Before my last season of Little League, my dad (our manager) and I and one of our team’s other coaches sat down and talked strategy. In the previous season, my dad had used our team’s best pitcher (who also happened to be one of the best pitchers in the league) mostly against the league’s best teams. Because we weren’t very good, we often lost the games that he pitched in even though he pitched well, and also lost to the league’s less talented teams when he didn’t pitch. We weren’t the worst team in the league that year, but we did finish with one of the worst records at 6-12.
So when my 12-year old season began, my dad was determined not to make the same mistake. He wanted to pitch me (I was at this point more or less a 12-year old Ricky Vaughn, I had huge RecSpecs and a temper, I threw hard for a 12-year old because I had hit a growth spurt, and while my control wasn’t awful it also wasn’t exactly spectacular) against the league’s worst teams to try and beat them as often as we could, then worry about playing the better teams when they became an issue. The other coach, Fred, thought this was a bad idea because he believed we “owed” it to the other teams to try and knock off the best clubs with the best lineup we could put out there. In the end, my dad tried to split the difference, but some of my best starts that year were wasted against teams that we never really had a chance to beat, while we in turn lost to some other teams that we probably wouldn’t have lost to if I had pitched instead. We finished 6-12 again, even though we were probably talented enough to be at least a .500 club.
As this ugly 2010 season winds down for the Pirates, I can’t help but wonder if there isn’t a similar gap between Frank Coonelly and Neal Huntington. It seems pretty clear that Huntington’s not hugely concerned with on-field results in 2010 because his sight is set on the much larger picture. If he were trying to win games in 2010 (and I don’t mean win the division, I mean win, like, 65 or 70 games), potential trade targets like Ryan Doumit and Ryan Church that hurt the on-field product probably wouldn’t have seen nearly as much playing time as they have, while guys like John Bowker (who’s bat could’ve been useful a month ago) or Brandon Moss (who’s glove would’ve been useful at any point in the outfield) may have gotten earlier call-ups. Charlie Morton probably wouldn’t have gotten as many chances as he has to iron himself out. Pedro Alvarez wouldn’t be on such a long leash.
Coonelly, meanwhile, seems to be leading the, “I thought we’d be bad but not this bad,” club Huntington’s said the same thing once or twice, but Coonelly is really hammering away at it and he’s saying it to just about anyone that asks. As much as his job is to oversee Huntington and the baseball operations and get the Pirates back on staff, he’s also the guy that knows just how much money the club is losing when attendance bottoms out in a year like this one. He’s probably got an idea of how long it’ll take to build that attendance base back up (hint: not just one good year). He’s competitive and outspoken and he’s probably using this job as a stepping stone to some higher position in the Commissioner’s Office (No, I don’t have any inside information there, but I mean let’s be honest here, does anyone think he’s going to be the Pirates’ CEO for the next 20 years? Or even ten years?).
I guess this all begs the question of whether or not the Pirates DO owe it to baseball or to their fans or some abstract knowledge of baseball karma to put the best team possible out on the field, even if it hurts future trade prospects or their chances at the first pick in the draft. I’m not even talking about signing Jeromy Burnitz here, just stuff like benching Doumit/Church/Jones or getting Morton the hell out of the rotation a lot quicker than they did or signing a starter or maybe offering more than Matt Capps for JJ Hardy (or anything else to ensure that Ronny Cedeno wasn’t their starting short-stop) in the off-season. The Pirates could’ve done some of that stuff to bolster the 2010 club without hurting their future, but they didn’t. I’m inclined to say I don’t care about that kind of stuff; like the Aki Iwamura trade or the Church and Crosby signings, some of that stuff can backfire. And I’m also the sort of person that thinks that there’s no functional difference between the Pirates and the Cardinals this year, since they’re both going to miss the playoffs, and that if you’re going to lose a bunch of games and get a top five pick, you might as well go balls to the wall and lose 105 games and get that top pick because in a lot of years, there’s a big difference between Stephen Strasburg and Dustin Ackley.
Except I’d be lying if I said this year hasn’t been rough. This team is awful to watch on most nights and equally as hard to write about. For about a month, I’ve contemplated putting a “Gone Fishing, Back in January” sign up on WHYGAVS because I kind of feel like the guy in the banner. I understand what Huntington’s doing and I think it’s more or less the right way to go about things, but yeesh, this year has not been easy and I have a hard time arguing with people who say that maybe Huntington could’ve done something to keep it from getting this bad.
Now the season’s finally almost over, and it seems like there’s a little rift between the two guys that are steering the club. It’s possible I’m reading into things a bit too much, but I thought it was interesting that when Dejan Kovacevic noted that there were no members of the front office traveling with the club (something he said was unusual) on one of their more recent disastrous road trips, he didn’t ask Huntington why he felt it was more important for him to be in Altoona. Instead, he asked Coonelly if he cared that Huntington wasn’t there. Why take that route unless you think there’s a chance he might care and might not explain the front office’s absence the same way Huntington would? And when Ken Rosenthal wrote that other clubs view Coonelly as the “de facto GM,” I’m not really sure I have any idea what that means and I don’t think Rosenthal really does either. In the next paragraph he points to the Dotel trade as a good trade Huntington made, except that if Coonelly were the “de facto GM” he would’ve been the guy that made the trade, not Huntington. What I do I think is that even though DK said that he wasn’t sure what it meant, either, it implies the same thing that the was implied by the way DK approached Huntington’s absence on the road did: Huntington and Coonelly aren’t exactly marching in lockstep right now.
There are 11 games left in the season and the playoffs begin two weeks from today. That means that any and all decisions to fire the manager, coaching staff, general manager, and/or front office staff will be made official in the next 14 days. I still think it’s more likely than not that Neal Huntington will be back as general manager of the Pirates in 2011, but six weeks ago I would’ve told you that my gut feeling (which is of course all I have for things like this) was that there was no chance Huntington wouldn’t be back. Now, I’m much less sure about it.
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