Officially, nobody knows. The team owner (Bob Nutting) has promised a "thorough investigation" and promises "it won't happen again." Of course, that's what they said last year.Originally Posted by WU9G
My guess is that when other teams improved at the non-waiver trade deadline, the Pirates essentially tread water. Some of the moves are questionable from the standpoint of trying to win a pennant... but their goal wasn't to win the pennant. At least, that wasn't the front office's goal. Their goal was to put players under long term contract, ie, get them cheap.
What was supposed to be their big acquisition, Wandy Rodriguez, fell flat on his face at first... though to be fair, I think he was trying too hard to impress everyone. And in the course of things, they gave up a starter who should not have been relegated to the bullpen, and was (Brad Lincoln), and sent their most effective starter for the previous month there as well (Kevin Correia) -- which has guaranteed that as a free agent, he's looking elsewhere.
Come the end of August, it became pretty clear that the front office had written off the season, and they spent too much of September trying out players for next year's team, instead of trying to win a few games. So even though the #2 Wild Card was there for the taking, they took a pass instead. And since the front office didn't care about whether or not the team made .500 or better this year... and they've been saying as much... well, the rest is pretty obvious.
On top of everything else, we have ANOTHER price hike for our season tickets for next year, AND we just found out that our rep forgot to tell us about a "pick your seats" event, so our current seats may have been reallocated to someone else. They should be glad my wife doesn't care as long as we get tickets; if it were up to me, I'd tell them to go to hell.
Reply With Quote