When the Pirates were choosing a new general manager in November 2019, Matt Arnold was right there in the mix. He had spent years inside two organizations that had already figured out how to win small: the Tampa Bay Rays and the Milwaukee Brewers.
Pittsburgh went another way and hired Ben Cherington.
Seven years later, Arnold is part of a Brewers organization celebrating Milwaukee’s first World Series title, while the Pirates are still waiting for their first postseason appearance under Cherington. That gap is the obvious part of the story. The harder question is whether Pittsburgh ever really understood the model it said it wanted to follow.
At the time, Cherington made sense. He had won a World Series as Boston’s general manager in 2013 and carried a strong reputation for scouting and player development.
But Arnold’s background fit Pittsburgh’s reality in a different way. He knew what it took to function inside the financial limits that define small-market baseball.
The Pirates themselves seemed to recognize the challenge when Travis Williams introduced Cherington. Williams acknowledged that other small-market clubs had already figured out how to compete.
Milwaukee is one of them now. Pittsburgh still isn’t.
The Brewers just won 103 games in 2026 before taking their first championship, and their run has been built on sustained excellence. They’ve reached the postseason eight times in nine seasons. That is the standard Milwaukee has set.
Pittsburgh’s rebuild finally produced an 82-80 record in 2026, its first winning season since 2018. That’s a step forward, but it’s still a long way from what Milwaukee has done.
Even so, this isn’t a one-man comparison. Milwaukee’s rise didn’t start with Arnold, and it doesn’t rest on him alone.
David Stearns helped lay the groundwork, and Craig Counsell gave the club stability in the dugout. When both left, the Brewers promoted Arnold and Pat Murphy from within.
That’s where the real difference shows up. Milwaukee didn’t fall apart when key people moved on.
It kept rolling. That takes more than good hires.
It takes scouting, player development and front-office structure strong enough to keep identifying talent and keep the machine moving.
Arnold inherited a winning setup, helped sharpen it and ended up guiding it to a championship. The bigger takeaway is that the Brewers were able to absorb major turnover and still stay on track. That doesn’t happen by accident.
And that leaves Pittsburgh with an uncomfortable question: if Arnold had been the pick in 2019, would things have turned out any differently? Would he have had the same support, the same room to maneuver, the same organizational backing? Would ownership have committed to building the kind of infrastructure that sustains a winner?
There’s no way to know. And that uncertainty is exactly why the Pirates’ issue goes beyond Cherington.
The front office has to answer for a rebuild that needed seven years just to reach a winning record. But ownership is the group that has to create the conditions for real, lasting success.
Milwaukee has shown that small-market teams can build a championship-level operation. The Pirates have talked for years about following that path.
In 2019, they had a chance to hire an executive who had already helped make it work. They chose differently, and the results since then have made the contrast impossible to miss.
Maybe Arnold wouldn’t have solved everything in Pittsburgh. Maybe the same old barriers would have stopped him, too. But that possibility may be the most damning part of all.
The Pirates’ biggest miss might not have been passing on Matt Arnold. It might have been failing to build a place where someone like him could thrive.
In Other News...
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Pirates Face A Costly Spencer Horwitz Question For 2027
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The issue gets trickier because Horwitz did not finish the season anywhere near that level. After returning from a left hamstring injury and a concussion on his rehab assignment, he struggled badly down the stretch, leaving the Pirates with a projected salary around $2.5 million and a real question about how much they want to commit to a bounce-back bet for 2027. [Read more 🡒]