Andrew McCutchen and Gerrit Cole

I was prepared to take a night this week, pour myself an adult beverage and plop down some thoughts on the Pittsburgh Steelers’ season coming to a sooner-than-expected and bitterly disappointing end.

Then something else happened in sports that actually frustrated me more.

Let’s talk about the Pittsburgh Pirates trading Andrew McCutchen and Gerrit Cole over the past 48 hours.

But first, some backstory.

When asked, I have always told people my favorite all-time sports team is the Pittsburgh Steelers, and it is really not even close. As loathsome as the NFL can be, it is an emotional and financial investment I just can not shake. There are few things I look forward to more than Sunday’s in the fall and getting together with my family and friends and screaming at the TV, or at the game, like a maniac.

But when it comes to my favorite sport, well, my first love there has always – ALWAYS – been baseball.

It was the sport that I played growing up. I played it poorly – VERY poorly – but I loved it. It was where I met what few friends I had from sixth grade through the end of high school. It was the sport I knew the most about. The sport I could relate to the most because you didn’t need to be a coach or player at the highest level to understand the strategy behind it or what players were supposed to be doing.

I spend my life writing about hockey, a sport I also love, but even after nearly a decade of being around the NHL I still feel like I would be lost trying to break down film or analyze a team’s system or how they play. Football terminology from an actual X’s and O’s standpoint might as well be a foreign language to me. All I know is the guys wearing the color of my favorite team need to tackle the guy wearing the other color.

But baseball? I got that shit, and I loved it.

I don’t really remember the first baseball game I ever attended. I know it was sometime in the late 1980s (or maybe it was the early 1990s?). I know the Pirates played the New York Mets, and I know Darryl Strawberry was still playing for the Mets, but I do not remember much beyond that. I do not remember exactly where we sat. I do not remember the score. I do not remember who won. I do not remember any single part of the game except that it was long and I was probably tired and ready to go home before everyone else.



One of my first true memories as a baseball fan came in 1992 when my mom did something she almost never did: She let eight-year-old Adam stay up late, on a school night, so he could watch Game 7 of the National League Championship series. She only did it because she was sure the Pirates were going to win. She had every reason to believe that.

The Pirates, after all, were winning 2-0 after eight-and-a-half innings and the Atlanta Braves had not even sniffed a run.

It was finally going to happen, and dammit, this was something we had to actually see happen.

Then, IT happened.

I don’t remember what my reaction was, but mom tells me I cried on the floor, which is entirely possible. I mean, I was eight after all.

But my disappointment was just limited to the fact my team lost.

I didn’t fully grasp the enormity of the moment. I just figured the Pirates would come back next season, do it again, and maybe win then. I had no concept of free agency. I had no idea that Barry Bonds and Doug Drabek were going to leave and that the team would never be the same. I had no idea that everyone else knew that was the Pirates’ last best shot to win for a long time.

There was no one that knew it would be two decades before they would ever get close.

This is the only downside to my love of baseball, the fact my favorite baseball team is one that has been a laughingstock for nearly four decades.

It is a team that has made the playoffs just six times in the past 39 years.

It is a team that has had just seven winning seasons during that stretch.

It is a team has not won a postseason series since 1979 (and no, winning that one wild card game does not count as winning a playoff series – it is winning a play-in game to get you to a playoff series).

It is a team that between 1993 and 2012 went 20 seasons without finishing with a winning record, a run of futility and hopelessness that is unmatched in professional sports. Even the Cleveland Browns have had two winning seasons in the past 20 years.

For pretty much my entire adult life, the team I cheered for the most has done nothing but lose.

During that time there were a lot of prospects that were supposed to change that. One Pirates scout once described outfielder Chad Hermansen as a prospect that could “walk on water.” His career drowned. Kris Benson was supposed to be a generational talent as a pitcher. When he wasn’t injured, he was astonishingly mediocre.

There were others, and they all failed. So did the team. Small market. Not enough money. Can’t win. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Then, in 2009, a new supposed savior showed up.

His name: Andrew McCutchen.

He had been hyped for a while after he was drafted and as he rose through the ranks in the minor leagues. But because so many supposed franchise saviors before him had failed so spectacularly, there was always a sense of, “yeah, well, I will believe it when I see it.”

But from the moment he arrived in Pittsburgh you could tell almost immediately he was going to be different.

