Ogden hires Perrotto

When the pirates lost their 82nd game of the season today, they clinched their 17th consecutive losing season, most in history by any major American professional sports team.

Perrotto has covered all 17 seasons, so he's the first beat writer in any major sport to cover the same team (and probably any team) for 17 consecutive losing seasons.

Through all the losses and a few wins, he's been a pro and a class act.

Congrats, John! Here's to No. 18 next year!

http://www.piratesreport.com/page/content.detail/id/501649.html?nav=5008

 

He's done an admirable job covering a horrific season this year. No change at all from his style when he wrote for the Times, which is good to see. Nutting's have allowed him to criticize the team, and he has an article out this morning that rips previous management.

http://www.piratesreport.com/page/blogs.detail/display/218/It-takes-a-small-army-to-lose-for-this-long.html

 

<i>"One other thing that stood out about Smith was his smugness. Of course, being smug was apparently part of the job description of being an assistant GM under Bonifay because John Sirignano was just as smug as Smith. In fact, I spent way too much time in the late 1990s trying to figure who was smugger, Smith or Sirignano."</i>


Smugger?

 

There's a beat writer near and dear to my heart who has never covered a win by his football team while on the beat.

 

great quote here from aramis ramirez on the buccos:

"Obviously, they haven't done a good job of anything here for a long time," Ramirez said. "They haven't signed good free agents. They haven't made good trades. They haven't developed many good players and the ones they have developed they've traded away for nothing."

 

I'll add my voice those praising John here. Very good reporter and a better person.

That said, I don't see this particular column as evidence that he has any real freedom to write what he wants while working Ogden. Most of the column places the blame for the years of losing, including this one, on everybody but the Nutting family -- McClatchy, Littlefield, Sauer, Bonifay and Smith. The only blame he puts on the Nuttings is for not stopping McClatchy from fucking things up sooner.

The worst of it is writing that Littlefield actually thought Daniel Moskos was better than Matt Wieters when the Pirates took the former over the latter in 2007. Sorry. Not buying it. That may have been the party line at the time, but it was pretty obvious to everyone that nobody in the Pirates' organization truly believed it. They just didn't want to admit that they passed on Wieters because he was going to be too expensive and they didn't want to deal with Scott Boras.

Maybe John's other work since moving to Piratesreport.com was more even, but this reads like a piece doing the PR work for the Nuttings, not a fully-balanced report on everything that has gone wrong over these 17 ugly seasons.