Most hopeless pro franchises

Erik Kramer? Led -- OK, maybe "was along for the ride" would be more accurate -- team to the 1991 NFC Championship Game.

Eric Hipple?

Dante Culpepper?

How quickly they forget.

 

Cheap is fine. The Rooney's, for the most part until recently, are cheap. Cheap and greedy, well, that's another thing altogether. And the Nuttings do it better than anyone.

 

The Rooneys operate in a much different system than the Nuttings do. I'm not sure the Steelers qualify as cheap, though, at least not compared to some other organizations such as the Bengals and Cardinals. Maybe we will find out if the owners really did screw things up with the lockout.

The Nuttings are an ownership nightmare -- cheap, relatively poor and clueless. Even if they tried, they would be held back by their relative lack of resources and baseball acumen.

 

Crossing sports there. "Cheap" in the NFL begins with Mike Brown and the Bidwills in Arizona. The Rooneys can't break through that stone wall of cheapness.

 

The Royals, to their credit, have built up a great farm system. That team could eventually contend for AL Central titles within a few years. Yeah, the team is nothing more than a Braves AAAA team right now (really: Francoeur, Cabrera, Davies, Blanco, Betemit...), but help is on the way.

The Pirates, meanwhile, have jack squat to show for their years of selling off talent. Their system is one of the worst in baseball. Unless they draft smartly (ha!) or make solid FA acquisitions (ha ha!), they'll be here forever.

 

There seems to be a rough consensus here about the Pirates, which means ... they finally won something!

 

That sounds about right. They keep talking about Alvarez, Walker, McCutcheon and Tabata as a core going forward, but those guys still have a lot to prove.

They made a lot of noise about not passing on elite prospects in the draft any more for financial reasons when they took Alvarez, but they went right back to going the cheap route the very next year. Bad decisions are certainly part of the problem, but the refusal of ownership to make a real commitment to winning is going to keep that team right where it is. The lack of revenue in that market is absolutely part of the problem, but they could at least be respectable once in a while if that ownership group wasn't such a disgrace.

 

The Pirates spent almost $12M on the draft last year, a franchise record and more than many other teams.

Also dropped another five mil on the baseball academy in the Dominican.

 

(We kid because we love.)

 

Let's see them do it every year with their first-round picks, because that just hasn't happened. Also, isn't saying the Pirates set a franchise record for spending kind of like saying Charlie Brown's baseball team had its best game ever?

 

Alvarez looks absolutely awful. If he tanks, he could dig that franchise into an even deeper hole. Why would they spend on amateurs when Alvarez worked out so poorly, etc etc.

 

Are you interested in having a mature conversation about this or are you going to go full Rainman mode again like you did on that thread last week? Give them credit for putting something back into the team. Check the numbers. Their spending is up.