DK’s Daily Shot of Pirates: Sooooo serious

DK’s Daily Shot of Pirates: Sooooo serious

It’s the day before Thanksgiving. I’m feeling pretty good about a lot of stuff. My kids came home yesterday. One is living in New York. The other one is studying in Philadelphia. Everybody’s under one roof. All things are good. I’m I’m going to give it a shot today. All right. An honest shot. Good morning to you. Good Wednesday morning. I’m Don Kovajvich of DK Pittsburgh Sports. This is Daily Shot of Pirates presented by the Northshore Tavern. It comes your way bright and early every weekday. If you’re into football andor hockey, I also offer daily shots of Steelers and Penguins in the same place that you found this. The team was kind of, you can call it that, in action yesterday in conjunction with the other two teams in town delivering turkeys outside PNC Park to those in need on this Thanksgiving. The players almost without exception aren’t around. So the player contingent that was there for the two teams that are active, Travis Williams, Don Kelly were representing the ball club. Williams had a little bit to say about the season ahead. It really just a reiteration of stuff that he had first spoken a few weeks back. This was at the Kelly officially becoming the manager or whatever press conference. Williams told reporters on the scene, quote, “Our expectations are that we win and that we make the playoffs. In order to do that, we knew we had to be aggressive in the offseason and we’re committed to that. That requires you to be really active in the free agency market and the trade market. That activity is happening now.” End quote. There’s I know everybody’s reaction to this sort of thing. What do you mean that activity is happening now? There’s been no activity. Well, that’s not how these things work. Free agents don’t get signed with a snap of a finger. Uh trades don’t get consummated with the snap of another finger. You It takes work. Here’s where I am right now. I and I don’t need to reiterate who shouldn’t be there anymore and how there’s really no getting around having an executive who can’t recognize hitting and who has just made a complete mess of however one would care to characterize this build or rebuild or whatever. I still see some conceptual things that are happening right now that are the correct thing to do. And the pirates as an organization do the correct thing so rarely that it’s probably worthwhile on my part to pause and say, “Okay, this here, this is at least an idea that makes sense.” Williams went on to say that when you have someone like Paul Ske anchoring your pitching staff, but you also have great pitchers like Mitch Keller and the young guys coming up like Bubba Chandler, Braxton Ashcraft. Those guys all add excitement and energy and give us an opportunity with a solid pitching staff. It’s one of the best, if not the best, in baseball right now. You want to build around that? What I hear when I hear that is, “Oh, you’re not trading Mitch for more money?” Because, as I’ve stated repeatedly, you can talk about how that you have this super solid staff. You can throw in Johan Oedo in there. You can throw in Mike Burroughs, but once you start hitting that four and five and even the six spot with question marks, your rotation’s not really all that different. You have skins and some guys. I get that there are some fans that are down on Mitch because of his second half fades, but Mitch gets you the 30 plus starts that you need. That’s not an option. You can’t just cross your fingers and hope for children to get you to the playoffs and then to still be strong. You can’t. You can’t. You can’t. If Mitch gets you there with a 4 point something ERA, he still helped you get there. So if you clear out this payroll space further by trading Mitch, you’re taking a strength and turning it into a at least a partial question mark. So does it mean anything that Williams used Mitch’s name? No. Mitch is on the roster. Anybody can do that. the general manager can do that right up until the split second that someone’s traded. But it’s a positive. It lends at least a little bit of credibility to the news I brought you exclusively last Thursday that inside 115 federal, they’re openly talking about $110 million payroll. Does that mean they’re going to do it? I have no idea. Are they talking about it? Yes, they absolutely unequivocally are. I’ve had other conversations to substantiate that. That’s obviously also a positive. Not a feather, not parade worthy. But if you’ve been listening to what I offer here for any amount of time or what I write, if you read that, you’ll know that I have felt for years that the Pirates were about 10 or 20 million off where they should be on an annual basis. Well, this is that this is that gap. They ended the 2025 season having spent 87 million. If they get to 110, that would represent one of the healthiest hikes in franchise history. So, what do you do with this? You wait for the worst executive in all of professional sports to try to do stuff that he’s never been able to do before. But in the moment, in the moment, a couple of things have legitimately occurred that do in some small at least conceptual way represent a step forward. If that step forward is somehow connected to Major League Baseball’s next economic system, that being of course the salary cap system, so much the better. The Pirates will have to play along. The Marlins will have to play along. The Rays and the A’s will have to play along. And you know the day before we’re supposed to be thankful for everything and all the things in our lives for which we should consider ourselves to be fortunate and this was the best I could do on this count. It’s something when we come back J1Q. 