DK’s Daily Shot of Pirates: Money’s always first

DK’s Daily Shot of Pirates: Money’s always first

Look, if you want to grade the trade, I know that’s fun for a lot of people. Go nuts. Not me. For me, there’s a much, much, much bigger issue at hand. And I am not the type to bury my head in the sand. Good morning to you. Good Thursday morning. I’m Dan Kvachovic 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 of two teams in town that actually care about competing. And I hope you’ll also check out my daily shots of Steelers and Penguins. Pirates 2 Giants won yesterday in San Francisco. That’s a sweep of the Giants. That’s five straight wins. That’s eight wins in the past nine games, which sounds like theoretically it could be the kind of thing that would motivate the people at the very top to be thinking about Gasp winning at some point, any point in our lives. But that’s not how this goes. That’s never how this goes. Now, I’m going to repeat this to try to make it as clear as possible because this is not something that’s going to be a really simple concept to relay here. I don’t care about the KBrian Hayes trade. I don’t care that Hayes was traded. I was the one on yesterday’s show underscoring that of the 30 starting third baseman in Major League Baseball, Hayes ranked 30th in offense, he ranks number one with a bullet defensively, but 30th on offense. And this is a team that needs offense. So, I don’t care about that. I don’t care about whichever random somebody class A middle infielder they picked up. And I’m not even being facitious. I do remember that it was a class A middle infielder or for that matter whichever 34y old reliever they got. I really don’t care about that. Let me tell you where I am with this franchise. And I’m not imposing it on you. You can go nuts. You can dig in on this trade. You can find out everything that you want. You can compare all the various grades. This management team, this ownership doesn’t deserve that. It doesn’t deserve being treated like it’s a normal franchise because it isn’t. Because let me tell you this, when these gentlemen sat down, Bob Nutting, Travis Williams, Ben Cherington to talk about all of this, and I’m going to ask you this as well. Regardless of how you feel about the trade or how you’ve graded it, what do you think was the first thing that came up knowing what you know about this transaction and knowing what you know about him? Mitch Keller’s name has been the one that’s most commonly floated out there. What do you think was the first thing that came up? Right. Money. It’s always money. They can talk until they’re purple in the face. To the contrary, but every time it comes to an action, it’s about money. It happens again and again and again and again and again. Now, I realize I’m asking a lot here in asking you to separate this, at least for the purposes of this little conversation that we’re having. Forget about the trade itself. Think about the mindset. Think about who these people are, what their respective histories, the fact that the Reds were the other party. you know, the Reds, a team inside your division, and how that wouldn’t even have been a thing because these are thoroughly non-competitive people. And it’s just about the money. For those who are unfamiliar with Hayes’s contract, he signed an 8-year, $70 million extension in 2022. All three of these gentlemen were presiding at the time. That was boiling down to basically around 7 million a season. It was a little bit front-loaded. It was 10 each of the first two seasons and then seven for a long time. In 2028, it was supposed to go up to 8 million and then there was a club option that was never going to get exercised in 2030 for 12 million. So, there’s roughly 34 35 million left on the contract. That’s why they sat down. That’s why they made this move. That’s what came up. And that’s my problem. Because on one hand, they’ll tell you the way Cherington’s been trying to do on three consecutive weekends now that this is all about 2026. Every move that we’re making is about making sure that we’ve got the best chance to win in 2026. If you’re the biggest proponent of this trade, I’m going to keep repeating, I don’t care, the biggest proponent who’s the happiest jumping up and down about this trade. You can’t say with a straight face that this has anything to do with 2026 because it doesn’t. Unless of course you can convince yourself that the money that they had committed to key is just going to be moved to some other player. And you know there’s not a whole lot of precedent for that sort of thing. You can think it, you can hope it, you can bet against the streak, but you just go right ahead through the entirety of the nutting tenure and tell me where it was exactly that they saved x amount of dollars over the previous season that it resulted in more dollars being spent the following season. I’ll just sit here and wait. Oh, you’re