What if

Anyone who is still a Pirates fan should read this article purposing that the Pittsburgh Pirates are intentionally losing to maximize profits and therefore the trade for Matt Morris make sense. At least it makes sense in a theory somewhere as it is hard to believe any other sane person could make a compelling argument for that trade. The theory is that you sign low end players in the draft, they are older than the high end players, and perform better in the minors. Therefore, your minor league teams appear to be good. However, none of the players there are big league talent so they never move while the high end players are moving up to the bigs. Additionally, you sign a few no-talent veterans to artificially increase payroll.

Why would someone do this? The theory goes that you keep expectations down so that media coverage is low and no one expects you to make deals that actually help the team thereby increasing payroll. One good year would require some longterm deals and some key veterans in the upcoming season.

I don't agree with this because it would give the Pirate management way too much credit. Here is my theory. McClatchy and the Nuttings love revenue sharing and want to maximize it. To do this they pay nothing to scouting and development. Why draft college pitchers every year? Because they are easy to sign. Someone sign with Boras as their agent, 0% chance the Pirates draft him. Littlefield is not an evil genius, he is simply a cheap GM with no clue. The Pirate owners may be evil geniuses, but more likely they are cheap and they are not baseball people and won't pay to hire anyone with a clue.