MLBPA: Tanking Pittsburgh Pirates told tanks but no tanks… again
By Jeff Kallman
The MLBPA grievance against the Pittsburgh Pirates tanking becomes an annual event. As if they weren’t already coming off a nightmare 2019.
Baseball and its lovers cherish or at least tend to live by annual traditions as much as anything else. The ones they cherish include spring training, the All-Star Game, the World Series. The ones they’re not so wild about include off-season free agency hagglings, award snubs, and Hall of Fame snubs, among others.
Now we may have to add one to the latter category: the Major League Baseball Players Association filing an anti-tanking grievance against the Pittsburgh Pirates.
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The union did it the previous two years, according to The Athletic‘s Rob Biertempfel, and they’ve done it again. Plain and simple, the union says the Pittsburgh Slumber Company violates the Show’s revenue-sharing rules requiring teams to improve the product on the field, no matter what their revenue shares let them do off it.
“After reaching a franchise-record $99 million [single-season payroll] in 2016, the payroll has steadily dropped,” Biertempfel writes. “Starling Marté would have been the team’s highest-paid player at $11.5 million this year, but the was traded in January for two minor leaguers. The Pirates are left with a $51 million payroll, which is third-lowest in the majors this year and roughly the same as it was in 2012.”
To think that the team’s new general manager, Ben Cherington—whom Pirates fans have every reason to gaze upon with hope considering his previous such service with the Boston Red Sox—is pondering the route of the dashing Chicago White Sox. Cherington’s thinking about tendering contract extension offers to pitcher Joe Musgrove, first baseman Josh Bell, shortstop Kevin Newman, and third baseman Ke’Bryan Hayes, among other young players.
To think, too, that the MLBPA wants to ding the Pirates for two or three years’ worth of tanking on the same day that ESPN’s Sam Miller, perhaps audaciously, wrote an essay headlined, “Remember when tanking ruled MLB? Those days might be over.” Not quite? Emphasis on “might?”