Pittsburgh Pirates’ chairman speaks on the likely plan of action for upcoming season - MLB News
The Pittsburgh Pirates' chairman Bob Nutting on Tuesday, November 6, spoke of the likely plan of actions that the club wants to follow after what unfolded with the end of the 2012 Major League Baseball season.
The fact that the club’s president Frank Connelly had maintained that the general manager – Neal Huntington and assistants Kyle Stark and Greg Smith, would remain unchanged in the upcoming season was something that Nutting said he would review himself.
Ruling out the possibility of management changes, Nutting stressed the point that the Pirates did not intend to look for scapegoats. That which was hugely disconcerting, as unexpected and unforeseen as it sounded, was the team’s slump after it had a phenomenally solid performance in the first half of the season.
Nonetheless, this was also a season wherein the club won 79 games, far more than any of last three seasons.
Nutting said, "As an organization, I don't think we should fall back on scapegoats and pretending that there are easy answers and grabbing one or two people and walking them off the plank. We cannot minimize the strong performance for the first 3 1/2 months of the season."
Be that as it may, the Pirates witnessed the downturn in the second half of the last MLB season, ending fourth in the National League Central while they were once among the top three teams.
Fans were predictably quite disappointed with the final outcome of the year – from seeming outright dominance to the sudden downfall. All that, nonetheless, does not necessarily lead to pessimism for the club’s chairman as he sees the brighter side.
"We clearly have a number of things in the organization that have gone right," Nutting said. "As angry and frustrated as we were about August and September, it's taken me a month to come back and to recognize that last year was still the best season that we've had for 20 years and we didn't get there by accident.”
His focus, as he put in the interview, is finding a balance for the team to achieve the bigger goals. The club still has the amazing moment in their mind when they had a 63-47 record until August 8.
What unfolded eventually might be disconcerting and disappointing. But Nutting knows very well how the club fared. Given the fact that the Pirates had only 57 wins in 2010, and 70 in 2011, this year was better as they netted 79 wins.
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