Maybe Pittsburgh'll Finally Go Moneyball
The new managing owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates fired David Littlefield! The initial, still vaguely-optimistic me wants to believe that this will be a good first step towards actually making an attempt to field a competitive team in Pittsburgh. Maybe the Pirates ownership is getting bored with making money from a losing team! Maybe they think they can make more money with a winning team!
Or more likely, firing Littlefield is a good way to get a new excuse to have a team that sucks for another half-decade, while the new GM "rebuilds." And then it'll turn out that the new guy sucks too, and then, after some riots, the Pirates will finally hire a legitimate GM, who, after another 5 years will finally field a winning team, just in time for Total Nuclear Annihilation of the entire planet.
I guess that puts Armageddon only a decade away - faulty math? Only time will tell...
Or more likely, firing Littlefield is a good way to get a new excuse to have a team that sucks for another half-decade, while the new GM "rebuilds." And then it'll turn out that the new guy sucks too, and then, after some riots, the Pirates will finally hire a legitimate GM, who, after another 5 years will finally field a winning team, just in time for Total Nuclear Annihilation of the entire planet.
I guess that puts Armageddon only a decade away - faulty math? Only time will tell...
2 Comments:
Only a decade away??? You're really fond of making these rash predictions. I'd put a potentiality of that magnitude out of our current scope entirely, at least till we see some real strides in minor-league player development.
I suppose, though, that no one would have guessed in 1985 that in a half-decade the Soviet Union would collapse and the Pirates would have a run of playoff appearances.
Dejan Kovacevic has a typically fine piece in today's Post-Gazette about Littlefield's practices as GM.
It's a scathingly comprehensive evaluation overall and I imagine readers who don't follow the Pirates, or maybe even Major League Baseball, would get a good sense of what's been going wrong with the entire Pirates franchise in recent years.
For close followers of the Pirates, the most damning detail of all may be Jeromy Burnitz seeking Littlefield out at the end of the 2006 season to "shake his hand and say, 'Dave, I can't thank you enough.'"
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