Hours before the first pitch of last Saturday’s Pittsburgh Pirates game, the line of fans waiting to enter PNC Park stretched all the way across the Clemente Bridge, over the Allegheny River, and into downtown Pittsburgh. It was an odd scene; the Pirates were entering the game against the Guardians with an 8-13 record and were sitting near the bottom of Major League Baseball in overall attendance. This was a special day, though. The team was giving away Paul Skenes bobbleheads, and the pitching rotation had lined up perfectly. Skenes, who might already be baseball’s best pitcher—and is for sure its most marketed, not counting two-way player Shohei Ohtani—was on the bump. The Pirates had promised bobbles to only the first 20,000 fans in attendance, and nobody wanted to miss out.
Then, shortly before the game, the Pirates made an exciting announcement: Everyone in attendance, not just the first 20,000, would get the bobblehead. As the Pirates’ TV broadcast showed Skenes warming up, longtime play-by-play announcer Greg Brown told what seemed to be a beautiful story. Team owner Bob Nutting, he said, saw the long lines and personally called his team president to ensure that the 17,000 attendees who’d missed out would get the trinket as well. Nutting was the hero. Left unsaid was why Nutting’s team couldn’t offer bobbleheads to everyone in the first place, or why it waited until long lines had piled up to make the announcement.
Fans in the ballpark did not seem grateful. Although Skenes did his part as usual, tossing seven innings of two-run ball, the miserable Pirates offense did squat in their 3-0 loss. And in the top of the eighth inning, the home crowd broke into a thunderous chant of “SELL THE TEAM,” so loud that it was unmistakable on the TV broadcast. Then, in the middle of an at-bat, the crowd suddenly went silent on the broadcast, and at virtually the same moment, Eminem’s “Till I Collapse” began to blare from the ballpark speakers, drowning out the chants. A nice thing about owning a TV network is that you can kill the crowd mics.
The disastrous day was the latest flash point in a deeply compromised relationship between a ball club and those of us who continue to call ourselves its fans. We live in a moment of high-profile hostility between fans and the management of their favorite teams, across sports. Mavericks fans have not given their general manager or ownership a moment of peace since the horrid Luka Doncic trade. Manchester United supporters have been hollering “Glazers out” for decades. Athletics owner John Fisher may never be able to show himself in Oakland again, now that he has moved his team from the Bay to a minor league outpost in Sacramento. (Granted, he rarely showed himself in Oakland before the move.) The Rockies’ Dick Monfort has no evident plan for his team’s competitive future other than complaining about the unfairness of baseball economics.
Yet what is happening now between the Pirates and their fans is something distinct. Maybe it’s not the single most toxic owner-fan relationship in sports, if only because there are so many strong contenders. Nutting is not the first team owner to have totally lost the locals. But rarely has a team done as much as the Pirates to blend two traits of terrible ownership. The first is never winning. The second is not just taking their remaining fans for granted, but treating them like pea-brained children. The club and its infantilized fan base may have passed a point of no return.
This ugly period in fan relations has been a long time coming. Nutting has always kept the Pirates among the bottom handful of major league payrolls since he took control of the team in 2007. (This year, RosterResource estimates that the team’s luxury tax payroll will land at $113 million, ahead of only the White Sox and Marlins and behind A’s and Rays teams that are currently playing in minor league stadiums.) Nutting’s choice not to invest in the roster ensured the wilting of the excellent teams of 2013 to ’15, and the Pirates have never course corrected. I will turn 31 this summer, and I have seen three Pirates playoff teams. “I understand where they’re coming from,” fan favorite Andrew McCutchen, the star of those teams, said about the booing last week. “I’ve been here long enough, so I get it.”
Poor play and stingy spending over so many years have created a combustible dynamic between the team and the fans. Lately, the Pirates have thrown jugs full of gasoline on the relationship, then taken a blowtorch to it.
The latest round of skirmishes began in January, at the team’s “PiratesFest” season kickoff. Nutting, as is his custom, skipped a fan Q&A, sending some of his executives to serve as his shields. A fan asked team president Travis Williams to respond to criticisms that the team isn’t serious about winning. Williams gave a rambling answer, and a fan shouted “sell the team,” prompting what various reporters described as scattered cheering. As someone tried to start a chant, Brown, the team’s loyal play-by-play announcer (who doubles as a key public relations flack for Nutting), took the microphone. He chastised the rebels for being “silly and immature about it.”
