PITTSBURGH TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Saturday, January 13, 2007
One of the worst ownership reigns in baseball history, Pittsburgh sports history and perhaps even professional sports history is about to end.
If you're a Pirates fan, you better pray another one isn't about to begin.
Major League Baseball on Thursday is expected to approve a change in the Pirates' hierarchy. Bob Nutting, the team's chairman of the board, will replace Kevin McClatchy as principal owner. McClatchy will remain chief executive officer.
In a sense, little has changed. The Nutting family already controlled the franchise purse strings, while McClatchy administered the baseball part of the business.
But it's impossible to dispute the portion of the Pirates' news release Friday that listed the team's roster of principal owners and finished like this:
"Kevin McClatchy (1996-2007)."
It's painful to sit here and hammer McClatchy, because he is a good man who meant well and worked hard. He helped to keep baseball here when it looked as if it would leave, and he pushed for the building of PNC Park.
Problem is, professional sports executives are measured by one statistic - won-loss record -- and McClatchy lost like few ever have. He compared his tenure to a ride at Kennywood. If so, it was the Pittsburg Plunge.
McClatchy lost for 11 straight years, extending the Pirates' losing streak to an unfathomable 14 years overall.
That is just two short of tying Major League Baseball's record for futility, set by the Philadelphia Phillies from 1933-48.
Go ahead and blame baseball's economic system, if you like. Just realize that McClatchy did very little to stand up for the mid- and small-market teams. The Pirates' public silence in the wake of MLB's latest collective bargaining agreement, signed a few months ago, was deafening.
"Would I say I gave a 100 percent ringing endorsement of the deal? No," McClatchy said yesterday in an interview he and Nutting conducted with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. "But it was a deal that was going to get done - and it did beat the alternative of shutting the game down."
Not from the Pirates' standpoint, it didn't. Sure, they're running a tidy little business, making a nice profit, but Nutting said it best yesterday, when asked about the perception that his family would rather make money than win.
"The reason the Pirates exist," Nutting said, "is to win baseball games."
Under McClatchy, the Pirates lost 996 baseball games, an average of 90 per season. Only the Kansas City Royals (1,037) lost more during his tenure.
Maybe local beer wholesaler Frank Fuhrer knew what he was doing in July of 1996 when he sold his $5 million ownership stake in the Pirates. A few months earlier, McClatchy, then a 32-year-old California newspaper heir and owner of the Class A Modesto (Calif.) A's, led a 28-man purchase of the Pirates for about $80 million.
Fuhrer soon realized the ship was off-course.
Upon selling his stake, Fuhrer said, "I know enough about these things to know things usually don't work out as well as wide-eyed kids think they will."
Hard to believe, but Pittsburgh once adored the wide-eyed kid. You can look it up. McClatchy's autograph was the hottest item at PirateFest of 1996, and after an Opening Day win over Florida in 1996, Pirates manager Jim Leyland gave McClatchy the game ball.
A year later, Baseball America labeled the Pirates' farm system "the best in baseball." That year, a team with a paltry $9.5 million payroll somehow contended for a division title.
On July 12, 1997, a crowd of 44,119 at Three Rivers Stadium watched Francisco Cordova and Ricardo Rincon combine on a 10-inning no-hitter. ESPN carried the final few innings and focused on McClatchy, who was being hailed as baseball's boy wonder and whose "five-year plan" to produce a winner seemed well ahead of schedule.
But that was before the 1998 team lost 25 of its last 30 games in the worst Pirates' finish since the Eisenhower administration.
That, too, was before the likes of Kevin Young and Pat Meares were signed to ridiculous contracts, before McClatchy predicted a 90-win season in 2000, before Lloyd McClendon was promoted to manager without a shred of experience ("We got the guy we felt would get us winning the fastest," McClatchy said at the time), before the Pirates claimed a $30 million loss three years into their tenure at PNC Park and before McClatchy raised season-ticket prices after a 100-loss season in 2001.
He learned from the price-hike mistake - the Pirates haven't raised season-ticket prices since - but it looks as if he did not improve on Cam Bonifay with the hiring of current general manager Dave Littlefield.
Just last season, the Pirates experienced their longest losing streak (13 games) of modern times.
"I feel good that we saved this team and that families are going to be able to watch baseball for a long time in this marketplace," McClatchy said. "I think when you look at PNC Park, we're proud of putting that together. I think it's the best ballpark in the country.
"Disappointments? Obviously, the record. I do, as some people probably understand, take this to heart."
I believe that.
I also believe it'll be hard for anyone - including Bob Nutting - to top an 11-year losing streak.
Joe Starkey is a sports writer for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. He can be reached at jstarkey@tribweb.com
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