DK’s Daily Shot of Pirates: Go Dodgers! Woo!

DK’s Daily Shot of Pirates: Go Dodgers! Woo!

[Music] [Applause] didn’t watch a minute of Major League Baseball’s playoffs to date. Don’t expect to anytime soon, as in like for years. But I can tell you I did see here and read this year’s team of destiny is up two games to none in the National League Championship Series. Good morning to you. Good Wednesday morning. I’m Dan Kvachovich of DK Pittsburgh Sports. This is Daily Shot of Pirates. It comes your way bright and early every weekday. If you’re into football andor hockey, I also offer daily shots on the two teams in town that care. The Dodgers did beat the Brewers last night in Milwaukee. The Dodgers do have a two games to none lead. And I am here to tell you for everything that happened in the 2025 season in Pittsburgh, for everything that happens anywhere in baseball, nothing nothing is more important than Los Angeles raising that ugly hunk of metal within the next couple of weeks. And then once the Dodgers are the world champs again through all their grit and determination and character and culture and everything, the next thing that needs to happen is they need to do it again in 2026. This isn’t about making a point once. It’s about doing it twice and then right into the lockout or however it is that the work stoppage ends up defining itself. Conversely, and the reason that this NLCS is so critical, the last thing that you want heading into this is for one of the teams based in one of the smallest markets, operating with one of the smallest payrolls, for them to prevail and to give everybody an unjust load of ammo for keeping the system the way it is. The fact of the matter, and I would hope these would be obvious at this point, but I’m not so sure that they are, is that the Brewers have never won the World Series. The Brewers have been a very, very, very competitive team for a decade and change now. And the Brewers do have to do everything that they do with one arm tied behind their back. When a player gets really, really good there, that player is gone. You have to make some super intelligent trade to salvage value. And they’ve done that. Case in point, Corbin Burns. But they’re still not playing the same game that the Dodgers are. When the Dodgers have a player they want to keep, they keep that player. When they have a player that they want to take from another team, come free agency, they take that player. So, it’s not really and shouldn’t be completely outcomebased, but that’s kind of the world we live in. And if the outcome is something that everybody sees, then the narrative is that much easier to paint. Think about it. Can’t be any simpler. Work stoppage. How can you possibly say that this system is unfair? The Brewers just beat the Dodgers and went on to win the World Series. No one will hear a syllable that’s spoken after that. Now, when I say this sort of thing, it can sound like I’m suggesting that if the Dodgers win, the players will all be like, “Oh, yeah, absolutely. Salary cap sounds awesome.” That’s not going to happen. I’m not an idiot. This is way, way, way more about public sentiment. And a lot of that public sentiment is driven by, as we discuss here a lot, those baseball writers who don’t cover baseball, the ones who just talk to agents. They’re commonly referred to as national writers, even though they’ve achieved no such designation. It’s not a status. It’s just a different job. And that job, the way it’s done, is founded really on communication with agents who are representing players. If those agents were doing their own jobs properly, they would be looking into the impact that salary cap systems have had in the NFL and the NHL and understand that a greater portion of revenues goes to the players in those systems. That’s why the players in those leagues keep enthusiastically approving new collective bargaining agreements without any real ranker because eventually they pushed through perception and got to reality. And the reality is, as is the case now in baseball, in the NFL and the NHL, it used to be that a gigantically disproportionate amount of the player pay went to just a handful of guys. Now, in the NFL, at the risk of diverting here, quarterbacks still get crazy crazy amounts of money. That’s something that’s probably going to have to get dealt with, but maybe not. NFL players and NHL players at the lowest levels, meaning your special teams guys, your fourthline penalty killers, they make more money than baseball players do at the bottom of that rung. And where half of revenues go to the players in football and hockey, only 38% does in baseball. Now, agents don’t want that to get out there because every agent sees themselves as the ones who are going to end up with that Bryce Harper or that Max Scherzer who’s going to make their brand. They’re going to be the next Scott Boris or whatever. But again, what they ought to be doing is advocating for the players that they do represent. And if they were, they’d be pushing for exactly this kind of system. So perception matters. Perception matters a lot. Infinitely more than it should. And I’m sorry, but you can’t beat the Dodgers winning it all this year and next year for a wonderful perception boost when we come back. J1Q. [Music] If you’re looking for a great dining experience, look no further than Northshore Tavern. Located directly across Federal Street from PNC Park, next door to Mike’s Beer Bar, Northshore Tavern is Pittsburgh’s home for steak on a stone. Enjoy your steak finished on a hot lava stone in front of you, where you ensure each piece is cooked to exactly your liking. or try their rotating selection of entre, hot sandwiches, salads, and burgers, all while enjoying the ambiance dedicated to the great players and history of the Pittsburgh Pirates all around you. Come see why everyone’s talking about Northshore Tavern and Steak on a Stone. It’s Gun Storage Check Week. Help prevent unwanted access to your firearms. No one wants their unsecured gun to be used in an accident, a suicide, or a crime. Use lock boxes, safes, and locks to secure your firearms. Learn more at gunstorage check.org. That’s gunstoch check.org. Brought to you by NSSF, the Firearm Industry Trade Association. Delete Me, quick, and safe to remove your personal data online. 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Matt writes, “You would have thought by now that the Pirates would have drafted and developed an outfielder just on accident.” Yeah, teams do make these types of dumpster dive moves like Will Roberts and being claimed off waiverss. They do it all the time. But the amount of outfielders year after year after year should tell you they just don’t have any. The fact that they carried Alexander Canario the entire year and Jack Suinsky almost the entire year tells you that they just don’t have the replacements. It’s pathetic. There doesn’t need to be a question for a lot of this stuff, just as there doesn’t need to be an answer other than, and you didn’t bring this up, Matt, and I I kind of have a problem with that, they don’t know what the heck they’re doing. Certainly not as it applies to hitters. If your approach to date through six years for Ben Cherington and his staff of evaluators and all those really, really, really smart people that they have in analytics is such that they begin this off season with a continuation of precisely the same approach, meaning this dumpster dive. This is all they know how to do. This is it. This is it. I mentioned Austin Hayes at some point earlier this summer. He was picked up by the Reds for essentially the same amount of money that the Pirates handed to Tommy Fam, right in that $4 million range. difference is is Hayes 8 years younger and probably a little bit more predictable performance-wise in the sense that he was trying to bounce back from a rare down year, a banged up year. The Pirates get Fam, everybody calls it dumb, which it looked like for a couple of months. Fam, to his considerable credit, roared back to be really productive and also didn’t get enough credit for this. very effective defensively. But Hayes, Hayes just went on to do everything that he’d been doing before, meaning with the Orioles, with the Reds, he ended up in 103 games, he batted 266, 315 on base, 768 OPS, which would have made him a virtual god in the Pirates order. And they they don’t know how to see these things. Whereas the aggregator children who are working at some of the various trade room or websites can see it way in advance and they put it there in their little two paragraph, three paragraph roundups of a given move where they’ll say, “Hey, this was this looks pretty smart for the Reds. Hayes is this that and this.” And you go, “Yeah, that is kind of smart by the Reds, but this team can’t do that stuff. This management group can’t do that stuff. This management group has no clue what to do with any single phase or facet of hitting. And if and when Connor Griffin happens to arrive to Pittsburgh in 2026, the odds he will have overcome to do so will be roughly the odds that Paul SK overcame. I appreciate hearing from you, Matt. I appreciate everybody who listens to Daily Shot of Pirates. We’ll have another one of these tomorrow. [Music]

Go Blue! Win it all, Dodgers! Next year, too!

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