constructing a baseball team. We have dubbed the partnership’s ‘frugal and flexible’ strategy the “Drive for 75.” * * * * * * * Should we have been surprised by this ineffectiveness? Should we expect a future different than our immediate past? Our answers: No! and No! Payroll spending and team performance — these are intimately related (correlated) variables for a professional sports team (see this and Scully, 1995, 50). When one varies so too does the other. As closely related, as correlated variables, we find that organizations that spend a lot tend to win more in proportion to the amount they spend on their player’s payroll while frugal organizations tend to lose in proportion to their player’s payroll spending. (Remember, correlation does not imply causation.) Why would we expect anything different when we know in general that high quality products cost more to produce in most business ventures? In this matter, Major League Baseball is no different than, say, commodity producers like General Motors, General Electric or SONY. They will design a product while keeping their profit rate in mind. What’s even more important is the relationship between player and team play and organizational revenue. The importance of these relationships derives from the fact that poor player performance can easily and, perhaps, necessarily become a precipitating cause of poor team performance (losing) while poor team performance (losing) may and probably will cause poor organizational performance (revenue shortfalls and bottom line losses) by depressing game attendance, television share and other sources of revenue. These, in turn, will serve to decrease the money available to the organization for acquiring (read: mostly paying) new and better players and for retaining the good players the organization already has on its payroll. This inability to acquire or retain talented players, born of the previous period’s errors and investment shortfalls, thus decreases the probability of future team and organizational success. Team failure indirectly breeds team failure; team success indirectly breeds team success. Only luck and organizational competence will enable a team to break this mechanism. Thus the Pirates’ long run of losing seasons. Thus the hopelessness and despair many fans feel with respect to the team’s future. Thus the McClatchy partnership’s compulsive exertions to secure their short-term profits while downplaying the significance for the fans of their losing teams. At this point we may rightly wonder about the honesty of the McClatchy partnership. Given the partnership’s flexible and frugal business strategy along with the results that strategy has produced so far, we may ask, “How honest have they bee
Our initial answer:We believe partnership hasn’t been very honest with the team’s fans. Not by a long shot. We say this because we doubt that they have ever made a credible effort to field a winning, contending team. But we also say it because we now doubt their honesty as well. Kevin McClatchy may want to win games and championships, as Bob Smizik argues here, but we know with absolute certainty that his burning desire for a winner has always proven insufficient when it came time for his staff to construct a winning, contending team. We believe their failures can be attributed, in part, to their incompetence, a consideration which won’t detain us right now. But we can also attribute them, in part, to economic factors. Our argument: We believe this because the McClatchy partnership has yet to give us a good reason to believe otherwise. Indeed, we even suspect the partnership may now prefer to field a losing team instead of a pennant contender since building a pennant contender would cost too much money and the effort would be too risky for their tastes (see this for a kindred view). We have drawn these conclusions because we know winnin
So what might money say to Pirates’ fans when it talks to them? Among other things, it lets them know that “an organization must pay to play and win!” A
 oll makes explicit — and forcefully so — the intentions of the team’s owners and
middle managers. It also follows that payroll dumps and chronically decreasing payroll budgets mean an organization has only weakly committed itself to winning in the short
-term and, perhaps, over the long-term as well. In fact, payroll dumps and decreasing budgets may also mean that the frugal organization may even be wholly indifferent to fielding winning team. An organization indifferent to winning would be one that, given the choice between profit-taking
and winning, would prefer to increase if not maximize the profits it takes from its investment. When we apply these considerations to the McClatchy partnership, we see an
organization committed not to winning baseball while also observing the budget constraints placed on it by the circumstances of its operations but, rather, an organization
strongly committed to profiting from its investment while attempting to placate the fans of the teams they send onto
the field. We also see that the financial gains the partnership might receive by cutting its players’
payroll have a far different value for the team’s fans. For Pirates’ fans, these cuts mostly appear as a net loss in value. What is the nature of this lost value? We would identify and
measure this loss by the number of team losses per season and over the long haul, by the championships the team failed to win during the partnerships tenure, by the number of seasons
rendered meaningless sometime near the end of May, etc. In short, we believe the McClatchy
partnership’s ‘fiscally sound’ and ‘flexible’ approach to team management — their “Drive for 75” strategy — comes at the expense of the team’s fans. It’s been a zero-sum game so far.
