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Pirates players are as frustrated as their fans
If you’ve ever wondered whether players on a team like the Pirates are as tired of losing as their fans are, well, look no further than a report that published this week. (Though, don’t actually look, as it’s from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the News Guild members of which remain on strike.)
To be fair, you don’t actually need to read the story to get a sense of it, if you know anything about an organization that has lied to the public about their finances and spending capabilities, and straight-up misled its own front office about the available budget. Basically, players are frustrated enough that they spoke, on the record, about their lack of belief in the organization to do what needs to be done. Meaning, to acquire players that can help them be better than they are, which is not a very good team — one wasting the absurd potential of Paul Skenes.
How could they not be cynical about it? Look at the last decade-plus of Pirates’ baseball — even when they were worth watching, they weren’t doing what needed to be done to increase their chances of winning if it was going to cost them any money. A single Skenes isn’t going to push them to do more, and you’re not going to see owner Bob Nutting suddenly open up the wallet right before the next round of collective bargaining, not when crying poor to secure increased revenue sharing and/or a salary cap is the play.
The current leadership of the Pirates — owner and front office — likely aren’t up to the task of making this club any good. The front office maybe could do something if they didn’t have to deal with Nutting, but frankly that’s not something you can prove, either — Cherington had a pretty good run with the Red Sox, but that front office had access to not just far more cash, but a far more proven brain trust that has been spreading throughout the game for 20 years now. How often do you see Pirates’ executives or baseball ops leaders heading off to promotions for other clubs’ front offices?
Another way to put it is that, before Cherington was even hired, I published a story in this space discussing how the safe bet was that nothing was going to change besides some name plates on doors so long as Bob Nutting was at the helm. And here we are, with Cherington heading into his seventh season in the organization, and the Pirates have accomplished what, exactly, while he’s been there? Skenes was a coup, and not the obvious pick at 1:1 for everyone despite some revisionist history suggesting that was the case, but otherwise? Look at that roster, look at the results, look at how long it’s been, and name a second win that doesn’t require a caveat.
Of course the players are frustrated. The real news is that they are mad enough to be discussing that frustration on the record — expecting anything to come of it, though, when the organization has already proven itself perfectly happy to subsist on those desperate enough to seek employment there, would be foolhardy.
The Mets collapsed, but that’s just fine
Much is going to be made of how much money the Mets spent in what ended up being a year where they missed the postseason, but much of that analysis is going to miss the point. The Mets were in a dire position just a few years ago, and they used the one resource that owner Steve Cohen had at his disposal — money — to buy his way out of having to go through a deep rebuild that would have made no one happy. He brought in Francisco Lindor before the 2021 season, his first in control of the org, and signed him to a 10-year, $314 million deal. The payroll, overall, shot up from 2019’s $158.6 million opening day tally to 2021’s $195.5 million, with a $79.9 million 2020 in between that, obviously, would have been a whole lot more than $158.6 million if the season wasn’t chopped down to just 60 games.
Over the last four seasons, starting in 2022, the Mets’ opening day payroll has come in at $264.5M, $330.7M, $329.8M, and $322.6M. They spent, and they spent, and they spent, because there wasn’t much worth making a huge fuss over to promote, but now they suddenly have a rebuilt farm system and a number of pitching prospects that ended the year on the big-league roster, and are likely better than the starters they had in the rotation for most of 2025 — the ones that caused them to put up a 38-55 record from June 13 onward in the first place.
The Mets haven’t been a powerhouse under Cohen, no, but they rattled off a 101-win season in 2022 and made it to the NLCS in 2024. This year was miserable in a lot of ways, but only because they were cruising before Juan Soto looked like Juan Soto, and then somehow could not score enough runs after he remembered he’s one of the best hitters on the planet. Rather than cut the budget to the bone and make everyone wait for the next great Mets team, they spent, and spent, and spent, putting together teams that were, at the least, watchable ones, all while seeds planted on the farm grew.
The 2025 team was a disappointment, but consider all of this a bridge to the actual Cohen- and David Steans-era Mets, the ones that can better combine what comes from the farm system with what Cohen’s money can accomplish. That squad could be here as soon as 2026, if a full season of the likes of Nolan McLean and Jonah Tong is anywhere near as productive as their brief big-league experience and scouting reports suggest it could be.
The rest
A busy couple of weeks of writing from me outside of this space. At Baseball Prospectus, I wrote about Rob Manfred’s two jobs. Here’s the basic idea:
MLB’s commissioner, historically, has served two central purposes. These are:
- Do what his bosses, the owners of every team, want them to do.
- Keep said owners from flying too close to the sun.
…
Now, though, there are contradictions to resolve—Manfred cannot do what the owners want him to do, because the owners are not in agreement about what it is they should be doing. Based on recent reporting by Jeff Passan at ESPN, it seems as if Manfred is trying to mediate and push the owners towards a consensus that will satisfy the lot, even if it isn’t necessarily the first choice of the seemingly opposing sides. Given how used to that first role they are, compared to the second, it’s been something of an uphill struggle.
In short, some owners want a salary cap. Specifically, the ones mad at the kind of spending that the Dodgers and Mets are doing.
This piece gets into the how and why of the push for a salary cap is just not going to be workable in 2026, but it is worth pointing out that “this is a bad idea with serious repercussions” is not the same thing as “and so they definitely wouldn’t make that mistake.” If the owners don’t go for a salary cap in 2026’s bargaining, it will likely be because Manfred managed to resolve these contradictions by convincing them that what he wants is what they want. Anyway, if you don’t have a Baseball Prospectus subscription but do have one at Defector, the piece also ran there as part of their story sharing program.
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Over at FOX Sports, I covered the Rockies’ 2025 season — yes, they avoided setting the modern loss record or even tying it, but they still ended up on so many various worst-of-the-last-125-years lists in the end that it’s honestly not difficult to argue that they were an even worse team than last year’s 121-loss White Sox.
At the least, enjoy the header photo I used for the piece.
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On the video game side, I wrote about remakes, and what the industry could learn about purpose, intentionally, and process from classic works and their incessant translations like The Iliad. This one ran at Endless Mode, here’s a sample:
Video games do not just deploy language in terms of the written word. Their language is spread across multiple axes, with visuals, sound, and mechanics as other forms of language to communicate with the player, that sometimes needs to be translated and updated to be understood by the “modern” masses and their familiarity with the languages of their day, no different than the works of Homer or Shakespeare. Delta retained the original’s classic and familiar voice work, but in its quest to create the most realistic possible Snake Eater in the present missed the point of what the thematic visual choices in the original signified back in 2003 on the Playstation 2. Which yes, makes it a “prettier” game as far as fidelity goes, one that sells you on the idea that you are in a living, breathing jungle, but at present is “written” in an inferior language for the chosen task of replicating the original game’s visual language. The same goes for Delta mechanically: by adding in an over-the-shoulder gameplay mode reminiscent of Metal Gear Solid V, they tried to square a circle by placing modern mechanics into a two-decade-old game, without updating the space in which those mechanics are utilized in any way besides in terms of visual fidelity. The end result is a game that does not know what it is nor who it is for, and it plays like it, too.
This was a big one, even for me. I’m very proud of the research and work that I did — I spoke with a classics professor from Columbia and went through various translations of classic works to put all of this together — so please give it a read if you have even a passing interest in games or how art changes and is preserved over time.
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And last up, another for Endless Mode, was a look at the original Command & Conquer by way of its maps, as part of a theme week the site was running. Everything comes down to the terrain in that game, and it’s why it still plays like a dream 30 years from its release.
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