Most Pittsburghers don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t regard the Pirates as lovable losers \u00e2\u20ac\u201c just losers.\u00c2\u00a0 The Bucs rank well below the Steelers in popularity, well below the Penguins, and perhaps a step or two above tuberculosis.\u00c2\u00a0 It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not just the losing; it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the perceived hubris of the men who run the organization, and their clumsy attempts at deluding fans into believing everything is peachy.<\/p>\n
In the midst of last week\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 12-game skid, the Pirates added two more off-field blunders to an arms-length list of silly public relations fiascos. \u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0A FoxSports.com report forced Frank Coonelly to admit that he had signed manager John Russell and general manager Neal Huntington to contract extensions.\u00c2\u00a0 \u00c2\u00a0They inked the deals during the offseason, but for reasons still not fully explained, Coonelly never deigned to tell anyone.\u00c2\u00a0 \u00c2\u00a0When reporters probed about the contract status of Russell and Huntington earlier this season, Coonelly was, to be generous, evasive.\u00c2\u00a0 Now his credibility, and that of the Pirates, has suffered a major blow.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 A prominent local columnist has dubbed the affair \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Liargate.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
When a team is 20 games below .500 in June and hasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t had a winning season since 1992, fans really don’t want to hear about contract extensions for the people in charge.\u00c2\u00a0 Not surprisingly, the new deals were greeted with something less than universal praise.\u00c2\u00a0 Some of the criticism came from Andrew Kurtz, who is paid by the Pirates run around PNC Park during home games dressed as a pierogi.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 On Facebook, Kurtz wrote, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Coonelly extends the contracts of Russell and Huntington through the 2011 season.\u00c2\u00a0 That means a 19-straight losing streak [sic].<\/em> Way to go Pirates.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 \u00c2\u00a0The Bucs promptly fired him.<\/p>\n Although much of the fan base likely shared his opinion, Dumpling Boy was way out of line.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 If you want to mouth off about your employer, do it with your buddies over a beer; don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t broadcast it to the world.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 The Pirates were not necessarily wrong to drop the axe; however, a more sophisticated organization might have taken into account the team\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s image problems and approached the situation more softly.\u00c2\u00a0 \u00c2\u00a0Had they quietly pulled the kid aside and ordered him to delete the comment, no one would have been any the wiser.\u00c2\u00a0 Instead, the Pirates chose the nuclear option, and, although they re-hired Kurtz a few days later, made themselves look like thin-skinned Orwellian bullies.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 They suffered a much more significant PR hit than if they had just ignored the offending post entirely.<\/p>\n Ironically, the Pirates commit these kinds of gaffes because they seem to be almost obsessed with how they are perceived in the community.\u00c2\u00a0 (At a meeting of the Forbes Field chapter of the Society for American Baseball Research in May, Coonelly, during a 60-minute Q&A, went out of his way three times to criticize the local media for its coverage of the team).\u00c2\u00a0 As a result, they try too hard to make themselves look good even when things are going badly, which is most of the time.\u00c2\u00a0 The front office bristles easily at criticism and is prone to making wacko claims that anyone with a molecule of sense can see through.\u00c2\u00a0 Among these have been owner Bob Nutting\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s boast that he employs \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the best management team in baseball,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and Coonelly\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s preposterous suggestion this spring that the Pirates were on the brink of a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153dynasty.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n Hand-in-hand with the absurd hyperbole is an annoying propensity for ducking responsibility for mistakes.\u00c2\u00a0 When he fumbled the negotiations with Dominican prospect Miguel Sano, Huntington whined that Sano\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s agent negotiated in bad faith.\u00c2\u00a0 Why do the Pirates play such fundamentally unsound baseball?\u00c2\u00a0 According to Huntington, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s because too many players learned bad habits as they came up through other organizations.\u00c2\u00a0 \u00c2\u00a0Is Coonelly disappointed that so many trades have bombed?\u00c2\u00a0 Well, sort of, but that is mostly the fans\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 and media\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s fault for setting their expectations too high.<\/p>\n When people are preoccupied with their public image, one of two things is going on.\u00c2\u00a0 Either they desperately want people to see who they really are (think about your typical 16-year-old, or those poor cavemen in the Geico ads), or they desperately don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t<\/em> want people to see who they really are (see<\/em>: \u00c2\u00a0Bundy, Ted, or Stalin, Joseph).<\/p>\n The first scenario surely is plausible.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 It was Coonelly, Huntington, and Nutting who had to field all the uncomfortable questions about Pittsburgh\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s record-breaking 17th<\/sup> consecutive losing season, even though they had very little to do with it.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 It is no fun answering for other people\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s incompetence, and certainly no fun being a national punch line.\u00c2\u00a0 \u00c2\u00a0We all want to rise or fall on our own merits.\u00c2\u00a0 You can understand why they might be a little touchy.<\/p>\n The second scenario suggests that the Pirates are being run by venal, nefarious people who are using the club solely for personal gain.\u00c2\u00a0 \u00c2\u00a0Unfortunately, that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not out of the question, either.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 Nutting isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t starving; the Pirates, for all their woes on the field, are consistently profitable.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 He says he is committed to bringing a championship to Pittsburgh, but to date, he has displayed little inclination to invest the resources required to make that happen.<\/p>\n We will know the answer soon enough.\u00c2\u00a0 If the Pirates begin making smarter decisions, spending more money and spending it more wisely, and perhaps hiring more astute people in key organizational positions, then it will be clear that there are no malevolent intentions behind the puffery and lack of transparency.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 If we continue to see weeks like last week, though, then obviously the club\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s leadership values spinning far more than winning.<\/p>\n James Forr is the 2005 winner of the McFarland-SABR Baseball Research Award and co-author of<\/em> Pie Traynor: A Baseball Biography, released in January 2010<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Most Pittsburghers don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t regard the Pirates as lovable losers \u00e2\u20ac\u201c just losers.\u00c2\u00a0 The Bucs rank well below the Steelers in popularity, well below the Penguins, and perhaps a step or two above tuberculosis.\u00c2\u00a0 It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not just the losing; it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the perceived hubris of the men who run the organization, and their clumsy attempts at deluding […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":734,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5991","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5991","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/734"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5991"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5991\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5991"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5991"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5991"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}