So yeah, it would seem that the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette are at total war with each other. The Post-Gazette started it with unsigned editorials insulting the Pirates for personnel moves and telling owner Bob Nutting to sell the team. The Pirates kept it going by resigning both Neal Huntington and John Russell this past October through the end of 2011 and not telling the P-G or anyone else until this past week. Really though, contracts in baseball are about as useful as contracts written by 5th graders. The team could fire anyone at any time for no good reason. The only difference between them and regular employees is that regular employees usually don’t have contracts saying that the company will pay them until the contract ends.
So after both Bob Smizik and Ron Cook threw a hissy fit about that, some mom called up and told a sad story about her son getting fired from the Pirates. He was working as a mascot. He was fired because he wrote disparaging remarks about the organization on his Facebook page. Of course that’s pretty silly and seems kinda thin-skinned of the Pirates to do that, I mean it’s not like he was selling to cocaine to the players. So not only does the Post-Gazette write a story about this, but someone in Pittsburgh told me that they have it on the very front page of the paper on the top half of the paper.
I know a guy who got fired from a job for comments on his blog. Ya know what? Not only did the local newspaper not put that story on the front page, but they didn’t even write a story about it. I guess they have better things to do than insult a local company for firing an employee over his blog. But it would seem the Post-Gazzette just has a huge ax to grind.
But it’s really frustrating to me because after years of them kissing Dave Littlefield’s dumb ass and not really questioning anything he did until Draft Day 2007, mostly because they were still part owners of the Pirates, they are now acting like the current management team which is trying to fix the organization after years of neglect are a bunch of criminals. It’s really a shame that Dejan keeps working there, he could probably do so much better. I honestly don’t care if you’re skeptical of the Pirates, but they are doing things the way Bobby Cox did in Atlanta in the late 80′s to fix the Braves or the way the Pirates of the 50′s did to fix the team back then. So to be clear here, skepticism: good. Bullshit: Bad.
(Seinfeld joke title FTW!)