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. Today’s J1Q comes from Robert Mendelson, who plain and simple sent me a video. I had actually already seen it, but it it was still nice that somebody uh thought of this of Hal Stein Brener, the owner, of course, of the Yankees. He was asked yesterday in a joint video session with New York area reporters about his thoughts on a salary cap. And what he did first and foremost was avoid the term. That’s something that I’ve been sharing with you. The owners and even Rob Banford himself have reached an agreement to not use the term. They’ll address questions on it, but they’ll really, really, really try hard to not speak it and to not really get into any kind of details. So, when this came up with Stein Brener, his answer basically amounted to, will always be among the highest payroll-wise, meaning the Yankees, and they are. I think they’re third. Always have been, always will be. There are groups of fans out there who come to spring training games. And he was referring to where he lives, which is in the Tampa area. That’s of course where the Yankees have their spring facilities. They think that their team has little chance to make the playoffs. He brought that up. The reporter didn’t. And that’s kind of what I’ve been telling you for a while now. It’s not just the handful of teams with the lowest payrolls that want this thing. It is Steinbrer. I’ve told you that as well. I’ve also mentioned that there are other owners who are in on this who will surprise you. I am not at liberty to share them at the moment, but they’re in there and there’s a lot more of this to come. But what one of the things that has to occur and one of the reasons that I’m in favor of the owners not speaking the term or really acknowledging the term is that the term sucks. It’s a complete misnomer. The best parallel that I can come up with is global warming. It’s one of the dumbest terms that really, really does damage to a very legitimate issue, which is climate change. Climate change has the earth getting warmer. This isn’t, you know, me jumping on some kind of political thing or whatever. It’s just proven. It’s scientific fact. But in the process, the weather is affected in all kinds of different ways where some areas actually will get colder, some will get warmer, the earth overall gets warmer, but the individual effects on cities differ. So the term that should have been stuck to that thing a long time ago was climate change. As it was, somebody thought of global warming. So every single time it’s a little chilly outside, you can say, “Oh, here’s your global warming.” Well, that’s this. That’s what this is. Salary cap. The Associated Press, maybe the most venerable news organization on planet Earth, had this headline on Stein Brener’s comments yesterday. I’m going to read it to you right off the screen here. Yankees owner Hal Steinbrrener declines to support salary cap but might support salary floor. This is nowhere in the accompanying piece. It’s never mentioned by Stein Brener. There was a quote from him in response to a question about a salary floor, but he never acknowledged anything of the kind. The reason that the headline was written the way it was, is that whoever wrote this just doesn’t understand what a salary cap system is. And I’m not oversimplifying it, I don’t think, to suggest that it’s the term that kills it. The salary cap, if you’re new to the show, and here it comes for the gazillionth time. Salary cap system involves a ceiling and a floor, a tight range between those two, roughly 20 to 25 million based on the other sports. And then the expanded revenue sharing that allows everybody to spend within that range. That’s it. That’s it 100% of the time. There are differences between the other three major professional sports. They’re not exactly the same, but that’s the essence of the salary cap system. These baseball people don’t know this. They don’t get it. Even if you believe Steinbrer, and I do, that he just wasn’t really ready for the question. to reiterate his quote, I don’t feel like I’m in position right now research-wise, knowledgewise to answer that question. I don’t think he’s making that up. There’s an accompanying poll next to this AP report that says, would a salary floor help small market teams? The answer is hell no. Because you can’t just say, hey, everybody spends 180 million starting right now. doesn’t work because there has to be increased revenue sharing for that to happen. And to have increased revenue sharing, you have to have a ceiling at the other end so that the teams with the greatest revenues have some of that spread out throughout the sport. This is doubly important in baseball because baseball has the bigger local TV contracts. Emphasis on local. In the NFL, every game’s on national TV. every game in some form or other, even if it’s just a regionally shown broadcast. They’re on a national network. They’re on an ESPN or an NBC or whatever. In baseball, it’s all over the place, and therefore, so is the money. Never mind that a broadcast of a game tends to involve not one team, but two. So, if the Pirates go into Dodger Stadium or if the Dodgers come into PNC Park, they are, think about it, half the entertainment. You can say that, well, yeah, they’re the entertainment the same way the Washington Generals were. In parenthesis, of course, remember that the Pirates swept the Dodgers in September, right here in Pittsburgh. And parenthesis, but it takes two, hence the revenue sharing. Change the name. In fact, don’t even call it salary cap system. just come up with something completely new. This is what we want. This is what we’re looking for. It’s a system of I don’t know, shared wealth or whatever. I I I’m not that guy to be thinking of stuff like that. I appreciate hearing from you, Robert. I appreciate everybody who listens to Daily Shot of Pirates taking the next two days down to hang with the kids and the family. We’ll be back with another one of these programs next Monday. Have a wonderful Thanksgiving, my friends.

It all sounds sooooo serious, this payroll increase.

#Pittsburgh #Pirates #LetsGoBucs #MLB #DKPS

Hear award-winning columnist Dejan Kovacevic’s Daily Shot of Pirates every weekday morning!

SUBSCRIBE TO CHANNEL ► https://www.youtube.com/@DKPS_Pirates?sub_confirmation=1

MEMBERSHIP TO CHANNEL ► https://www.youtube.com/@DKPS_Pirates/join

OUR APPS ► https://DKPS.net/apple | https://DKPS.net/android

OUR WEBSITE ► http://www.DKPittsburghSports.com

ABOUT US ► DK Pittsburgh Sports is the proud, pioneering, fully independent venture begun in 2014 by award-winning reporter Dejan Kovacevic and featuring a professional staff covering the Pirates year-round and everywhere they go! This is where it all started!