DK’s Daily Shot of Pirates: Lower the payroll?

DK’s Daily Shot of Pirates: Lower the payroll?

Can you imagine that they’d have the nerve to lower the payroll next year? Well, get ready for it. Good morning to you. Good Friday morning. I’m Dan Kawaj of DK Pittsburgh Sports. This is Daily Shot of Pirates. It comes your way bright and early every weekday. If you’re into either of the two teams in town that care, I offer daily shots of Steelers and Penguins in the same place that you found this. The World Series begins tonight and that has no relevance to anything around here. So, let’s just move on. We’re going to talk payroll because you know why? The end of the week, this time of year, it’s really tough to think of things to talk about related to this baseball team because, you know, it’s the off season. they don’t do anything. If they do, it tends to be regressive. It tends to be something that makes the team worse. So, I want to have a like a good informationfilled episode on payroll. And let’s begin with this. The team ended up paying in terms of major league payroll somewhere in the neighborhood of 87 million. If you’ll recall at the beginning of the season, what’s referred to commonly as opening day payroll and the one that everybody ends up citing like into infinity was 89 million. So it went down from opening day and that makes sense considering some of the moves that were made trading David Bednar Krian Hayes and that’s why I’m always cautioning people against taking opening day payroll too seriously. They think and they’ll accuse me of this because it’s I’m suggesting that the Pirates are going to end up spending a whole heck of a lot more. You just wait it out. That’s all. You don’t have to predict anything. Anyway, 87 million is really low and it’s lower than it should be. But here’s the part that’s wild. As I look at the playerbyplayer list of who got paid what, this will blow your mind if you’re not already familiar with this. There are only four players on the entire roster making more than 1.4 million. Only four. Mitch Keller is at 15.4. Brian Reynolds at 12.2. 2 Cutch at five, Tommy Fam, who might not be back at four. From there, it dips all the way down to Dennis Santana at 1.4. Then there’s Joey Bart at 1.2 and then everybody else is under a million. Like, the entire organization is under a million. And there aren’t even very many arbitration guys going into next season. So, if you factor all of that into one pile and then move over to this other pile and presume, and I think it’s kind of safe to do this, that Mitch Keller is going to get traded. Well, there goes your most expensive guy at 15.4 again. So, now you’re down to 70. So even if payroll stays where it was in 2025 or is you know in that neighborhood which I’ll repeat again is around 87 million. You’re not leaving the general manager much and this is a good thing. I’m not complaining to go bolster this hitting. Now could you or would you be trading Mitch for a hitter? Yes. Could you or would you be acquiring somebody who’s major league ready to hit? I’m theoretically also yes, but you never know with this guy. Could you or would you be adding somebody who costs more than Mitch? Unlikely. These are the pirates, but not impossible. And if that is the case and you bring in this hitter who costs, I don’t know, 20 million a year, you’re already chewing into money that you don’t have. And from there, what you’ve got left to spend on the remainder of the roster is exactly zero. So, why would you do this? I mean, let’s start all the way at the top here. Why would Bob Nutting do this? Well, this isn’t something that anybody’s going to put out in an advertisement or come up with a slogan for, but next season for all intents and purposes, is looking like it’ll be a great big waste of everything, meaning everybody’s time, everybody’s money. And if the players association is as clever as it’s been in the past, the union can hit a certain point in the summer where they say, “You know what? We’re not getting any positive vibes back from the owners at all that they’re serious about talking. They just want to impose something. So, we aren’t going to play along with them and give them playoffs, which is when they make most of their money. Certainly, from the broadcasting perspective. So, the players can say, “Well, we see that you’re going to lock us out. We don’t really feel like waiting for that, so we’re just going to strike.” And then there’s no remainder of the season, so you’ll have wasted all your money on whatever this was anyway. So everything gets shut down. It comes back in, I don’t know, 2027, whenever it is that the union gives up, and they will give up. The owners stick together, there’s really no choice for the players but to concede. And when the sport does return, whether it’s a salary cap system that’s in the model of the NFLs or the NHL’s or the NBA’s or it’s something that’s some hybrid version. None of them are completely identical. It’s bound to be something that’s a lot fairer. And from there, it’s bound to be something that would benefit the pirates over the longer term. meaning just at the foundation. If they continue to be idiotic in their decisionmaking, it’ll actually backfire because it’ll expose how terrible they are at everything way more than in this system where you can hide behind, oh, how does Ben Sherington like to word it? Operating in a quote place like Pittsburgh end quote as if somehow we’re responsible for this living in our puny little village. I honestly don’t see a reason why anybody anywhere would get super invested in the 2026 season. And I’m not going to make an exception to that for the Pirates just because they’re here. So yeah, lower the payroll. Who cares? When we come back, J1Q. 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Today’s J1Q comes from Mahoney who says, “Look, it’s a mood point with Bob Nutting and Ben Harington anyway, but if you were to write off Tommy Fam’s $4 million, then you could spend 15 million to land someone like a Henny O Suarez or Josh Naylor, maybe 8 million to get Reese Hoskins to platoon with Spencer Horwitz or an outfielder like Gabe Kepler from Philadelphia. You can spend another five to six on a third bat and wait for Connor Griffin to get to the bigs. Is it maybe closer to 30 million at the end of the day? Is it also a pipe dream with this front office? Absolutely. Wow. I had a tough time even reading that. No, no offense. Not to you. It’s just wow. No, like none of that. I wanted I wanted to get it out though and I did make it to the conclusion, but no. As I hope I was able to lay out for you in the opening segment, the money to do this just isn’t going to be there barring some sort of, you know, big addition to the payroll. And I have no earthly idea why nothing would do it or even in an optimal circumstance that he would. So, I I I would I’m not I swear I’m not trying to be negative just because this and that and I called for their firings. I don’t envision this happening. I don’t have any information to support that it will. But even beyond that, I I just I I don’t see how it could. Wilbur, our good friend, took uh yesterday’s subject matter, which was my attempt to go through every starting hitting position on the roster and see which ones needed to be addressed. Uh Wilbur, who’s more than adept in the analytical world, went the WRC Plus route. That’s a very popular route. all-encompassing offensive statistic. It stands for weighted runs created plus and and the plus is supposed to represent adjustments for ballpark factors, league averages, and so forth. Anything that’s above 100 is seen as above average. Anything that’s below 100 is seen as below average. So 100 is kind of like the median. What Wilbur did was he took each one of these positions and just ranked them against their positional peers from the other 29 teams. So out of 30 teams, you ready? The Pirates catching position ranked 26th in offense. First base 22nd, second base 25th. You don’t even think about that one. Second base, right? Third base 28th. Shortstop 24th. Left field 29th. Center field O’Neal Cruz almost entirely 25th. Right field Brian Reynolds. Brian Reynolds 24th. DH Cut 25th. to which Wilbur concludes as only he can, and I quote directly, “The only position the Pirates need to upgrade is hitter. All of them. Period. Full stop.” What a wonderful way to finish the week. I hope everybody enjoys watching the World Series. I’ll be watching hockey. I’ll be covering hockey. I’ll be covering some football. And I’ll probably be having a lot more fun. This program will be back Monday.

Lower the payroll? Sure, what’d be the difference?

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