This is all a huge scheme by Nutting, not only does he not have to pay the "big" salaries of Taillon, Musgrove, and Bell, he is allegedly going to double the price on scorecards since everyone will need to buy one now that nobody knows who the hell any of these guys are anymore
Scorecards accounting for 35% of all Pirates profits, as will happen when the average age of a fanbase is in their 80s.
Don't get anyone knocking the Pirates for this.....they need to go Scorched Earth. Taillon was good but only had one more year after this one, and has an injury history.
decent return.
My issues aren't with the trade, it's everything surrounding the trade. That's pretty much the universal take around each of the trades this off-season.
Cherington re-stocking a ridiculously shallow farm system despite inheriting an insanely shallow system with only a couple assets with any sort of trade value is positive (he hasn't landed big name prospects, but he's added a lot of young talent to a farm system that was more focused on developing replacement-level plug-ins that can field half a dozen positions equally poorly or teaching pitchers to pitch to contact no matter what rather than their individual strengths. Not having the faith that ownership will spend a single dime more than necessary to do the bare minimum is significantly less positive. The Pirates problems won't change until ownership changes, so even if these prospects turn out as hoped there's little to be excited about when the franchise has a rotten core philosophy about never paying anyone what they're worth. Who would ever want to stick around that kind of environment?
It's not even like that motherf***er did anything for us. As bad of an owner as McClatchy was, he was bad because he was broke. He at least seemed to care about putting a decent team on the field, he just was too broke to do it the traditional way and not savvy enough to surround himself with the right people who could. If nothing else McClatchy gets credit for providing enough stability to get the stadium built. Nutting just benefits from inheriting it from his ghoul of a dad who bought McClatchy out at an unknown point in time. Nutting is a billionaire and the Pirates are profitable, he has no excuse other than not knowing how to run a business like anything but a small-town newspaper that fires its entire staff and replaces them with unpaid interns.
So f***ing embarrassing having a 130+ year-old franchise held hostage by a billionaire whose fortune comes from operating newspapers like The Minot Daily News and Altoona Mirror and a shitty Pennsylvania ski resort that gets more attention than the Pirates do. I'd hold onto my money-printing business that fell onto my lap too, if I were the useless fourth generation progeny of a newspaper named The Intelligencer and whose entire business ethos is that the only route to profitability is to slash payroll.