Pittsburgh Pirates: from
bad to worse
Major League Baseball thought they were doing the
Pittsburgh Pirates organization a favor by giving them the All-Star
game this year. It has only been ten years since they hosted their
last one. True, Pittsburgh has one of the finest baseball only
stadiums in the Major Leagues, but did they deserve another game so
soon?
If you factor in the mentality that small market
teams such as the Pirates needed help financially, giving them the
2006 All-Star game made sense. The team even went out and spent
some hefty money on free-agents, Sean Casey, Jeremy Burnitz and Joe
Randa. They fired Lloyd McClendon and his staff and brought in new
blood by the way of former Dodgers Manager, Jim Tracey. Many blamed
the failure to win on McClendon.
With a new manager in place and new free agents,
the Pirates tied season ticket sales into a chance to purchase
All-Star game tickets. This should have been a booming year for a
franchise that had not finished over .500 since Barry Bonds played
there. That was several hundred home runs ago.
Unfortunately the Pirates have played worse under
Tracey than they did for McClendon. They are arguably the worse
team in baseball. Attendence at Pirates games is below what it was
in 2005, after the same amount of home contest. And how low will
attendence drop after the mid-summer classic.
Mark Cuban, the wild but supportive owner of the
Dallas Mavericks says he would buy the team if it were for sale.
Here is hoping that a once proud franchise of Honus Wagner, Roberto
Clemente, The Waner brothers, Willie Stargell, Barry Bonds and
others will find someone who is willing to spend money on the team
and bring it to a competitive level.