* * * * * * * If our argument is sound, as we believe it to be, it follows that the injury and insult every Pirates’ fan suffers are intimately related. Simply put, this close relationship issues from the fact that Pirates’ fans, by supporting their team, pay the McClatchy partnership good money to avoid making a credible effort to field a competitive team in the future! Our money sends a signal to the partnership: Our actions indicate that we do accept as legitimate the fact that the partnership has provided and will likely continue to provide to us nothing but bad baseball teams. We financially reward the partnership for being greedy and incompetent when we support our team. Losing and profit-taking are thus linked for Pirates’ fans just as they are linked for the McClatchy partnership, although the fan’s version of this relati
With regards to the team’s 2006 payroll, the Pirates will dwell within Major League Baseball’s basement for the current season even though the partnership did increase their payroll allocation by $8M. We believe this increase, made with much partnership fanfare (see this and this), is a bit deceptive (see here for another take on this problem). The deception originates from the fact that an $8M payroll bump amounts to a pittance for a Major League team even though that sum would provide a life full of splendor and ease for most of us. We consider $8M a meager amount because it forms such a small fraction (about 10%) of the average Major League player’s payroll. When this amount is used to sign just one player, we would expect to find that $8M would be sufficient to sign one league average free agent with a bit of change left over. Hence the “spend more to stand in place” quality evoked by the whole payroll situation this season. This quality is well expressed by the fact that the average opening day payroll for the 2006 season rose to a robust $77.6M while the Pirates are committed to spend a measly $46.7M. The difference between the two sums: $30.8M. That’s the third largest difference between the Pirates’ payroll and the average major league payroll in the eleven years the McClatchy partnership has owned the Pirates. Given the disparity between what the partnership spends on their team and what other organizations spend on theirs, it’s clear that the raw total payroll numbers will and can not tell us much at all about the effect this new and increased spending would have on the 2006 roster. What, after all, would $46M mean to most fans but a large amount of money? But it’s not a large amount when considered within its proper context. Thus we should carefully treat arguments made by the organization which assert that we may ‘know’ — if, that is, we care about the truth — that the partnership is committed to winning baseball because they have authorized a larger payroll for this year’s team. In order to treat this spending with the care it deserves we ought to consider the McClatchy partnership’s payroll budget with respect to the following criteria:
When we consider the 2006 payroll budget with respect to these four items, we find that the McClatchy partnership has actually spent less on payroll relative to their estimated income and relative to the payroll spending of its competitors. We believe they have spent less because: 1. As we argued above, the $8M increase which marks the 2006 season as special will provide for only a small improvement over the suppressed payrolls of the past few seasons, the years following the 2003 salary and talent dump phase of the partnership’s tenure. We may confidently make our claim because the partnership continues to fund their team at a rate far below the norm for the league. But the real problem is not just a comparative lack of funds, a problem that has hampered but not defeated recent playoff teams like the Athletics, Marlins and Twins. The problem is also defined by the organization’s irrational commitment to signing veteran free agents. It vexes baseball savvy Pirates’ fans that the organization continues to squander much of their already meager payroll budget on journeymen who are well past their prime years (see this for a representative example of such a Pirates’ fan). Although these veterans often receive short-term contracts, as per the flexibility approach to payroll construction we discussed above, they seldom help the Pirates’ teams they play for simply because their skills have declined to such a degree that they have little to give once they sign on to the Pirates. Every year David Littlefield throws good money after bad when he goes “dumpster diving.” Given the size of the 2006 payroll increase, the dubious use to which it was put and the new revenue sources that have opened up over the past few seasons, we feel safe in concluding that neither the new monies delivered by the recent CBA nor the small attendance increase of 2005 have motivated the partnership to spend money at a greater rate when they constructed their 2006 team. In fact, the link between attendance and payroll has been a weak one for the McClatchy Pirates, although the evidence for this link suffers from the small sample size problem. In sum, then, we feel safe in claiming that the 2006 payroll expresses the fundamental features of the partnership’s post-2003 payroll regime, the regime established by the 2003 salary dump trades and the partnership’s 2004 payroll budget. Like Andrew Zimbalist, we find claims that the partnership is spending all that they can on their team to be “uncompelling.” 