By Tom
Hey there, glad to be back writing about the excess of greed in our beautiful sport!
The Pittsburgh Pirates are full of shit, and so are the Milwaukee Brewers and every baseball organization out there. The MLB headlines have featured our two divisional siblings the last couple weeks, mainly because the Brewers are too cheap to pay for good talent and the Pirates never pay enough for good talent–so much in fact their star player, despite 3 more years of team control, has realized such.
The Milwaukee Brewers had a payroll around $143 million this past season, you’ll be surprised to know that in today’s modern game that’s not a lot of money. Their active payroll by the end of the season was far lower, around $106 mil, however they retained the final year salaries of guys like Brad Boxberger, Lorenzo Cain, and Josh Hader, as well as signing bonuses for draftees Jacob Misiorowksi and Eric Brown Jr. The MLB average for total payroll last season was around $164,000,000, but the Brewers came in well below that; in fact they were 20th in the league among their peers. As for 26-man spending the Brew Crew spent just over $93,000,000, good enough for 15th in MLB, but almost $9 million below league average.
The entire NL Central hates spending money in fact. Their ownership groups will say it’s because they’re a small market, but we all know that’s horseshit for the Cubs and Cardinals, who rank 4th and 7th in franchise value. It’s more horse-true for our little brothers like the Pirates, Reds, and Brewers who rank in the bottom 10 in that category. Jeeze, what have the Cubs and Cards done, especially in recent memory, to increase their value?
As of writing this, the Cardinals will be the only NL Central team to crack the league average in active payroll. They ranked 10th last season, and only the Cubs ranked ahead of them in total payroll–considering that the Cubs retained a shitload of salary in the 2022 season, as well as releasing $24.5 million man Jason Heyward.
Despite finishing 10 games over .500, and that they held a divisional lead until self-immolating their chances in August, the Brewers have decided now is the time to shed some salary. Andrew McCutchen and his $8,500,000 are gone to free agency, along with Trevor Rosenthal–yes, that one–and his $4,500,000. They waived Brent Suter, who made a crippling $2,700,000, let Brad Boxberger and Jace Peterson walk, saving them about $3.6 mil there, and they let the guy they traded Josh Hader for, Taylor Rogers, bounce along with his $7,300,000.
Now in the Brewers defense, you might be thinking that these guys were hurt or bad, but actually they were mostly good. McCutchen earned every penny, Peterson and Boxberger were underpaid, and Suter was fine; Rosenthal hasn’t pitched to a big league hitter since 2020, Taylor Rogers was awful, and catcher Omar Narvaez regressed heavily, but was still serviceable behind the dish.
But now we’re at the other two guys, Hunter Renfroe and Kolten Wong, who made a combined $15,650,000 this season. We’re these guys good?
Hunter Renfroe sure was. In 125 games for the Brewers he mashed 29 homers and posted a team-leading 126 OPS+. He posted a 2.5 fWAR, which means his value was actually right around $20 million, which means he was vastly underpaid. Kolten Wong made $8,000,000 this past season, and while he’s been beat up his first two years in Milwaukee he gritted his way through 134 games. He posted a .770 OPS as a second baseman, and finished the season with a 118 OPS+ and a 2.5 fWAR. He also did shit like this all the time.
For $15 million the Milwaukee Brewers got about $40 million in production, and they traded those guys. Renfroe went to the Angels for 3 young pitchers, Wong went to Seattle for Jesse Winker and Abraham Toro. The Brewers front office took $15,000,000 and slashed it by $7,000,000, and all they got in return were two guys who posted shit numbers in Seattle. Hey, but Jesse Winker kills Cardinals pitching though!
Over in Pittsburgh Bryan Reynolds realizes he plays for the Pirates and that the Pirates are owned by the ultra greedy Bob Nutting. The Pittsburgh Pirates have seen their payroll grow under Nutting, but in the same way the cost of everything goes up in time. Nutting likes to point that out when in fact it’s just the natural occurrence of baseball inflation. The Pirates in the early 2010s fielded three playoff teams that featured a prime Andrew McCutchen, young Josh Bell, and successful reclamation projects like AJ Burnett, Russell Martin, and Francisco Liriano. With a swell of burgeoning talent like that, you figure the Pirates would shell out some serious cash! Wrong, they have never ever ever posted a player payroll north of $100 million.