done. Okay, it doesn’t exist. It doesn’t happen. But in the moment, you convinced yourself that it was okay to get excited about this because you think that money is going to go to some third baseman who can hit. Well, two major problems with that. One, it won’t. Two, this general manager couldn’t find that hitter at that position if you spotted him the mic and the Schmidt. Why? because he can’t find hitters at any position. But what he can do is sit in that room where those three guys brought up money. Now, refresh my memory again. Who are the other two players who’ve been talked about a lot as it relates to this trade deadline? Oh, right. Mitch. Mitch is owed 16.9 million next season, $18.4 million the following season, 20.4 4 million. The season after that, these same three gentlemen signed Mitch to that extension, the 5-year $77 million one. And the other player, David Bednar, who just in a wild coincidence happens to be entering his third arbitration season in 2026 and is going to get a big big raise over his current pay of 5.9 million. Amazing how it worked out that it just happened to be the guys making the money or about to make even more money. One more time here because I’m convinced I’m not going to make myself clear enough on this count. This isn’t about Hayes being traded. This isn’t about who they got or what they got in the Hayes trade. It’s about their mindset. Wake up, Pittsburgh. This is what they’re about. For however long this GM keeps this job, you can be very sure that one reason he does is that when the owner says whack the payroll, he says yes, sir. When we come back, J1Q. 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Today’s J1Q comes from Kyle Moan, who says, “DK, why is Ben Cherington uh drafting slashtrading for guys like he thinks he’s okay to start up a 10-year rebuild?” For anyone who doesn’t know of Kyle’s multiple references that he kind of packed all into that one question, a lot of the draft picks, including the number one draft pick, Seth Hernandez, the pitcher, the high school kid, it’s going to take him a while to get here. And in trading, not only Krian Hayes yesterday, but also Caleb Ferguson, what the Pirates got back were prospects who are nowhere near Pittsburgh. I have two richly cynical ways to answer this question. One is that this is the only kind of trade that Cherington even knows how to make. Look at his history. Show me where he’s made pure baseball trades. Probably the only one that even comes to mind for me is Spencer Horwitz for Luis Ortiz, meaning somebody who was already in the majors for somebody who was already in the majors. But otherwise, this is the profile. This is what they all look like. And this is also why, at least it’s yet another reason why I don’t care about these results. I don’t care about the grading of these trades. The rankings are all over the place in almost every circumstance. And that can be both good and bad. It can be good in the sense that a Connor Griffin can go flying 70 80 spots up the list in the span of a handful of months. But that also should tell you that the rankings from a few months ago weren’t all that awesome. But to the broader thing that whether you intended to or not gets raised by your question here, none of this should be happening right now. This is nuts, Kyle. This is nuts on so many levels that I wouldn’t even know where to start in cutting it all up. It’s nuts for this GM to be talking about any year that isn’t this one. You know why? because it’s nuts that he’s here to be talking about this one after his performance, after these tangible and very real and measurable results in wins and losses, in drafting, in developing in Latin America, in other international capacities, in instruction, in trades, in free agency, with the exception of a very small pool of pitchers. the best of which anyone could have drafted. And with the exception of one richly promising hitter who’s still in class A, this has been an F minus across the board. And yet he’s permitted to go talk in public about 2026. And yet he’s permitted to continue trading away major league players for low-level minor leaguers. We’re not even going to get into Ferguson today, but it’s a pretty nice pitcher who’s coming at minimum wage. What would be the crime in bringing him back for another year? You know, it’s just But it doesn’t even come up. It doesn’t even come up because he doesn’t think like that. They in general don’t think like that and can’t think like that. And that’s why it’s an enema that’s needed. It’s an enema. It’s from top to bottom. And yes, of course, that includes and begins with the owner. Insanity. I swear all of this. I appreciate the question, Kyle. I appreciate everybody who listens to Daily Shot of Pirates. We will be back with another one tomorrow.

It’s about the money … first, last and always.

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