Comments on: Breaking Down the Pirates 2018 Opening Day Payroll

By: JoeBucco

JoeBucco — Mon, 02 Apr 2018 16:24:08 +0000

This article didn’t really tell anyone anything they didn’t know, nor care about.

All that matters is how low the payroll is with a team that could have competed for a championship if they spent even up to par with other small markets. Minnesota, Milwaukee and Cleveland are all spending a ton more than Pittsburgh because those teams want to win. Nutting prefers to make money.

Fans deserve an owner that wants to, expects to, and demands to win. The other stuff in this article is really a waste of time. Seriously, every team continues to the college scholarship fund, etc. Nobody is going to credit the Pirates for spending money there.

By: Bob Stover

Bob Stover — Thu, 29 Mar 2018 20:28:36 +0000

I don’t think that’s what he was trying to convey at all. Still, some teams with reported much higher payrolls have payrolls that include a lot of dead money, i.e. payroll that they are still paying long after the player has moved on or is out of baseball. The Dodgers had a ton of it until recently and so did the Phillies to name but two. The point being that a team’s payroll in any given season is not a pure reflection of how much money they are putting on the diamond day to day.

By: Daquido Bazzini

Daquido Bazzini — Thu, 29 Mar 2018 19:08:12 +0000

Though it doesn’t really matter how (the results are always skimpy)….I believe Bob Nutting goes to his accountant early in the off season (if not sooner).
His accountant comes back with figures he knows Bob will approve of (minimal numbers for MLB players), and Mr. Nutting forwards it to GM Neal Huntington.
Like the lap dog he is, Huntington accepts it and deals with it….No questions asked.

By: Jim K

Jim K — Thu, 29 Mar 2018 18:34:00 +0000

It almost is like Ethan is trying to say that the comparisons putting the Pirates at the lower rung of mlb salaries is misleading because the Pirates have hidden yearly expenses that other teams simply do not have that makes their total payroll figure artificially low.

This sounds like a complete alternate Nutter universe style argument.

By: Norm Cubellis

Norm Cubellis — Thu, 29 Mar 2018 17:50:09 +0000

I found the article very interesting and informative. The article does not attempt to defend what management has done to date. My takeaway from the article is that the Pirates will spend $15M less this year and we all would like to see some/all of that money spent to improve the Club. My biggest issue with their payroll is not the total sum which has been spent each year (vis-a-vis other clubs), but with the fact that for the last two years they spent no additional money at the trading deadline when we were close to the wild card position. While not great clubs these two years, we had a shot and the front office failed to act….while continuing to talk about being competitive.

By: Ethan Hullihen

Ethan Hullihen — Thu, 29 Mar 2018 17:16:30 +0000

Alan,

I went to Spotrac and the problem with comparison that I mentioned was immediately apparent:

Spotrac includes that it shouldn’t:
Ji-Hwan Bae’s Signing Bonus, which is Int. Signing pool, not payroll
Stewart and LeBlanc’s buyouts

Spotrac is missing:
Minor League salaries
Nik Turley’s base salary
Pro-rated Buyouts
Cash for Hudson’s salary
Any Salary Credits

The point of this exercise was not to compare, but to give fans an idea of actual payroll and what makes it up, as I see misrepresentations all the time.

If someone wants to compare Spotrac salaries of the Pirates and Brewers, be my guest. I was simply saying that if someone wants to compare what I worked up to Cot’s or Spotrac, that wouldn’t be appropriate. Much like math, you need to add or subtract like terms, and since our ingredients aren’t the same, these comparison’s wouldn’t tell you anything.

By: Alan Posey

Alan Posey — Thu, 29 Mar 2018 16:35:20 +0000

I Googled mlb payroll and found spotrac website. It shows currently the avg MLB team spends 137 mill. Pirates are 27th in spending out of 30 teams. They came up with 86 mill for Pirates currently which is close to the 84.6 Ethan calculated. Jim K, you can go there and compare salaries any way you want to.

By: Jim K

Jim K — Thu, 29 Mar 2018 13:36:53 +0000

It is simply irrefutable that the Pirates under this ownership group maintains a low payroll, among the very lowest in the league, year after year. You simply cannot find a reputable source that would claim otherwise. Nutting is properly seen around the league by anyone who knows anything as being frugal, at best, and an absolute carpetbagger cheapskate (my vote) at worst.

So, what do we get with this article? Absolutely Nutting! The only thing that matters is the comparison to other mlb teams. And this author, try to the forum, blathers on about how the fans grouse, but then fails to offer any reason why the fans shouldn’t grouse about what everyone already knows….payroll is and has always been comparatively very low. instead, the author feebly tries to leave things up in the air by staying at the end of it all….

“Unfortunately, due to the intricacies of the calculations and the differences in the final numbers from other sources, there ?s no easy way to compare the Pirates Opening Day Payroll to that of other teams, which I know is what most fans want to do.”

Just throwing figures out there and not comparing them to anything is meaningless. Absolutely meaningless.