And Pittsburgh is not a small market in the way they want you to believe, they are a sports city. They have the Penguins and Steelers, both storied franchises, both of which have won multiple championships in the last, oh I don’t know, forty years. Pittsburgh is so dedicated to their sports they made all three of their professional sports teams wear the same goddamn color scheme, like adult dress-up.
Pittsburgh Pirates baseball is a small market because that’s how Bob Nutting wants it. In April of this year the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette released a stunning piece on how the Pirates ballpark operations work. Here’s the gist of it, they’re fronting most–and in some cases all–of their payroll with ticket and concession sales. This doesn’t sound crazy especially for smaller market teams, but this is just one lane of revenue.
This doesn’t take into account any realty, advertising, or merchandise–or the $2,000,000 that PNC Bank pays the Pirates for naming rights on their stadium. It also doesn’t take into account that the Pirates, like every other organization, rake in an additional $100,000,000 in TV deals and revenue sharing.
I repeat; $100,000,000 in additional funding that the Pirates could–hear me out–use to make a splash in free agency or trade for a high-end player. Where is this money going? If you ask the Pirates ownership group they will say drafting, scouting, and player development, but we all know it’s going inside their pockets.
Bryan Reynolds, a very good outfielder who is 27 and still under team control, perhaps has taken all this into consideration. This past season, the Pirates handed out their fattest contract to date to elite-fielding third baseman Ke’Bryan Hayes, a whopping $70 million over 8 years. How completely…underwhelming and on brand for a team owned by the league’s 10th richest owner.
The Pirates say they’re currently ready to make Reynolds their new highest paid player. They signed him for 2 years/ $13.5 million this past offseason, covering the first two seasons of his arbitration years. They discussed contract extensions throughout the season, with Reynolds stating he’d like to stay in Pittsburgh his whole career, but talks eventually stalled and this past week it was leaked that Reynolds wants to be traded ahead of the upcoming Winter Meetings.
We don’t know what all happened, other than that this is a complete tone shift from the rest of the narrative presented. Perhaps Bryan Reynolds was stuck in the Matrix and has now taken the red pill–not the one that makes you a Nazi–and has awaken to find that there are 29 other teams out there and a few of them will pay him more than $6.75 million a year, and might field teams with better talent that might go to the postseason!
Baseball orgs love to keep their finances under lock and key. The Atlanta Braves are publicly traded so their earnings are accessible, and that’s it. If you want to find out how much a team is vaguely raking in, you have to get a FOIA request that takes 3 years to be granted, like in the case of the Post-Gazette writer Mark Belko. The Milwaukee Brewers drew over 30,000 fans per game in 2022, in a stadium built 20 years ago for $400 million, $290 mil of which was fronted by Wisconsin taxpayers. In Pittsburgh over $800 million in public funds were created to fund two stadiums for the Pirates and Steelers, the Pirates chipped in $40 million for their “share” and the taxpayer fronted the rest–the Steelers and Pirates, to assure the populace, promised they would stay in the city until 2031, at least the Steelers will be encouraged to stay.
Fans and taxpayers will always front the bill for billionaires and their toys, and these same literal dragons, boons on our local, federal, and global economies, will get handout after handout from us. They will lie about their expenses, under report their earnings, and threaten to leave unless we divert money to build them a new cathedral. Considering that each club receives $100,000,000 guaranteed each season, but fields products like the Pirates, or slashes and trades away contributing talents like Kolten Wong and Hunter Renfroe, and underpays perennial all-stars who make maybe a 5th of what their actually worth, is testament to what is mainly wrong with baseball in the 21st century. Do not for one second, whether it’s Bob Nutting or Bill DeWitt Jr, buy their bullshit that they cannot afford a player. They totally can, they just don’t want to.
Home of The Worst Fans in Baseball Podcast 
Leave a comment