While driving down the street in downtown Nashville the weekend before MLB’s opening day, I saw a fellow Pittsburgh Pirates fan proudly wearing a Bucs jersey and walking down the sidewalk.

“Let’s go Bucs!” I yelled, hanging out the window of my wife’s Jeep Grand Cherokee and pumping my fist.

“They ain’t going far,” the fan replied without skipping a beat.

A little over a month later, that pessimist has been proven right.

As of this writing, the Pirates are a woeful 12-26, good enough for dead last in the NL Central and sporting the third-worst record in Major League Baseball. The team has no clear closer and is decidedly anemic when it comes to run production.

Oh, and the team just fired its manager—Derek Shelton—and replaced him with Bench Coach Don Kelly.

The sad thing here is that getting rid of Shelton won’t matter much for the Pirates. That’s right. Heck, the Bucs could woo Pat Murphy from the Milwaukee Brewers in hopes of capturing their division and it wouldn’t make much of a difference. They could talk Jim Leyland out of retirement and convince him to come back to Pittsburgh and the team would still lose. For that matter, why not talk the ghost of Connie Mack into haunting Pittsburgh and managing the team for a few seasons?

The truth of the matter is that Shelton may have actually overperformed with the roster he was handed. The problem with the Pirates has nothing to do with the team’s manager— it has everything to do with payroll.

There is no salary cap in the MLB. There is no salary floor, either. No, teams are free to spend as much or as little as they want in the league.

According to the number crunchers over at Spotrac.com, Pittsburgh has the fourth lowest payroll in the league. Total payroll allocations for this season come to $90.4 million—decidedly short of the league average of  $169.8 million and a far cry from the Los Angeles Dodgers’ allocation of $332.25 million.

It should come as no shock, then, that the Pirates were recently crushed in a three-game series against the Dodgers. The Dodgers have the highest payroll in the league and have the players to show it. Pittsburgh is either unwilling or unable to spend enough money to compete with the dominant teams in the league.

That’s not to say that a lack of a salary cap or anything else in the MLB is right, wrong, or something else. To paraphrase former Arkansas Razorbacks Football Coach Danny Ford: It doesn’t take a scientific rocket to figure that low budget teams like Pittsburgh are in a tough spot.

Want more proof that high spenders do well in the MLB? The New York Yankees had the second highest payroll in the MLB last year and the Dodgers had the third highest. It’s not a shock those two teams wound up in the World Series while Pittsburgh—which had the second lowest payroll in the league—wheezed to a 76-86 record.

The only real surprise is the New York Mets—with the highest payroll in the league—finished third in the NL East with an underwhelming 89-73 record. Payroll isn’t everything, but it matters a lot.

Try as they might, the Pirates won’t be able to manage themselves out of their bargain basement status. A manager can only work with the tools provided and Bob Nutting doesn’t provide much in Pittsburgh.

Ethan C. Nobles is a Benton, Ark. attorney and a Pittsburgh Pirates fan since he was a kid in 1978 who didn’t know any better. Send him an email to NoblesLikesSportz@gmail.com  or visit him on X @NoblesLawFirm.

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