OT - MLBPA Files Grievance Against Pirates

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There's a huge difference between tanking in basketball and baseball. You tank in basketball for 5 years and you get two All-NBA players and kaboom, you're automatically a playoff team and very likely a conference contender (the Sixers recent season notwithstanding since they decided to sign ancient Al Horford to a $30M/year deal instead of a shooter). You only need 2 great and 2 good players in hoops, plus about 3 specific role players that you can find anywhere. In baseball, you tank for 5 years and you get maybe 3 good MLB players. That's not enough when you need 8 fielders, 4 starting pitchers, probably 2-3 relievers, etc. It's just a totally different thing. Plus, acquiring baseball talent is much harder. Baseball players take forever to develop and they're very hard to scout. I never played basketball above the good high school level but I could pick Ben Simmons and Joel Embiid. And once I had those 2, I could find a 3-and-D, a defensive backup center, and a backup PG. Maybe the only thing I'd have trouble with identifying is a stretch forward and a real shooting guard but that could also be because those guys are just rare skillsets.

The second issue with tanking is with the Pirates specifically. Look what happened the last time they tanked - they got Cutch, who was unquestionably their best player of the last 30 years; Neil Walker, who was good but not great, Marte, and Pedro Alvarez who was basically a DH but played in the National League. That's likely not enough to win a championship by itself. And that's with the best player they're likely to find in the draft for the foreseeable future. Then, instead of making a few moves to go all-in around that core, they went cheap on pitching and poof, their best team in decades is gone.

Objectively, there's no question that the Pirates are in no place to win now and might as well try to stockpile for the future. Subjectively, because Bob Nutting will never go all-in to the extent required, this approach will ultimately be futile anyway. Having Nutting as your leader invalidates any and all strategy. It's fighting with 1 hand tied behind your back. The sooner you realize that and give up on the Pirates, the better you'll be.

Again, it was a misstatement to pin it all on the draft because that is only part of it. There’s no requirement in MLB for trades to have any balance, so any team in rebuilding mode obviously trades away any marketable players for prospects. There is more upside in those prospects to take younger guys (think AA) than a more probable starter in AAA or rookie. So that forces several years of rebuilding until those trades surface (or bust) in parallel with your draft choices. My opinion on the draft tanking is simply that once you’ve committed to losing, you have no reason to avoid losing big. I don’t expect the attendance this year will be greatly impacted by losing an extra 10 of 162 games. $15M is a lot of tickets.

I totally agree with your points about draft volatility and that is why the Pirates were so bad so long. Guys were trusted to draft to rebuild and couldn’t identify talent.

Regardless, this is now way OT as my original point was only that enforcing a “salary floor” would not change the direction of this season. The FO focus is not the team on the field for 2020, but the guys being cultivated through trades and drafts and internal development. Forcing them to spend another $15M is not going to make them go out and join the WC hunt because they have no chance of competing period. An optimistic person would rather see that same $15M committed to the 2022 or later payrolls when competing might be worthwhile. But, as we’ve all seen this story before, we know that won’t happen either.