Suspicious behavior at Pirates Town Hall should be alarming to fans

To the surprise of most Pittsburgh Pirates fans, the team held a “Town Hall” meeting earlier this week with season-ticket holders.

Pirates play-by-play analyst Greg Brown acted as the emcee for the Town Hall, while a panel consisting of team president Travis Williams, general manager Ben Cherington, and manager Derek Shelton took questions from the few that were in attendance.

While this would normally be a good time to hear about the team’s plans for the next season, or to at least pick the brains of those on the panel, very little information came out of this. In fact, media personnel weren’t even notified that this even took place until during or after the fact.

Call it crazy, but shouldn’t something like this be open to the general public or the media at the very least? In fact, it bears the question if the Pirates even promoted this Town Hall at all on social media, TV, radio, etc.

Sure, they might have sent invitations to season-ticket holders through the mail, but there was nothing said about this at all.

Then, according to Don-The hard working sports fan ‍on Twitter, who was at the Town Hall, Williams said the goal for next season is to win 83 games and improve the payroll. That’s it. There was no “at least 83 games,” or even “83 wins is a base goal, but winning the World Series remains the main priority.”

Better yet, he could’ve said something about how much the team would improve the payroll, or lay out a plan for winning 83 games after garnering just 62 wins this season.

I’m a little surprised this question even got through as, according to Don, questions had to be included with your RSVP:

Again, call it crazy, but this sort of event should be open and questioning should be open as well. Granted, this wasn’t a news conference, but if you’re willing to take questions from the public, you should open the floor to any and all questions.

Another concerning aspect is that this is one of the few times we’ve seen Williams make an appearance to the fans, even if they were in a smaller capacity. Unless he’s made several attempts to speak to the public and they were never publicly announced, this would mark one of, if not the first time, that Williams has made an appearance since he was hired.

We knew we weren’t going to get much, if anything, from an event like this, but the fact that this was — for lack of a better term — hidden from the public is just bad from a P.R. standpoint.

At least one good thing came from this: the out-of-town scoreboard is making its triumphant return to PNC Park.