MLB’s looming lockout is about to create a strange and ugly scene across the sport, and the Pirates could wind up looking especially bad in it.
The league’s 34-page memo to owners lays out what can and can’t happen once the stoppage begins, and one of the most jarring details is this: teams won’t be allowed to promote a player’s name, image, or likeness, but they can still sell merchandise. No trades.
No signings. Players can keep playing in other professional leagues, and player videos and NIL content will be scrubbed from official team sites.
That setup is a problem for baseball in general. It’s also a brutal look for Pittsburgh in particular.
The Pirates and Bob Nutting have spent years carrying the “cheap” label, and a lockout-era website stripped of player promotion but still pushing jerseys and other merch is the kind of thing that pours gasoline on that fire. The club can’t control MLB’s rules, but the optics are still ugly. Fans won’t see players getting paid during the labor stoppage, yet ownership will still be trying to extract revenue wherever it can.
For the Pirates, that matters because the selling point right now is hope. And at least for the moment, there’s real hope to sell.
Paul Skenes and Konnor Griffin give Pittsburgh a young core with some serious buzz. But if the next CBA doesn’t get settled until next summer, what happens when the team has to try to move tickets in the spring without being able to lean on that hope in the usual way?
There is a path where the lockout leads to something better. A salary cap and floor, in theory, would push the sport toward more balance and force owners like Nutting to put more into the roster. Short of that, a more merit-based revenue-sharing system could also pressure small-market teams to spend more responsibly.
But before any of that, baseball has to survive the damage this kind of shutdown can do in the public eye. The longer it drags on, the more the league will have to do to win people back.
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For Pittsburgh, the contrast is hard to miss. The Pirates spent their deadline almost entirely on pitching help, stockpiling bullpen arms while their offense remained untouched, and the result was a club that never got close to the postseason. In a year when another teams deadline additions are already swinging October games, the Pirates choice to lean one way and not the other looks even more costly in hindsight. [Read more 🡒]
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Pirates Have A Third Base Trade Idea Fans Will Debate
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For the Pirates, the appeal is obvious, but so are the complications. Arenado is in the final year of his deal, and any serious pursuit would likely force Pittsburgh to part with pitching help from a system that has become one of its biggest assets. The bigger question is whether the trade framework ever gets off the ground at all, because a player with Arenados standing can shape the destination as much as the teams can, and that alone gives this idea a layer of uncertainty fans will be debating for a while. [Read more 🡒]