Friday, 1 a.m.
This blog is open to all ways of presenting information and opinion and that includes a rare original article by another writer. Frank Nepa, a Shadyside resident whose work has appeared in the Post-Gazette print edition, has a different take than most on three Pittsburgh sports owners. It's a funny and fascinating piece, which should make some laugh, some angry and all read to the end. -- Bob Smizik
By Frank Nepa
I have never actually met Bob Nutting, but that doesn't matter. I'll go ahead and hate him anyway if you want me to. Here goes: Bob Nutting is odious. Bob Nutting is despicable. Bob Nutting is the living embodiment of everything bad in the world today. Bob Nutting is trans fats. He is "Jersey Shore." He is the stuff inside of a dirty bomb.
Bob Nutting is a walking, talking colonoscopy.
You know how after it snows a lot and they put the salt on the road and you've driven your car around for a few days and you get that black gunk all over the side of it? That is the stuff of Bob Nutting's soul.
Bob Nutting is rich and he wears glasses and he has a stupid-sounding last name, and I hate him for all of it.
Bob Nutting is the principal owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates, and the Pittsburgh Pirates are losers -- in fact, they have lost better than any team in any league has ever lost before in the history of sports -- and because of that, the miserable, the revolting, the contemptible Bob Nutting should do us all a favor and remove himself from this Earth and in the process allow us to get our team back.How's that? Is everyone happy now?
The Post-Gazette, in a recent editorial entitled, ``Winning offer: An open letter to Pirates owner Bob Nutting," has suggested that the awful Bob Nutting just do the right thing and sell the team to Mario Lemieux (who, by the way, has a very cool-sounding name). The Post-Gazette admonished Nutting for not being open to accepting a reported offer made by Lemieux and fellow Penguins owner Ron Burkle to buy the Pirates, although no dollar figure regarding this purported offer has ever been published anywhere to my knowledge and Lemieux theoretically could have told Nutting that he would buy the team for a dollar. It doesn't matter. The paper apparently thinks that Nutting should sell the team to Lemieux under any terms that the great Lemieux deems fit.
After all, in his run as Penguins owner, Lemieux has exhibited, in the words of the P-G, "management smarts," which is sort of vague phrasing, but it presumably has something to do with owning the team during a time when it filed for bankruptcy and then later threatening to take it away from its fiercely loyal fan base and move it to Kansas City, if he didn't get what he wanted. (Nutting at least has never done this, which suggests a possible slogan for the 2010 Pirates: "Hey, bad baseball is better than no baseball, right?")
Lemieux's glowing reputation for business acumen must also have something to do with his presiding over a team that was putridly bad in its own right for a fairly long time and then having a telekinetic knack for making a ping-pong ball bounce his way, ensuring that the team would be able to draft a once-in-a-generation talent like Sidney Crosby, a player whose skill level is matched only by his work ethic, his willingness to involve himself in the community and his ability to make teenage girls squeal with delight at the mere sight of him.
Without the great good fortune of Crosby falling into their laps (as did Evgeni Malkin, another lucky break that gave the team two of the best three players in the entire sport), the Penguins would be as long-gone as the Quebec Nordiques. (I hadn't really heard of them either.) And this vaunted Lemieux savvy surely must also have something to do with his decision to own a team in a league that employs a salary cap, which mandates that every team have essentially the same, relatively modest payroll. (Contrast that with Nutting's league, which awarded its championship most recently to the New York Yankees, a team with a more than $200 million payroll, a figure that the Pirates would only be able to afford if it had an ownership group consisting of about eight cloned Ron Burkles and a dozen Mario Lemieuxes.)
The Post-Gazette, in extolling Lemieux's "record of success" -- which is undeniable, surely -- certainly should not have failed to mention that it was achieved in the NHL, an entity whose significance as a business in the United States (save for Pittsburgh) is quite limited and an outfit that Lemieux himself once famously derided as a "garage league." Professional hockey is a mom-and-pop operation compared with the billion-dollar behemoth that is Major League Baseball, where owners like the Steinbrenner family likely think that the Stanley Cup is an athletic supporter.
So for this fine newspaper to blithely state that Lemieux and company would waltz right in there and "build this team into not only a sure winner but also one with staying power," well, that's about as naive a sentence as has ever been written. I mean, luck eventually runs out for all of us, there is only one Sidney Crosby, and he doesn't play second base.
Anyway, none of what I say is meant to condone the stewardship of current Pirates ownership -- they've failed in every way possible short of setting fire to the paying customers. I'm just saying that it's silly for anyone to dream about a savior riding in here on a Zamboni to resurrect this once-proud franchise because, first of all, the current owner doesn't want to sell it to him (or to anyone), and, more importantly, there really isn't one piece of objective evidence that indicates that this new owner would make the team even the tiniest bit better than they are now.
So, on that happy note, I ask, What do we Pirates fans have to look forward to? Not much, I'm afraid. But we still have the terrific Andrew McCutchen for a few more years, and he's a wonderful player no matter who's signing his checks, and when we watch him hit one into the gap in left-center field at PNC Park and he races from the batter's box all the way into third with his helmet flying off and his feet barely seeming to touch the ground, well, it's really one of the most beautiful things that you'll ever see. And it serves as a reminder that the Pirates are not the guy sitting in the owner's box.
Frank Nepa can be reached at fnepa@aol.com.
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