the stadium and the team not having money to spend don’t have a lot to do with eachother since the team didnt pay for the stadium…
i’ll break the problem down for everyone… the problem is part: the pittsburgh fans, baseball fans across the league and the team them self.
The fans across the league: the fans across the league need to just stop comming and stop worshiping overpaid premadonas or the sport will never get fixed.
The teams: the teams are not willing to take a step back to fix the problems that exist so they instead cater to the fans by whoring themselves out. ( giveaways, juiced balls, juiced players)
the fans in pittsburgh: the fans in pittsburgh are under some dilusion that the steelers are so great, Dan rooney really doesn;t give a fuck about you because some other assholeis waiting in line. Go ask the steelers to accomodate you with any ticket related issue… ask the steelers for a discount on tickets… NFL isn’t comparable to MLB… NFL business wise is eons beyond MLB. there are real baseabll fans in pittsburgh, enough to fill this place but they are so turned off with the current state of baseball they don’t bother. The fans of pittsburgh treat the pirates like a door mat. you buy a ticket for a game you are not garentteed anything but seein a baseball game. thats it. they cry and cry about tickets costs… PNC park has probably the bottom 5 cheapest seats in the leauge and they are even more discounted at that. the fans won’t support the team unless we give something away…thats why they will never win.
while the steelers are great for the city…they are more benificial to morale of the city than they are in the business sense, i’ve gone over this before… the perception is that the steelers make all this money for the city because the people go nuts and the team wins… well it’s true but the pirates make more money for the city and business in the city than the steelers… 81 games vs 8-12 games… the pirates also give more money to local charities than the steelers and penguins combined… that may not seem important to someone who only cares about wins and losses but to the people that money benifits…its HUGE!
It all comes down to the NFL and MLB… NFL has it set up for the steelers and every team to succeed and the MLB has it set up for the Yankees and other big market teams to succeed.
the pirates do suck and they haven’t won shit in forever but its not ONLY their fault… the organization is tryin but what can you do about injuries, prospects not living up to their potential, not being able to secure a big name player, gettin a player and then he shits the bed… i mean if anything i’d say its just a period of exteme bad luck. Look at the buccaneers…all those years of drafting high and yet they still couldn’t produce a winner until the salary cap era… you can only say that was some bad freakin luck.
the pirates will not win a world series until A) they sell out everygame and not because we had 81 fireworks nights or B) there is a salary cap, non garentteed contracts C) 2-4 teams are eliminated from MLB…
one last thing… the pirates will never leave pittsburgh. MLB will never let a charter team leave its city. its not a coincidence that the pirates are in debt to the MLB and our new CEO is directly from MLB… its not a coincidence that the black leaders were complaining about the lack of black managers and teh pirates inturn hired lloyd mcclendon and then were awarded the all star game only 12 years after they had it… Its also not a coincidence that former team president dick freeman was hired when the pirates were moving into PNC park…( MLB forced the pirates to take him on to oversee the process because kevins ownership group was still wet behid the ears at this point)