Pittsburgh Pirates: Team preview and prediction for 2020 season

Pittsburgh Pirates: 2020 Preview, Prediction

All in all, the Pittsburgh Pirates did a lot of “stuff” in 2019, but most of it wasn’t baseball. What we saw was a team in complete free fall with absolutely no discipline, no respect around the league, and no cohesion within the clubhouse, which puts them here in 2020 as perhaps the most dysfunctional organization in baseball if we look at what went on last year as well as what the front office has been up to these past several years.

Has anybody else noticed how many trades the Pirates have lost out on? I mean, look at all the players that have left Pittsburgh and have gone on to have more success in better situations.

Gerrit Cole? Tyler Glasnow? Austin Meadows? Charlie Morton? Jared Hughes? Even Jordan Luplow for God’s sake.

Hell, we can throw it back to Jose Bautista as well. Now Starling Marte is gone and he could very well join that group as he plays for a playoff contender in the Diamondbacks.

The point I’m trying to make is that the Pirates are an organization right now that is not facilitating good players. They’re trading them off, rather, and those guys are having success elsewhere.

On top of that, they have disharmony in the clubhouse and one of the best closers in the game was charged with a heinous crime under their watch.

So, even though this team has some nice young players, I can’t trust that they’ll be able to develop in this system until the organization either turns things around noticeably, or those players are traded away like all the other key assets in the past.