The Pittsburgh Pirates used to be winners, even if they lost that reputation long ago.
From the time they joined the National League in 1887 through the 2006 season, the Pirates had the sixth-best winning percentage among franchises that were still active, according to Baseball-Reference. Only the Yankees, Giants, Dodgers, Red Sox and Guardians were better.
What happened after the 2006 season? Bob Nutting took control of the team. Since 2007, only the Miami Marlins have a worse winning percentage in all of Major League Baseball than the Pirates.
The Pirates enjoyed a competitive window from 2013 to 2015, when Andrew McCutchen, Starling Marte and Gerrit Cole led them to three straight playoff berths. So nobody can say it’s impossible for a team owned by Nutting to win. But the competitive window has been boarded up ever since.
Things have really taken a dive in the past decade. Three teams rank below Pittsburgh in winning percentage, but only because the Marlins, Kansas City Royals and Chicago White Sox put on all-time tank jobs. Nobody can reasonably defend how the Marlins and White Sox operate, and the Royals have already been back to the playoffs since they let themselves sink to the bottom.
Tanking did help the Pirates land a generational talent to lead their rotation in right-hander Paul Skenes, who has performed just as expected after being picked first overall in 2023. The Pirates still have a 15-32 record entering play Monday, a pace for 53 wins. There’s no such thing as a one-man gang in MLB, even if he has a 2.12 ERA with 232 strikeouts in 195 2/3 innings.
They also recently fired manager Derek Shelton, and while interim skipper Don Kelly seems like he might be a good prospect for the job, how many good players does he have to lead? Ben Cherington has been the general manager since late in 2019, and since 2020 the Pirates have gone 309-447. Only the Rockies have been worse in that span.
How is the immediate future looking? Pittsburgh does have good individual prospects like right-hander Bubba Chandler and shortstop/center fielder Konnor Griffin, who is just 19 playing at Class A. But they also didn’t make the kind of hay in recent drafts that a team like the Pirates — which doesn’t spend on free agents and hasn’t been all that effective in player development — must do to win. Their farm system ranks in the middle.
The Pirates use the cover of being a small-market team in an attempt to deflect responsibility for losing. They try to temper expectations, gain patience and bide time with fans, and point the finger at MLB’s big-spending owners and the players union. The finger is pretty crooked. Even the revenue-sharing money the Pirates already receive from other MLB teams doesn’t get invested into new payroll. They rank 27th in 2025 in payroll and rank 27th over the past 15 years, according to information kept at Spotrac.
Perhaps the most damning result of not using the money on new players came from the open competitive window in 2013–15, when the Bucs reached the postseason but fell short once they got there. Could they have won a World Series with more investment from ownership? Well, they sure didn’t get there without it. The Bucs did use the money on players in a way — by upgrading the weight room at spring training.
Nutting has a reported net worth of $1.1 million.
The Milwaukee Brewers come from an even smaller market than Pittsburgh, yet since Nutting took over the Pirates, they have made the postseason eight times and finished first in the NL Central five times, including three times since 2021. For whatever MLB’s richest owners need to work out with the less-richest owners, competing with the way things are is possible.
Trouble for the Pirates began before the Nutting family bought a share of the team for the first time in 1996. The Bucs have been in general decline ever since Barry Bonds left for free agency in 1993. They haven’t won a World Series since 1979, which was still the early days of free agency.
Small-market teams complain about a lack of fairness in MLB’s economic system, and how they need help to compete. OK. But the Pirates aren’t even trying to win, and haven’t been trying for years.
The Bucs stop with their owner.