2. We believe it would be better to interpret the $8M payroll increase budgeted for the 2006 season as the partnership’s effort to maximize the windfall return they expected to pocket by hosting the 2006 All Star Game and as their latest attempt to improve their image among Pirates’ fans. These two claims surely better interpret the partnership’s efforts than would identifying the 2006 payroll increase as the practical expression of the partnership’s heartfelt desire to improve the quality of the team they would sell to Pirates’ fans. They are better because Littlefield hardly spent that money well. We thus consider their payroll increase a variant of their “Drive for 75” strategy. We have drawn this conclusion because the organization has clearly failed to acquire the kind of players it would need either to win or compete for champions either in the short- or long-terms and because their effort retains those features of the “Drive for 75” strategy meant to insure cost certainty, payroll frugality and tactical flexibility. 3. What is most telling for us is the fact that the Pirates have not only mostly cut their payroll budgets since the 2003 salary dump trades but that they made their cuts just when they were due or had just begun to receive new and larger revenue sharing monies, the cash flowing from Major League Baseball’s new revenue streams (especially from its Advanced Media division, on which see this), the increased money generated by the national broadcast rights contract with Fox (on which, see this) and the windfall profits which would fall to them from the 2006 All Star Game and from the sale of the Nationals. Also significant was the fact that the partnership cut their payroll budgets during a time of payroll inflation for Major League Baseball as a whole. By considering the aggregated payroll totals for Major League Baseball, which includes the relevant Pirates’ payrolls, we find that Major League Baseball’s wage bill for its players inflated by 19% during from 2001-2006 period. Yet we see the Pirates spending less relative to their 2001 baseline. Thus at a time when their competitors spent more to improve their teams or, saving that, to stave off falling backwards, the McClatchy partnership decided to spend less, much less. We should mention here that we purposely chose the 2001 season as the baseline year for our payroll index because 2001 was PNC Park’s inaugural season and because we were told by McClatchy that the new park would provide the kind of venue and the revenues the partnership needed in order to field winning and competitive teams. Therefore the partnership’s choice with regards to the team’s payrolls did not occur in a political or economic vacuum. The consequences following from their choice should also be assessed in their relevant political and economic context. Yet we would fail to exhaust this issue if we merely compared the Pirates’ post-2001 payrolls to the league average payrolls and the payroll inflation rate of the period. As it turns out not only were the McClatchy Pirates an atypical team when we consider their payroll strategy for the period and consider it with respect to the league as a whole, they were also atypical insofar as they cut their payroll budgets while their revenues grew absolutely and relative to their fixed and variable costs. Moreover, one can not say that the partnership was caught unaware by this revenue growth. These monies were predictable outcomes for the partnership because they surely knew about the provisions included in the current CBA and could rationally predict the income growth of Major League Baseball’s collectively owned properties. We can confidently assert the second point because their competitors had no trouble predicting these revenue increases, a fact demonstrated by their payroll budgets and by Major League Baseball’s short-term (2001-2006) payroll inflation. When we consider what we know about the partnership’s financial situation we should not find it at all surprising to learn that the estimated value of the franchise also increased during the 2001-2006 period. What does this increase mean? First of all, in order to identify this meaning we should point out that a franchise’s real or estimated value greatly depends upon the expected future profitability of that franchise. We should also mention that the franchise’s future profitability will depend on its sale price and the risk entailed by achieving a given profit rate when the franchise was purchased for a specific price. Its value does not depend just on its past economic or baseball successes. The franchise’s estimated value is thus an attempt to identify what a rational investor would bet on the Pirates when profitability is the goal. What, then, does the franchise’s current estimated value tell us about Major League Baseball in Pittsburgh? It tells us that business has been and is expected to remain good enough. We may draw this conclusion because the estimated value of the team has grown 55% since the 2000 season, according to the Forbes data (see here for a table of this data and see this for Major League Baseball’s disclaimer regarding the Forbes’ estimates). It’s also grown a whopping 277.8% since 1996, the year the partnership bought the team for $90M. It’s thus obvious that the overall franchise value trend has been a positive and significant one, as the franchise valuation chart demonstrates. It’s likewise obvious that this impressive growth has had little to do with the partnership’s management of the team, for the McClatchy partnership has failed on the field and had little success in developing their local markets. Given the size of the increase, we feel confident in attributing it to the health of Major League Baseball as a whole and, of course, to the recent construction of PNC Park. As for the latter, we wish to mention again that the 2000 season was the last full season the Pirates spent in Three Rivers Stadium, a fact which provides a forceful clue to interpreting the massive increase in franchise value from the 2000 