Better Luck Next Year, Pirates

For starters, you can’t actually complain about payroll. That has no relevance to the story of the 2025 Pittsburgh Pirates, six games in. It will be plenty relevant soon enough, when they take on the New York Yankees, their torpedo bats and their nearly $300 million payroll, but right now it is a back-burner issue.

Why isn’t it relevant? Because the Marlins, who just took three of four from the Bucs, have a payroll that’s $20 million less than the Pirates, per Spotrac, and feature a roster comprised almost entirely of no-names and nobodies. The Tampa Bay Rays, who have throttled the Pirates the last two nights, have about the same payroll as Pittsburgh.

What the Pirates played for four games in Miami can only loosely be described as baseball. You might think that a harsh assessment, given that all three of their losses in the series were of the walk-off variety. I beg to differ. Those of us “privileged” enough to call this team our favorite know exactly what we saw, and it was the same slop the franchise was serving up last year.

The play was so shoddy that the games felt more like a continuation of 2024 than the start of 2025. It’s one thing to have a low payroll, to not spend competitively with the rest of the league. It’s another altogether to make multiple fundamental errors, have a bullpen self-destruct over and over, and have players with prodigious physical gifts fail to use them effectively.

In other words, I can tolerate a bad baseball team. I cannot tolerate a team that plays bad baseball. You want to get beat because the other guys are just better? Fine. But Oneil Cruz allowing the tying run to eventually score because he foolishly missed the cutoff man in a doomed, no-chance attempt to gun down a runner at home? Can’t tolerate it. Cruz also misplaying a deep, somewhat routine fly ball into a triple when it could have been at worst a double, and maybe just an out? Unacceptable.

Cruz’s mishaps were the highest-profile because he is the Pirates’ most gifted position player and therefore the focus of most fans’ hopes. He’s the guy who inspires people to say, “If he just puts it all together…” and things of that nature.

He made rookie mistakes in center field, partly because he had only started 22 games at the position prior to this season. Endy Rodriguez, the team’s best defensive catcher (don’t look up and ask how he played that position against Miami) started the season at first base. He had played there exactly one time in spring training. He made an error.

Ji Hwan Bae, one of the fastest players in the majors, and a frequent spring-training hope merchant, got thrown out as a pinch runner after an agonizing series of false starts whereupon it appeared like he could not make up his mind about whether or not to try and steal. Here’s a nice breakdown of the entire sequence, with an added reminder that not only is Bae not even close to a major-league caliber player, he’s also a bad guy!

Jack Suwinski also misplayed a routine ball in the series, but I can only write about so many individual mistakes before your eyes, loyal reader, glaze over.

Thanks for reading Nine Straight Threes! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Speaking of Suwinski, it would appear that he’s going to share left field in a platoon with 37-year-old veteran Tommy Pham. Simple concept, right? Suwinski plays when the opposing starter is a righty, Pham jumps in when it’s a lefty. The arrangement makes sense, particularly as the Pirates are desperate to tap back into Suwinski’s power, which disappeared last season, along with his ability to hit, period.

Naturally, Derek Shelton started Pham against righty Sandy Alcantara, the 2022 NL Cy Young winner and a guy who chews up right-handed hitters to the tune of a .638 OPS against for his career. Pham struck out in his first two at-bats before managing to draw a walk off a tiring Alcantara in his third. Not great, overall!

Why, you might wonder, did Shelton give Pham the start? Apparently, it was the classic “tip of the cap” to a veteran player on Opening Day. That would make sense if the player was a franchise hero, or an all-time great of the sport. Pham is neither. He probably won’t even be here past the trade deadline.

In the second game of the Tampa series, a truly lifeless 7-0 drubbing that had major, “19 games out of first place and playing out the string in mid-August” vibes, Pham trotted – I can’t even say jogged – after a gap shot hit approximately 30 feet to his left. Oneil Cruz fielded the ball at the wall and fired it in, but Pham’s total indifference turned a double into a triple.

(It is here that I remind you that Pham is here in part because he’s supposed to hold younger players accountable.)

If the Marlins series was defined by incompetence, the first two games of the Rays series have been all about the Pirates’ total surrender. They’re playing the game with the kind of energy (read: none) that tends to get a manager fired. And if this continues apace for the next two to three weeks, Derek Shelton will probably be gone.

He’s hardly the only problem.

The Pirates’ process is atrocious. The team that’s supposed to win in the margins is playing multiple players out of position, has players stall in their development timeline on a regular basis, is poorly coached, and makes fundamental error after fundamental error, over and over again. Just days after stubbornly continuing to hand David Bednar the ball as closer, the Pirates optioned him to Triple-A. That’s where he belongs right now, but there was no warning, no attempt to put him in lower-leverage situations in the majors, just an abrupt course change.

The sum total of all of these flaws is a six-game stretch as dispiriting as any I can remember, and it’s not like this is a team stumbling out of the gate after being burdened with major expectations all offseason. Their Vegas win total was 75.5. Most people didn’t expect them to be good, locally or nationally, and they’re still managing to inspire anger.

Worst of all is the fact that this small sample of horrendous play has nothing to do with money. It costs nothing to get the basics right, to play with a little bit of purpose and fight. To look, in other words, like a professional operation. That should be a given, the lowest bar for a team to clear.

Right now, these Pirates can’t even do that.