In the years before McCutchen the Pirates were not only bad, they were boring.

They had nobody that was worth the price of admission. They had some good players here and there, but nobody that made you excited. Brian Giles was probably the second best hitter in baseball during his time with the Pirates, but his value was that he had a great eye at the plate, and when teams inevitably pitched around him because no one else in the lineup could hit, he would draw a ton of walks. Every four or five games when someone would make a mistake and give him that one good pitch to hit, he would hit a home run. But that was pretty much all he did.

McCutchen was different. He brought an energy, and an excitement, and an awe inspiring set of skills that made you make sure you weren’t in the concourse or in the bathroom when he stepped up to the plate. In any given at at-bat he could leg out an infield single, stretch a single into a double, fly around the bases for a stand-up triple, or just simply hit the ball 420-feet.

Every year he got a little better. Eventually he went from being a good young centerfielder, to a legitimate MVP candidate, then to an actual MVP.

He finished in the top-five of the MVP voting four years in a row. Do you know how many other Pirates in the 136 year history of the franchise can make that claim?

Zero!

Not Barry Bonds. Not Willie Stargell. Not Dave Parker. Not Roberto Clemente. Not Ralph Kiner. Not Paul Waner. Honus Wagner may have done it, but the MVP award did not exist for a large portion of his career.

In 2012, McCutchen’s career broke out and he had the Pirates flirting with their first winning season in decades (decades!).

Even though the Pirates collapsed in the second half and finished with another losing season, there was still reason to start to believe and Andrew McCutchen was the reason.

Even more so because they had another potential cornerstone player coming the next season.

That player’s name: Gerrit Cole.

Cole was important for a lot of reasons. For one, when the Pirates drafted him No. 1 overall it helped break a string of mind-numbingly stupid draft decisions that saw the team pass on superior talent out of fear that they couldn’t afford them. Or, perhaps more accurately, didn’t want to afford them. This was a team that in 2003 drafted a pitcher No. 1 overall that they admitted might only be a “middle of the rotation starter.” This was a team that once drafted a relief pitcher with the No. 4 overall pick.

When they took Cole, it made you want to believe that maybe the tide was turning. Especially because he had a chance to be something completely different. For all of the great players the Pirates have had in their 130-plus year existence, they have almost all been position players. They really haven’t had a truly dominant starting pitcher.

When Cole made his Major League debut in 2013, the Pirates finally seemed to be on their way. It was mid-June, the team was 11 games over .500 and in playoff contention. And now they were adding a guy that could throw 100 miles per hour.

My brother Matt and I bought tickets for his first game, and it was unlike anything I had ever seen at a Pirates game. It just felt like a big game. The place was not only sold out, but there was an unmistakeable buzz in the air. People were not there for the post-game fireworks, or the bobblehead, or to drink beer on the river walk and just kill a summer evening.

They were there to see a big baseball game. It was almost as if everyone knew they were about to see something important.

Cole delivered on the hype that night. When he struck out the first batter he faced, the stadium erupted. When he stepped to the plate in the second inning and drove in the first two runs of the game, it was even louder. He ended up dominating for seven innings.

Later that season he was the one that officially broke the streak. On the night the Pirates won their 82nd game, securing their first winning season since 1992, he went up against one of the best pitchers in baseball – Yu Darvish – and one of the best teams in the league that season – the Texas Rangers – and shut them out for seven innings, striking out nine, allowing only 3 hits in a 1-0 win.

Things, finally, were different.

A couple of weeks later the Pirates actually clinched a playoff spot. I want the moment it officially happened on my wall.

Cole’s career with the Pirates probably did not turn out exactly the way it was expected, but he was still good. Really good. Probably better than he will be remembered for being, and there is still a very strong possibility that he will still be that consistently dominant starter. When he was at his best he was unlike anything the Pirates had on their team in a long time.

The three Pirates teams that made the playoffs between 2013 and 2015 were incredibly exciting, and for as much credit as players like Russell Martin and A.J. Burnett got for coming in and helping to change the culture, or whatever it was, those teams were about Andrew McCutchen and Gerrit Cole. They are the ones that changed everything. McCutchen mostly.

Now they are gone. Traded within a span of 48 hours for six players that, combined, will probably never make even half of the impact that McCutchen and Cole did, whether it be on the field or off of it.

