PITTSBURGH (AP) -The Steelers are in the Super Bowl. The Penguins were in the Stanley Cup finals. The Pirates were in last place.
Something doesn’t fit here, and the Pittsburgh Pirates know it.
The Pirates haven’t made any significant player moves since losing 95 games last season. They haven’t bumped up a payroll projected to be $54 million, or started going after unsigned free agents such as Manny Ramirez. What they are promising is to get better, and that doesn’t necessarily mean in 2010 or 2011.
“We expect this team, this year, to win,” team president Frank Coonelly said Friday. “We expect significant improvement and we are confident of it.”
General manager Neal Huntington said upgrades aren’t always restricted to players, pointing to a new Dominican Republic baseball academy, the addition of coaches Joe Kerrigan and Perry Hill and front-office adviser Bill Lajoie and a deeper baseball operations staff.
nd full season. “I know the players in the clubhouse are tired of losing. The field staff. The front office. … We’re here to win. It’s not acceptable to lose. We’re here to build a winner. But we want to do it the right way, and to do it the right way we had to establish a foundation to build on.”
To help with that, he said, the Pirates “have added some great young minds. One of them someday is probably going to be a general manager somewhere, someone is going to be a scouting director.”
With the Dominican producing so many players – more than a third of all major leaguers are from outside the United States – the Pirates are hoping their $5 million academy will get them back into a region they once dominated. The complex will open later this year, with Coonelly saying it will be one of the three best there.
New, young players and an upgraded staff help in the long term, but manager John Russell said short-term improvement can come from pitching much better. The Pirates didn’t have a 10-game winner last season for the first time in 108 seasons, and they lost 41 of their last 60 games.
some talented people on the field. There’s a lot to look at and say, `These guys are going to be pretty good.”’
Still, being the only losing team in a town filled with winners – Pitt basketball recently spent two weeks at No. 1, and the Panthers football team went 9-4 – is increasing the pressure on the Pirates to show measurable improvement soon.
With the recession and the other successful teams in town threatening to take away fan dollars, the Pirates are selling full-season tickets for as low as $399. That’s less than $5 per game, and half the price of one Super Bowl ticket.
The best way to sell tickets, of course, is to end the streak of 16 consecutive losing seasons. Another losing year would set a major league record of 17 in a row.
“It may not happen on a timeframe that everybody wants it to happen, which is tomorrow, but we are building,” Huntington said. “As we stood here a year ago, we hoped to get better. We believed we were going to get better. I can confidently stand here today and say we are better, and it will happen here in Pittsburgh.”
Notes: RHP Jason Davis, 2B Shelby Ford and C Eric Kratz were invited to spring training, giving the Pirates 17 non-roster players heading into camp. … RHP Jeff Karstens (sore elbow) doesn’t expect to be significantly slowed during spring training, despite being limited to a single minicamp throwing session last week. … 2B Freddy Sanchez has yet to fully test his right shoulder, which was sore all last season following surgery.
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