Thank you, a question and a rant

However, the current path seems to be the only realistic path to sustainable success. That being said, the competence of the people executing the plan is still in question. While they are no longer tabula rasa, and some of the results are dubious thus far, I still think that they deserve a couple of more years before I would feel it fair to give them a clear thumbs-up or thumbs-down.

Just punt whole season’s on the way to getting better. You have to focus some of your attention to the MLB level. I feel that the FO felt that all of the players would take a step forward this year and the small pieces added would make a difference.

Neither has happened, and almost the whole team has regressed. There are maybe 3 guys on the whole team performing at last years or better level. Can we blame that on Huntington?

I think we can at some point say that the Pirates FO cannot determine between fringe MLB prospect and solid MLB player. Right now it seems they are just hoping these guys turn out good or improve. When they don’t our back up plans are still 3 years away.

Contenders are a license to print money.

If he didn’t want a contender, they wouldn’t be going to the trouble to rebuild for real, with the PR hit that involves. They’d just spend $50M on crappy vets and take their guaranteed profit.

I don’t think we’d spend fifty but I get your point.

However you can’t just expect everyone to cream themselves when a AA player has a good game right after we 17-2 and have the worse run differential in ML history at this point in the season.

because he made the decision to focus on the long term over the short term. I’m not saying that is good or bad, though personally I think it’s good, just that he is sticking to the rebuilding plan and that is something that previous GM’s never did in the Burg. Coonelly stated the Neil had money to add players this year and Neil decided not to block players like Clement, Hart, Milledge, etc. He wanted to find out what we had to determine if they were part of the core and I believe that was a good decision. He got us a pen and Aki and could have complemented that with players like Nick Johnson, Rick Ankiel and I suppose Ben Sheets. Those players wouldn’t put us over the top, would only be here for one season, and totally block the players I mentioned above so we would have no idea next season if that group could perform. It sucks but we just have to ride this thing out. Things will get more interesting in the second half and we’ll start to see the future core of the team take shape.

I think the priority is always money. That being said, I don’t think anyone WANTS to own the worst team in baseball, so…

And the within reason part includes staying in the black and keeping the organization financially sound.

One of the worst things that has happened to the Pirates franchise was when the early 2000s teams were put together expecting them to be competitive and draw fans and they actually lost big time and attendance dropped.

At that time, they didn’t have the financial cushion to withstand the revenue loss and that’s why they had to dump valuable players like ARam.

Nutting saw that situation – in fact he had to make the call himself to dump payroll because of the hemorrhaging money situation. He is determined to not let that happen again, and so keeping the payroll within certain realistic revenue boundaries is important.

He sees the Rays and Brewers and believes things can be done like that in Pittsburgh. Those organizations had years of futility and built from the ground up.