The Pirates will talk about financial flexibility. And the realities of the marketplace. And how the six new players have years of service ahead of them and how this will help make the Pirates a more consistent contender long-term and a bunch of other corporate buzzwords.

It is all bullshit. All of it. Every word of it.

You’re not going to get another Andrew McCutchen. Those guys don’t come around very often, and when they do, you only get them for a limited time. When you’re the Pittsburgh Pirates, that amount of time is even shorter than most other teams. When you have them, you owe it to yourself to do everything in your power to not just compete and win, but to put yourself in a position to win it all.

That is what makes the past 48 hours such a gut punch.

It’s not that McCutchen and Cole are gone. You could probably make reasonable, sound arguments for why it had to happen. McCutchen is a free agent after this season and is on the downside of his career.

The Cole trade is frustrating because he was dealt at his lowest possible value and before he needed to be moved. He still had two years left, and while he was destined to leave as a free agent, you might have been able to pump his trade value back up and get more than what amounts to just a few guys back in return.

What makes this such a gut punch is how they wasted these two players.

For years the Pirates front office told us, as fans, that when the team became good and fans came to the stadium they would make bigger investments in the team.

The team became good. Fans set attendance records. The front office did … nothing of consequence to really put the team over the top.

Sure, they made some trades and added some players, but nearly every move they made, even the ones that worked, was them trying to find a diamond in the rough that could rebound or bounce back. They never went after a bonafide impact player. The only time during Andrew McCutchen’s career with the Pirates that they traded a top-10 prospect out of their farm system was when they traded two of them to DUMP salary by trading Francisco Liriano to the Toronto Blue Jays. The Pirates tried to sell it as them being really excited about a pitcher named Drew Hutchison. He was so bad he is already out of the organization not even two years later.

Never made a splash free agent signing. Never made a splash trade. Kept counting on the fact they could take reclamation projects and turn them into something.

After winning 98 games in 2015, they punted on the next season. Unforgivable.

What makes the Pirates’ situation so hopeless is that they have a lethal combination of a bottom-five ownership situation in all of North American sports, and a bunch of buffoons running the baseball side of things.

When general manager Neal Huntington talks, he talks down to everyone around him like he is the smartest man in the room.

He tried to justify the Pirates’ payroll this offseason and the inevitable salary dumps by saying, and I quote, “We already pay significantly higher percentage of our payroll than Penguins pay to Crosby.”

His farm system has produced next to nothing of value despite the fact he spent the first several years of his time in charge of the Pirates picking at the top of the draft. He got Cole with a No. 1 overall pick. Josh Bell looks like a solid player. And that is pretty much it in a decade of drafting baseball players.

His major trades (Jason Bay, Neil Walker, Freddy Sanchez) have all been flops.

And perhaps most embarrassing he seems to have no current plan for where the team is headed now. At the start of the offseason he admitted as such.

https://twitter.com/adamdberry/status/941331362837094400



His trades and roster moves this offseason perfectly illustrate the lack of direction.

In the Cole trade, the Pirates picked up a bunch of mediocre prospects that are close to the Major Leagues and might be able to play this season. How good they are remains to be seen (none are high ceiling prospects) but it’s a more “medium term” outlook, if not immediate.

For McCutchen, the key piece in that trade, outfielder Bryan Reynolds, has a little more upside but is significantly further away from playing in the Major Leagues (if he ever even does). That is obviously a longer-term outlook.

Then, they signed relief pitcher Felipe Rivero (a legitimately good pitcher) to a four-year contract extension.

There are three different plans here with these moves. Pick a direction and stick to it. If you’re rebuilding long-term, then go for all high upside players. Trade everyone of value.

If you’re trying to win now, maybe take another shot with the guys that are already good and try to add something around them.

Instead, the Pirates are choosing the path that seems likely to help them win 78 games for the next few years.

But hey, I am sure all of the young players will all take that big step forward at the exact same time. This will be the year Starling Marte actually hits for power. And the year Gregory Polanco doesn’t actually suck at everything. And the year Tyler Glasnow learns how to throw a strike. And the year Auston Meadows actually hits something in Triple-A, let alone the Major Leagues. It all has to come together, you know?

Basically, this is just a long-winded version of me saying what I really wanted to say:

Fuck Neal Nuntington.

Fuck Frank Coonelly.

Fuck Bob Nutting.

Fuck financial flexibility.

Fuck years of service.

Fuck the Pittsburgh Pirates.