to the 2001 seasons. The construction of PNC Park can be interpreted, we believe, as the necessary condition securing the long-term profitability of the Pirates’ franchise and as a sufficient condition motivating potential investors and baseball observers to confidently predict that the franchise will remain profitable in the future. Bearing this argument in mind and given the number and strength of the partnership’s income sources, the rate at which their franchise has increased in value during the recent term and the low payroll baseline established by their 2003 salary dump trades, we may wonder whether savvy observers were surprised when the partnership refused Mark Cuban’s efforts to buy the Pirates? We wouldn’t think they were. Why, we may ask, would the partnership willingly sell their profit-center when that profit-center is a mostly risk free business? (Naturally, no business is wholly risk free!) They wouldn’t. But there’s the rub, of course, for dedicated Pirates’ fans. The McClatchy partnership, as McClatchy now admits, reaps profits from their franchise. They are not heavily in debt, so far as we know. Nor are they now burdened by numerous and large long-term players’ contracts, commitments that would increase their debt burden as per Major League Baseball’s odd rules governing team debt (see Attachment 22 to the CBA). Yet their teams always lose while they continue to reap whatever economic benefits they can from the losing teams they send onto the field. Keeping this in mind, we can say that, although we may now judge the McClatchy Pirates a healthy and profitable business, we must also judge them an unsuccessful baseball team. We can also say with certainty that the partnership revealed their preferences with regards to their investment when they voted with their wallet, so to speak. By refusing to sell their team to a deep-pocketed and quasi-local owner like Mark Cuban, they sent a signal to the Pirates’ Nation. That signal: The Pirates as presently constructed suits them just fine (on the sale, see this). 4. As we have seen although most teams have increased their player’s payrolls these last few seasons, the Pirates’ payrolls have slanted downward since 2003. How therefore might we interpret the Pirates’ 2006 budget which was marked by an increase over the 2005 budget? To best interpret this ‘spending spree’ we would begin by pointing out that the larger 2006 payroll budget only partially corrects for the great difference between the Pirates’ payroll and the league average payroll. The difference shrank by mere $4.01M this season, which is to say that the partnership managed to gain only $4.49M on the league average payroll for the current season (see this). And, to be sure, the correction may be short-lived. A reversal is a feasible possibility because there is nothing in the current CBA, the partnership’s local political environment or the attitude of corporate Pittsburgh which would limit any attempt the partnership would make to roll the 2007 player’s payroll back to the floor established by the team’s 2004 payroll. [The impending CBA and the sour attitude of many Pirates’ fans are moot points right now. The attitude of the various owners factions are another matter altogether (see this, this, this, this and this) since they can and might adversely change the rules of the game under which the McClatchy partnership must operate.] The partnership has this wonderful ability — this freedom — because they implemented their “financial flexibility” strategy when they dumped the contracts they gave to Giles, Ramirez, Benson and Kendall and when they refused to give similar contracts to their post-2003 free agent acquisitions. Only Jason Bay and Jack Wilson currently hold long-term contracts with the McClatchy Pirates. This flexibility strategy not only enables the partnership to practice a form of labor arbitrage when shopping for free agents, it also empowers them to lessen their investment in their team (the player’s payroll) when they feel such a reduction is justified by the circumstances they confront. All that stops the partnership from deeply slashing their player’s payroll is their commitment to competitiveness. Thus we may judge the 2006 increase an aberration or a genuine move to a new payroll norm for the franchise. However we judge this increase, it remains the case that the McClatchy partnership under-funded their 2006 team while retaining the capacity to rollback their payroll budget to the 2004 baseline and beyond. In sum, then, the partnership opted to spend less on team payroll relative to their financial means and they money spent by their competitors. They were undeterred by the fact that the construction and opening of PNC Park was meant to ensure a viable Major League team for Pirates' fans (see this, this, this, this and this)! Every indication known to us has the partnership profiting from their franchise but spending little on improving their product. And, in fact, we would be hard pressed to identify an incentive they currently face which would motivate them to take less in profits in order to invest more in their team. Quite naturally the product the partnership sells to the fans — which is to say, the team they choose to send onto the field — reflects this shabby approach to team construction, as it must given the relationship between payroll spending and team winning. To put our conclusion into different terms, we would say that the product the partnership sells to the public reflects the well-considered organizational and financial preferences of the partnership. These preferences give pride of place to the profits the partnership wants to take and expects to earn from their property, not the winning baseball team they could sell to Pirates’ fans but won’t