It’s Sunday, I’m back from San Jose and spring training starts about in a little more than a month. That means it’s time for me to take up defense of the Pirates that can do no research and complain about them. This time it’s the New York Daily News and their grupmy columnist, Bill Madden. Madden hasn’t liked the Pirates since Mazeroski got elected into the hall of fame by the veteran’s committee many years ago. This is mainly because he is a good friend of Yogi Berra and Maz caused the Yankees not to win a world series.
But back to the present. Madden seems to be of the opinion that MLB will be cracking down on the Pirates to spend more money on the major league roster. His logic is that since the Marlins were told to spend more money the Pirates will be forced to do the same.
That’s all well and good but if he had bothered to read any of the excellent work that Post Gazette Pirates’ beat writer Dejan Kovacevic. This past week he reported from sources outside of the Pirates organization that they were not going to be a target. This is something that he was also told by the commissioner of Major League Baseball. (Dejan also has a nice take down of Madden’s article, citing the real 2009 salary of the Pirates).
Yeah, we’ve sucked for 17 years and are a laughing stock for most of the league and press. But having fools like Madden not even bothering doing any research into the situation is just lazy journalism.
It’s bad enough that there are fans who feel that if we just spend more money we’d have won a world series by now. That is just not the case.

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