You can see why Nutting wanted to stay away from the fans. Last year, a group of them paid for billboards that urged the sale of the team and said “Our Team, Not His.” At the home opener this month, the same crew paid for a plane to fly a “SELL THE TEAM” banner past PNC Park. Later, Nutting walked up the stadium’s left field rotunda as a larger group of fans booed and lobbed more “sell the team” chants at him. Nutting did not acknowledge them, walking straight ahead with a security guard. It was all very French Revolution, except Nutting was able to retreat to his suite to watch the remainder of a loss to the Yankees. He doesn’t seem to believe he’s done anything wrong, after all. “I think that I've done everything that I can to provide the tools and resources to the team,” he said that very day. “There is a point where it becomes execution.”
Nutting’s biggest problem that day wasn’t on PNC Park’s rotunda, but on the right field wall. Named the Clemente Wall, it stands 21 feet high to honor no. 21, Roberto Clemente, the franchise’s legendary right fielder. Clemente was also a humanitarian, and he died in a plane crash in 1972, at age 38, as he sought to deliver relief supplies to earthquake victims in Nicaragua. For the past few years, the Pirates have dedicated a strip of the wall to an illustration of Clemente’s number. But during the same opening home stand, fans and reporters noticed that the 21 was gone, replaced by an advertisement for a canned cocktail brand. Clemente’s son issued an outraged press release, and the 21 returned. Williams released a statement that read, in part, “We did not intend to disrespect the legacy of Roberto Clemente.” Things are going great when a sports executive has to say those words in that order.
The Clemente flap was, frankly, superficial. The jersey number had been displayed there only since 2022. I watch 75 Pirates home games per year on TV and had barely noticed it. But soon, that drama gave way to a bigger one. Before PNC Park opened in 2001, the Pirates sold roughly 10,000 commemorative “Bucco Bricks” that were placed on the walkway outside the stadium’s home plate entrance. People bought them as gifts or memorials for loved ones, or just to feel as if they owned a piece of the new stadium, a jewel of a ballpark that serves as a rare point of pride for Bucs fans these days. Yet when games started this month, fans noticed that their bricks were missing. Where had they gone? To a local recycling center. The Pirates had removed them without telling the public, later citing “a host of environmental factors, including weather and foot traffic.” The team claims that it has plans to honor brick buyers in some other way starting next season, the team’s 25th in the stadium. The whole thing has been a grade A Pittsburgh scandal, prompting Nutting himself to join the damage control effort.
If your team insulted your intelligence as often as the Pirates do their fans’, you, too, might wonder about their intentions when they do something as benign as offer an expanded bobblehead promotion.
In theory, these dustups between exhausted Pirates fans and their club’s management could have happened in just about any of the past 30 years; only the Royals have had fewer wins since MLB’s most recent round of expansion, and even Kansas City has two pennants and a title over that span. But the conditions are extra ripe now. Naively, many of us who care about the Pirates hoped that the front office would jolt into action this year. Why? Well, Skenes.
The Pirates drafted the righty first overall in 2023, a rare wise move by flailing general manager Ben Cherington, who has been with the club since late 2019. Skenes made a bunch of history in 2024, starting the All-Star Game and winning National League Rookie of the Year. He is one of the most hyped young pitchers ever, an immediate celebrity thanks only in part to his relationship with influencer, former gymnast, and fellow LSU alum Livvy Dunne. Most importantly, Skenes really is that good on the mound. The Pirates have a hybrid of Fernando Valenzuela and Nolan Ryan throwing for them on an annual salary under $1 million. In a free market, Skenes’s salary this year would be pushing $40 million or more.
The Pirates control the 22-year-old’s rights for this season and four more. Nobody expects that Nutting will offer the sort of contract that could keep Skenes around past then. It was reasonable to hope that the owner would seek to maximize Pittsburgh’s brief time with the wunderkind playing at a discount, spending money in free agency to plug some holes in what has been a bad lineup for years. It wouldn’t have taken much to be competitive in the winnable NL Central. “Obviously that’s what everyone wants, right?” McCutchen told The Ringer this spring. “Especially when you have the talent that you have around. Capitalize.”