because they would rather not be bothered to make any effort to provide just this kind of product. * * * * * * * So, if it can be said that the McClatchy partnership specializes in both loosing and profiteering, and, as we have argued above, we believe the McClatchy partnership can be rightly identified as such an organization, we Pirates' fans surely must specialize in suffering . These days it cannot be otherwise, for, as Pirates’ fans, we follow a team that’s nearly certain loser while also paying out good money for the right to watch this team lose games and seasons. We also follow a team that makes good money from the support we give it. And this unrequited devotion has been our lot since Barry Bonds left for San Francisco. It is due to this losing, which has been chronic, pathetic and certain under the McClatchy partnership, and to the organizational incompetence which produces these losing teams, that we Pirates' fans often find ourselves the objects of pity and ridicule (see this). The McClatchy partnership denies to us even the dignity of fighting the honorable fight. If Kevin McClatchy and his partners were the sworn enemy of every Pirates' fans…. Our sad tale is summarized here:
And a sad tale it is. As Table 1 tells us the McClatchy partnership’s methods and strategies have generated a.443 winning percentage over the course of their term. This winning rate generates a miserable 72-90 record when we apply it to a single season of 162 games. Clearly the partnership has provided a product sitting well beneath mediocre. Amazingly enough their teams have achieved a level of ‘success’ which even fails to realize on average the diminished goals specific to the organization’s “Drive for 75” strategy. Such a team would be incapable of contending for anything but fifth place in the National League Central Division. And it’d be a team which would not be especially interesting to watch in most years because it would fail to be competitive under most definitions of the word “competitive.” And, as one might expect with a record such as his, the “accidental Pittsburgher” Kevin McClatchy has never led his organization to a winning season . Not a single one. The McClatchy Pirates twice came within five games of The McClatchy Line. That’s it. That’s the best it has achieved. We may reasonably expect those seasons to be the best they will ever achieve. Of course, the 2006 Pirates’ team, General Manager Dave Littlefield’s ‘second’ (this and this argue that we should consider the 2006 team to be Littlefield’s second but see this for a counter-argument debunking this apologetic argument), is currently stuck fast to last place in the National League Central Division. Although the partnership’s propaganda machine worked hard in the off-season to drum up excitement for the 2006 season, the team has won about 30 % to 35% of its games and, unsurprisingly enough, has managed to achieve the third worst record in Major League Baseball as we were writing this essay. Last place again…. We might expect McClatchy to find this result appalling, although he has yet to offer an opinion about his 2006 team to the public. Our critical analysis of his opinion will just have to wait until he does so. Until then we will continue to believe he would be appalled because he surely expected better from his team. What expectation could we rationally attribute to McClatchy and his partners given the grandiose promises made by his new manager before the season began (on which see this and this), the ‘pricey’ veterans he had Dave Littlefield acquire the past off-season and the payroll increase he authorized in November 2005. Clearly the partnership would expect a return on what must be considered a capital expenditure meant to generate a profit. By adopting the perspective of the partnership, which is to say, by considering the 2005 Hot Stove season to be a prelude to a very profitable 2006 season, we can easily see that it would make no sense whatsoever for the partnership to pay out more money to the team’s players in order to produce yet another dismal season. The Pirates could have finished last without the payroll bump! Why would the partnership act in such a way as to entice the team’s fans to increase their expectations for the season only to have the 2006 squad fail them in the end? Why, indeed, would the partnership choose to pay more to create a public relations disaster? They wouldn’t, of course. But that seems to have been the choice they made this past off -season. Since we do not believe the partnership to be wholly irrational or perverse in any way, we suspect that there is more to the story than the partnership’s efforts to increase their profits. We believe instead that this embarrassing situation exposes some of the deep flaws that can be found in this organization. Partnership greed is just one of the flaws which undermine the organization’s efforts to field a winning team. Even though the “greed and money” explanation of the Pirates’ woes is a convenient and often true explanation for many team fans, reporters and commentators, it just isn’t true that every organizational flaw reasonably attributable to the McClatchy Pirates can be directly and neatly explained by the financial state of the team and Major League Baseball in general. We would also suggest that the organization’s operation’s staff has also failed the team’s fans. Littlefield and his people have failed them mostly by always providing ‘name’ veterans for the team — albeit third-tier veterans who are mostly past their prime years. These veterans serve to elevate the expectations of the fans while they also fail to perform at a level needed to meet or exceed these expectations. These signings fail because the McClatchy Pirates refuse to pay for high-quality