Zack Greinke is 33 years old making $34M+ per year - if he wins 20 games, that's $1.7M per win - great deal! Pirates are fools for not making that offer.

but who cares..theres no cap..it comes outta owners account..no mine or urs..fans pay to see the product on field. id rather pay to see a quality pitcher whos rich then a bargain basement chump.. if I want a team of prospects and hopefuls ill go see triple a ball..

would u rather pay your hard earned money to go watch ben throw passes making 20m a year or wes lunt making 555k..?

Watching Jose Quintana pitch for the Cubs tonight. According to some reports, he was on the Pirates radar last off-season but they refused to pull the trigger. Well, our division rivals have him now.

I agree with you. The Greinke deal proves that small market teams seemingly can afford to make foolish deals just like the large market teams do.

But wins and losses are not at all the best way to judge a pitcher.

Would Greinke be a 20 game winner on the Pirates? Probably not.

You guys and I will never agree on this issue so it's ridiculous to keep arguing it and I understand I bring it up a lot because being a Pirates fan in 2017 is frustrating, but unlike most of you I will not hold the Pirates at 100% fault. They will always get a break from me.

I am confident that in the year 2017 with guaranteed contracts (Nfl issue) and no cap, the Steelers and Penguins wouldn't be the power franchises they are today. That's why I hold the Steelers to a higher standard. NE has owned them in every football operation and people write it off as them just being better while the Steelers stay in their box.

If the Pirates really want to build a strong team they need a better farm system. The Cubs success is part drafting and part dumping talent for prospects. Rizo, Russell, Hayward, Happ, and Zoberist are all from either trades or FA signing. Their entire pitching staff were FA with zero home grown talent.

I go to the Indianapolis Indians games and I think they might have two players on their that will have any impact at all. So near term they are not getting any help. Their good classes have ( Bell, Tallion, Cole, ect) have graduated. They can plod along and get more of the same or try to sell players for top talent. Not salary dumps. They trade someone like Felipe Rivero they had better get another teams #1 talent and that talent had better be considered top 10.

I do not hold the Pirates 100% at fault, nor do I 100% dismiss the advantages that 2 or 3 teams seemingly have by the economics of the sport. But I believe these advantages are significantly overrated. For every big time free agent signing that works out there are 2 that turn out to be complete albatrosses. Signing big time free agents is a suckers game. But the Pirates deserve a lot of criticism in my mind because they botched a window of opportunity by being too focused on the future and too concerned with "financial flexibility". The truly awful decisions the Pirates have made in the last few seasons would have easily been avoided by a very modest increase in the payroll.

The 2017 Pirates? Try the last several decades.

We are the Browns of baseball. No chance at a World Series.