More Pirate hate

You have to understand Madden’s agenda. His pretense of being concerned about Pirate fans is just a smokescreen. His concern is to create a system that will allow the Yankees to be in the World Series every year. The current system isn’t good enough for Madden. In his view, the Yankees should have been able to add Matt Holliday and Jason Bay, and keep Johnny Damon and Hideki Matsui to be pinch hitters. No revenue sharing, no luxury tax. That’s what he’d like to see. Anybody who thinks he wants to see the Pirates be more competitive is a fool. He’s just acting as a shill for the Steinbrenners.

What WTM said. Plus, Bill Madden’s an idiot, so who cares?

they don’t even need to use facts anymore. Pearlman and Madden just throw crap out there because they are too lazy to do any real research. Either that or they are worried that if the do actually try to write an informed article that it won’t support they argument. This is just piss poor journalism…I feel like I’m watching Fox News.

as a “proven” prospect? Seems to me that the reason for being a prospect is that they are unproven, no?

And ordinarily I’d critique specific parts of the article, but it really isn’t worth the time to read the recycled “Pirates trade all their best players and are cheap” articles that appear so frequently. As Huntington said months ago, they aren’t disassembling the ‘27 Yankees. And they aren’t being cheap, because they are reinvesting their profits into the club; Salary is not the only metric for a club’s willingness to spend. Too bad that some journalists aren’t going to ever wake up to this fact.

Grabow was our 3rd best reliever.

Snell was our 6th or 7th best starting pitcher.

Adam LaRoche performed at replacement level with us and was so good he is making less money this year. Sanchez was replaced with someone at a similar pay level.

Nate McLouth was replaced with someone who performed better.

That pretty much leaves Jack Wilson as the only one whose production has not been replaced. Wow…call the police!

don’t they have their own underachieving NL team to worry about

“To make their point, they have cited the Milwaukee Brewers, whose owner Mark Attanasio has taken their payroll to over $80 million the last couple of seasons – and been rewarded by attendances of more than three million for the first time in their history the past two seasons. Not bad for the smallest media market in baseball.”

Note Maddon fails to mention that the Brewers are now in a world of hurt for all of that spending

using revenue sharing to pay back their debts, good for them. sustainable financial and on-field success is the goal here.

The Brewers increasing payroll and more fans showing up? That’s stuff you can do once you build a good young core with the talent to succeed, you add the missing pieces and win.

The Pirates core was neither highly talented or young. Throwing money at them just makes them higher paid, not better talents.

I understand the mentality, they are looking at these teams who do what we do and build a good roster while using Yankee money to cover for the fans not coming to games. Then they get better and beat the Yankees. If you pull the Yankees money out from the team they wouldn’t be able to support a higher cost farm system to develop lots of players.

If I was a Yankees fan It’d piss me off too. BUt you know what, The Yankees just won, so shut your trap idiot. Your team finally spent money on good young talent instead of washed up talent. The Yankees aren’t losing money either, they can afford to spend and pay the taxes.