players. Rather it appears instead that they acquire the players they do and they spend their money, meager as it may be, in order to acquire the publicity value inherent in the names of the veterans who will sign with the Pirates. This point is neatly illustrated by the organization’s behavior when it signs certain players, players like Kenny Lofton, Sean Casey and Joe Randa. These are players who can only be a subordinate part in a greater whole dominated by stronger talents than they. They are not stars. They don’t produce like stars. They don’t even receive the pay of stars. But for the McClatchy Pirates, these players are stars on the team. At least Littlefield asks them to fill that role when they sign on with the Pirates, a role for which they are ill-suited. Even Jeromy Burnitz knows this to be true. Yet the McClatchy Pirates mostly stake the reputation of their teams on the play of these players. They treat their veteran acquisitions as necessary conditions that they must meet if the organization is to have a successful season. They believe “bad things will happen” if their teams lack this veteran supplement, according to Dejan Kovacevic. They fear their prospects, according to Mike Emeigh. And it’s mostly the veterans who have disappointed McClatchy, his operations staff and the team’s fans. And this malignant dynamic is at work in the 2006 team, which has received little from the money the partnership invested in Sean Casey, Joe Randa and Jeromy Burnitz. (We should mention that relievers like Roberto Hernandez and Domaso Marte have been productive so far this season.) In fact, when taken together, these three now stand 11.6 runs and .6 wins beneath the replacement players for their positions. Their skimpy production belies the fact that they were the players Littlefield acquired in order to make the 2006 team ‘competitive’ or, baring that seemingly impossible goal, appear competitive to the fans. Appearances can deceive, however, for it’s not only the partnership which had some of their dreams wrecked by a hard and bitter reality. Some Pirates' fans were also hopeful as the season drew near (for a sample, see this). What were the sources of their hope? Well, the trade for Casey excited them. Randa provided a happy memory from the last interesting Pirates’ team. Burnitz was a lefthanded power hitter with a track record who would play 81 games in PNC Park. The 2006 team might actually hit its weight! The fans could even nurture their more extravagant aspirations by focusing on the young players who performed so well over the last few months of the 2005 season. Perhaps Littlefield’s ‘pitching and defense über alles’ strategy might work after all, they could wonder? Maybe these prospects will pan out? Zack Duke may be the real thing and Ollie will reprise his 2004 self this season? Things seem to be coming together! We know the fans supported their team because attendance increased last season (despite the 2005 team’s dismal record), season ticket sales increased for the 2006 season (see this and this) and one could detect a faint but not imperceptible buzz during the off season months. Could the 2006 team surpass The McClatchy Line? Would a contending team be our near-term future? This buzz died a quick death when the Pirates began the season with a 7-19 (.269) record. Some fans quickly turned on the organization. Boos could be heard echoing about a half-empty PNC Park. The speed of this reversal was startling. It’s as though Pirates’ fans were waiting for the inevitable and the upsetting feelings it would cause when it came. And when fate brought them to the realization that the 2006 season would be like 2005, 2004 and 2003…seasons, they expressed their frustration with the organization without hesitation. As for ourselves, we don’t believe we are relying upon the omniscience provided by hindsight when we state that the 2006 team would earn the organization’s its fourteenth consecutive losing season. The dismal start may have been a shock to those who had drank the partnership’s Kool-Aid during Piratefest and who had dared to hope for better days. But most of us here weren’t shocked at all. As we noted above, we believe the partnership and its operations staff failed to fund and thus arm the team with the kind of talent needed to produce a winning season . Their failure was due, in part, to the partnership’s preferences for veteran talent, to the partnership’s penny-wise, pound-foolish ways and to the incompetence of the operations staff. It’s also unfortunate that help is not on the way. Having promoted so many of their prospects to the majors —that is, by promoted those prospects left over after the talent drain of the previous years — and given Scouting Director Ed Creech’s poor drafts since being hired by the Littlefield, the Pirates now have a mostly depleted farm system from which to build their teams. In its current iteration only Thomas Gorzelanny, Neil Walker and Andrew McCutchen appear certain bets to make it to and contribute in the major league team. Nor has Littlefield proven to be a crafty prospector able to find gold where others find only sand. He too appears committed to veteran players. As Wilbur Miller might put it, Littlefield plies his trade much like the Yankees’ General Manager Brian Cashman. But Littlefield works Yankees’ way without having access to the quantity of money Cashman uses to build contenders and world champions for New Yorkers! These skimpy resources only permit him to “dumpster dive.” Unless we see a significant change in the organization’s methods, goals and personnel, we believe a talent shortage will remain a significant and defining feature of the team. So, just as many we expected another losing season in 2006, we will not be naive about the possibility