Wishful thinking, it turned out. The Bucs’ offseason was intellectually insulting, the kind of exercise that is possible only with both a tightwad owner and an out-of-depth general manager. The winter splash was a trade for Spencer Horwitz, a 27-year-old first baseman who has just 425 career big league plate appearances and a history of trouble with both wrist health and left-handed pitchers. Sure enough, Horwitz already has a wrist injury and has yet to debut for Pittsburgh. When he does debut, he will succeed Rowdy Tellez, last year’s lousy first baseman, whom the team cut on the last weekend of the season, when he was four plate appearances short of collecting a bonus. The Pirates did not add an outside free agent hitter who was worth positive wins above replacement last season. The biggest free agent deal in team history remains a $39 million commitment to pitcher Francisco Liriano in 2015. Relatedly, the Pirates’ last multiyear free agent signing was in 2016.
You get what you pay for, and the Pirates have put together a brutal team around Skenes. The offense had a collective 79 wRC+ through Thursday, exceeding only the dreadful Rockies among NL teams. David Bednar, the Pittsburgh-bred closer, has already had to do a stint in Triple-A after melting down to begin a second consecutive season. The team’s most compelling position player is Oneil Cruz, a 6-foot-7 dynamo who hits the ball hard, runs fast, and has a cannon for an arm. In a player development masterstroke, Pirates moved him from shortstop to center field late last year, and he’s now one of the worst defensive outfielders in baseball.
This parade of incompetence has to make the Pirates contenders for the title of worst-run franchise in major North American sports. That belt changes hands often, though. What strikes me most about the Pirates is the unique way in which they’ve gone about alienating the people who care about them.
Are the Pirates the first team to squander a generational star like Skenes? No, but they are unusual for doing it in this manner. The last pitcher with Skenes-like expectations was Stephen Strasburg, who arrived to play for the Nationals in 2010. The next offseason, Washington reached a seven-year, $126 million deal with outfielder Jayson Werth, who became a key part of several postseason teams. The Pirates’ big corner outfielder signing for Skenes’s second year was 37-year-old Tommy Pham, for $4 million. After compiling minus-0.1 WAR last year for three different teams, per FanGraphs, he’s “produced” minus-0.4 in 2025. In other words, Pham is a bottom-10 position player in all of baseball.
Is Nutting the first owner to hear “sell the team” exhortations after a lousy roster move (or a lack of moves)? Nope. Just look to Dallas, where fans were holding a funeral for the franchise within hours of the Doncic trade. But the Pirates haven’t traded their generational star(ter) … yet. Mavericks fans didn’t declare the franchise dead within months of Doncic winning Rookie of the Year in 2019, but that’s pretty much what Pirates fans have done not long after Skenes’s 2024 win.
Would Nutting listen to public outcry and sell the team? There’s been no indication that he is even considering it. (“Bob is not going to sell the team,” Williams said at PiratesFest.) Would MLB, seeing the damage he is doing to baseball’s more-than-a-century-old tradition in Pittsburgh, nudge him into a sale, à la the NFL and Daniel Snyder? Probably not. The MLB Players Association has filed multiple grievances over the Pirates’ low payrolls, but Nutting has not been the subject of a workplace behavior scandal or become an impediment to his league’s hopes for public stadium funding.
That is the twilight zone the Pirates now inhabit. Every fifth game, the ultimate symbol of hope steps onto the rubber. Nobody who has stuck with the team through such a long, dark night wants to bail for good right as a pitcher like Skenes is entering his prime. (I can’t resist going to see Skenes face Yoshinobu Yamamoto on Friday at Dodger Stadium, in a matchup that will be one of the buzziest games of the baseball season even though one of the teams is the Pirates.) When Skenes pitches, you can glimpse what the Pirates might be if they were in someone else’s hands. Instead, they are here, locked in a cold war with the people who still care about them, in a season that is already on life support in April.
Those fans will keep showing up, and some will keep telling the owner exactly how they feel. But, at least on the Pirates’ TV network, nobody can hear them scream.