of the team suffering through another losing season in 2007, 2008 and beyond. When we consider the current state of the organization, the futility expressed by the team’s record since the McClatchy partnership bought the franchise and the myopia and rigidity the partnership has shown with respect to their strategies and goals, must we ask about the record for consecutive losing seasons by a Major League team? We should…. The answer: Sixteen, of course! With their Scrooge-like mentality and behavior, their organizational incompetence and their “Drive for 75” strategy, we believe the McClatchy Pirates are good bets to break that record. In fact, we can think of no event or situation that has happened during the partnership’s tenure which suggests they will eventually field a winning team, a team that surpasses The McClatchy Line, a team that does not injure and insult Pirates’ fans. This is a truly appalling prospect, for even the Brewers and the Royals, pathetic as they have been over the past fifteen years, have recently met or topped The McClatchy Line. The Devil Rays, another horrible franchise, is so well-stocked with young and talented players that they will likely relegate leave the Pirates behind sometime over the next few seasons. At present the McClatchy Pirates nearly stand alone as a Major League Baseball basket case. They will continue to stand alone. And they will probably become unique once they complete year seventeen of their losing streak (2009). How could have McClatchy and his partners let this happen? Over the past months a few Pirates' fans began to cohere into an informal and ever-changing group. IrateFans.com came into being not long after. We were motivated by and committed to achieving a simple and feasible goal. Our goal: We wish to publicly express the frustration and anger we feel toward the McClatchy partnership, their methods and the results they produce. Our hope: That our frustration and anger, as expressed and heard, will motivate other Pirates’ fans to act in a like manner while, eventually, prodding the team’s owners — whomever they may be — to provide something every baseball fan wishes to have: The experience of rooting for a championship contender. Our path: Argument and debate, publicity and collective action. IrateFans.com was born from this goal, this hope and the adoption of this path. Our motives ought to be clear-cut, especially to anyone who read the first part of this essay. And in fact few these days would dispute the belief that the McClatchy Pirates are a basket case team. While the partnership might make money, as we have seen, they take their profits at the fans’ expense. Their bankers may understand them. But we won’t! * * * * * * * So, why act now? Why interrogate the partnership’s goals, methods and practices today, at this late date? Why harass Kevin McClatchy, his partners and staff when the lot of them are merely acting as they always have? We actually believe these to be reasonable questions given the recent history of the franchise, the economics of Major League Baseball and even the state of the local economy. Since we believe them to be reasonable questions, we will attempt to answer them below. We believe them reasonable because, firstly and as we discussed above, it’s not as though our team became decrepit and embarrassing just this past year or two! With respect to the Pirates, a fan’s greatest despair has long been a feature of our lives. Despair is normal for a Pirates’ fan . Some of us have never known anything but this despair! The origin of this despair dates back at least to the 1992 League Championship Series. Some would even want locate this origin in the 1981 season, the year when Dave Parker’s production dropped well below the level required by his salary. Others would push it back further still to the 1979 World Series! Whatever dating given to this beginning, the length of the drought will always be significant for the dedicated fan. So, why speak up now, in year fourteen of the most recent phase of this twenty-five or -seven year disaster? Are we not changing “the rules of the game” on the McClatchy partnership? Are we holding them accountable for the misdeeds committed by others? Second, it’s not merely the business goals, methods and practices of the partnership that work against the interests of most Pirates’ fans. Their ways, means and ends are only a part of the problem. Additionally, the national, regional, urban and even the larger, inclusive sports economies contribute in their fair share to the completion of this destructive work. As Western Pennsylvanians know all too well, the regional economy has been a long stagnant one. Indeed, it’s never truly bounced back from the greater deindustrialization and regional capital flight that defined the decomposition of the Big Steel economy during the 1970s. Empty plant, lonely downtown streets, decaying infrastructure, second-hand shops and bankrupt governments — these mark the Western Pennsylvanian economic landscape just like craters define the moon’s terrain. They now express the normal state of things, not smoky skies and darkness at noon, barges laden with coal and box cars standing sentry besides the rivers. But economic misery of this kind has not been confined to the local region or to its urban Rust Belt kin. It’s a sad but true fact that America’s national economy has also stagnated since the Post-war Golden Age came to an end. Deindustrialization and capital flight, declining real wages and public squalor (Galbraith, 191) have characterized the American economic system since the Oil Crisis of 1973 and the stagflation of the 1970s. We are slowly discovering that “Manufacturing Matters,” as Stephen Cohen and John Zysman once put it. Many Americans began to discover the truth of this assertion for themselves when they realized the United States was and would remain a debtor nation. Manufacturing surely matters for those who want to have well-paying jobs working in high value-added industries. It matters to the secondary and tertiary sector firms which immediately depend upon these primary sector firms and to the governments that must make due with their shrinking tax bases. A full employment economy and a wealthy society depend greatly on firms which make things, but not things like burgers, motel beds and cold calls to debt-ridden consumers. Rather, they make things like steel, rubber and glass, electronic components and integrated circuits. And as capital flees an area so too will many of those who live there (see this). They will follow the jobs and the money. It’s thus inevitable that younger Western Pennsylvanians would tend to move away from their rusty and torpid communities just as it’s predictable that real wages would fall for those who chose to remain behind. As prosperity often falls upon the already prosperous, so too will stagnation and decline afflict those who have already fallen through the cracks. What might our argument mean when we use it to interpret the McClatchy partnership and its practices? It means, among other things, that there are thus fewer actual or potential Pirates fans now living in the region. Furthermore those who remain will tend to have less disposable income they could use to watch professional baseball at PNC Park. They will also have less to spend on the partnership’s souvenirs, food, programs, shirts, etc. This is a consequence of the declining real wage, a decrease specific to the country as a whole and also to this region. When we consider these conditions together, its clear they cohere into constraints on the demand for the goods the Pittsburgh Pirates put on sale. There are, then, absolute and relative limits the partnership will confront when they consider the investment strategies available to them. These are limits to the degree of revenue and profit growth they can expect to receive from their investment. This, in fact, seems to be the point McClatchy wants to make when he claims that his player’s payroll budgets depend upon the attendance of the team. Third, although some individuals may find professional baseball intrinsically interesting and, as a consequence, feel an insistent desire to spend one-hundred hours every week of the year following the sport and their team, there are, we must admit, far more worthy and pressing problems and life projects on which a baseball fan might spend his or her time. Family, friends and vocations come immediately to mind. Reading and playing a musical instrument are also worthy pursuits! And some of us do make time for these things. But others do not. As for the latter, if they truly need to spend their time on something that fails to lift up their souls by providing them with instruction in the fine arts of life, they now have far more vulgar entertainment options competing for their limited time and money than they would have ever had in the past. Proliferating television channels, an Internet expanding towards infinity, numerous sports and sporting leagues, shopping, hands on hobbies — these and more provide able substitutes for being a fan of a professional baseball team. When taken together, both conditions conspire to depress the commitment a Pirates’ fan may have to his or her team. A potential fan needs a good reason — a winning and contending team might be one reason! — to cross over the line which separates healthy men and women from the fanatics who devotedly follow a professional baseball team. Fourth and finally, we wish to mention that we do not underestimate the difficulties we face in our efforts to motivate the McClatchy partnership to change their ways and goals. Nor would we for a moment want to underestimate the difficulties an outsider would face if he or she attempted to change or even to influence the changing of the owner of a professional sports team. We are realists! We lack great power and most forms of legal authority. The partnership, on the other hand, has the vested powers and authority due to those who hold rights over a piece of property. When these property rights are considered in light of the legal nature (it’s a coercive monopoly) and financial health of Major League Baseball as a whole, we quickly discover that we are limited in our ability to affect the setting, nature and ownership of this baseball franchise. These rights provide the McClatchy partnership with a political and economic refuge from the team’s noisy and demanding fans. They enable the partnership to stand pat with the resources they now have. We fans, on the other hand, can only speak out, protest or boycott our team while hoping that our actions have affect the partnership in a desirable way. * * * * * * * The fans face obstacles. The partnership faces obstacles. We all face obstacles. Yet we ask once again, “Why now?” The simple answer might be the best we could give: We want to root for a winner and we do not want to be exploited by the partnership. It’s also our most authentic answer. An unanticipated incident brought matters to a head, as it so often does. We believe it’s rather obvious that many Pirates’ fans, including those of us associated with the IrateFans.com web site, were greatly encouraged by the plain but pointed words Michael Keaton recently spoke on behalf of every Pirates’ fan. Yes, we agree with Keaton that Pirates’ fans have been too quiet and even “gracious” to a fault in their dealings with the McCl
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tners and their employees, it’s always a hearty “Yes” to
corny public relations efforts (see, for instance, 