When you imagine the term “putting the cart before the horse”, what comes to mind?
Is it a horse behind a cart, trying in a likely unsuccessful manner to push the cart forward?
Or, is it an order of operations? If you’re starting with neither a cart nor a horse, and you buy the cart first, you’re left with no horse to move the cart. The clear choice is to buy the horse first, and add a cart when the horse has too much to carry.
The cart represents future excess. It represents an influx of some sort of currency, whether it be actual monetary value, possessions, or even social capital. We all put the cart before the horse sometimes. It’s not a good order of operations. It’s borderline insecurity that the cart might never come if left to the correct order of operations.
The practice of putting the cart before the horse has plagued the Pittsburgh Pirates, to this very season. The Pirates have put the cart before the horse, often.
This is a mentality from the top down.
The owner of the Pirates, Bob Nutting, is heavily committed to charity. The Pirates go a long way to make an impact in the community, while touting the impact they’ve made through their charitable works. This is an organization that is meant to entertain through winning baseball games. If they’re successful, the charity impact becomes greater.
For too long, it seems the Pirates have prioritized the image of being a good member of the community over being a good team. It’s almost as if there’s an attempt to write off the losing by saying “At least Bob Nutting treats his employees well, and cares about contributing to the community.” That’s like saying “They have a really nice cart, and it would be better if they added a horse, but at least they have the cart.”
From the team building perspective, the focus is typically on the cart.
This is an organization that has long touted developing elite prospects from within, before having a system in place that could successfully develop prospects. It’s an organization that rarely spends money or resources on a proven horse of a player, instead adding complementary pieces to a team with no stable of elite talent. It’s an organization that often worries about stocking the cart, before figuring out how the cart will move.
There are many player examples of putting the cart before the horse.
It wasn’t the best approach to push Rowdy Tellez as a leader and a player the fans should embrace before he had even performed on the field. Tellez has recently shown himself to be a horse in the batter’s box, but early in the season we were just shown his cart. Fans don’t want to cheer for the player’s cart. They want the player to be a mustang.
Every single game, Oneil Cruz has a custom pair of shoes, including one to show his journey from signing with the Dodgers to reaching the majors with the Pirates. He currently has a .738 OPS in his first full season, and has a career .746 OPS in 651 plate appearances in the majors. Worrying about an image on the field when you’re a below-average performer seems like investing in the cart and not the horse. Cruz is clearly spending more time than most focused on how he looks on the field, which can take away energy from focusing on how he performs.
Henry Davis now has a locker room named after him at his alma mater in Louisville. The 2021 first overall pick made a donation to the renovations prior to this season. Credit to Davis for wanting to give back and improve things for those who follow his path, but it is a little strange that Davis isn’t even the best catcher in the Majors from Louisville. That honor goes to Will Smith, who is in his sixth season in the big leagues, with a career 18.2 fWAR. Davis had a -0.9 WAR in his rookie season when he made the donation for the locker room. This is another cart before the horse moment.
All of these situations make sense. It’s just the order of operations is wrong.
If all goes right for Davis, he could be as good or better than Smith, with a career that every future member of Louisville would want to think about every time they step into the locker room. That hasn’t happened yet. Right now, Davis is just the highest drafted player out of Louisville, which is more cart than horse.
Cruz has the talent to hit the ball harder than nearly any other player in the majors, with the potential for stallion level home runs. With those types of results consistently, younger players would inevitably try to copy Cruz, down to his shoes. That hasn’t happened consistently yet, but Cruz is still putting out the cart image.
Tellez seems like a good person who keeps things light in the clubhouse, no matter the situation. But the Pirates have had countless glue guys over the years, and the number of quality first basemen is minimal. The fans will follow the latter, first. Tellez might be starting to pull his cart, and Saturday’s ovations might be a sign that fans will cheer the cart once Tellez gets it moving.
Taking a team building approach of attempting to develop a lot of high character and high talent individuals is what the Pirates need to do as a small market team. Drafting Paul Skenes last year as a horse who could immediately pull the team, without having to do much development, is something the Pirates don’t do often enough. This hasn’t happened much under General Manager Ben Cherington. Credit to Cherington for picking the horse in a draft of first overall candidates who mostly were touted for their carts.
I’d even say that Bob Nutting’s approach makes sense. If I owned the Pirates, my focus wouldn’t be entirely on winning games. It would also be on the impact to the community. It would be on helping as many people as possible. But you need to win games to maximize that focus.
All of the above examples are the equivalent of having a cart and asking everyone to travel to see what you have inside.
Nutting needs to invest in the team from time-to-time, in order to ensure that people even want the communal help from this organization. Cherington needs to add horses to pull the team, rather than loading up the cart with everything the team needs when they’re somehow eventually rolling forward. The players themselves simply need to perform like horses before getting the glory of being a Major League player.
Who are the horses on the Pirates roster?
Tellez is playing like one lately.
Skenes has been a horse since before he was drafted.
The Pirates have invested long-term in Bryan Reynolds, Ke’Bryan Hayes, and Mitch Keller to help pull this team for the next several years.
Jared Jones might be one of the best hopes that things are changing from the development system. It was fitting that he went up against Tyler Glasnow last week. There was once a time that Glasnow was held back in this system to work in the minors on a changeup that he’s thrown five times since the 2021 season. This year, the Pirates let Jones pitch in the majors with his fastball and slider leading the way, rather than keeping him down to work on pitches he might not even need to get the wheels moving in the big leagues.
Glasnow’s development was focused on stocking up the cart, rather than letting him be a horse with what he already had. Jones is now galloping in the majors, while working toward his own cart. That’s the way it should be.
If there’s one thing I’ve liked about the development approach over the last few years, it’s that the Pirates have allowed their young players to show what they can do in the majors, rather than adding to the cart in the minors. They’re not holding back horses as much, evident by the call-up timing of Jones (Opening Day) and Skenes (before Super Two).
The Pirates now have a stocked cart in the majors, with a few horses who could pull the team. That said, I don’t think they have enough horsepower.
This is a team that just added Skenes and Jones to the majors this year, while giving guys like Cruz and Davis their first full-season attempts at the big leagues. It’s a team that largely filled up the cart in free agency this offseason, rather than adding a horse to pull the team. It’s a team that is exiting a long rebuild mode that has mostly produced a stocked cart, but not a lot of horses.
It’s difficult to get horses in the majors. Every player is a human, capable of putting their own cart before their horse. Every player knows what they could become, but very few know how to run the race around the track. The players who are proven to be horses cost money or prospects.
The Pirates are in need of more horses if they want to get this cart rolling toward the post-season. They could add at the trade deadline, sending out a few prospects in the process. They could wait until the offseason and spend on a horse-level talent tier that they’ve always avoided in the past. They have the money and prospects to do either.
The change in this organization will need to come from the top.
Bob Nutting will need to spend to build a team that the community will want to rally around. I don’t know if you’ve seen the crowds lately, but Pittsburgh is starting to embrace the stable of young, productive players.
Ben Cherington will need to acquire players who can help pull the team toward the playoffs. With prospects in the minors, and clear needs in the majors, he’s got that opportunity this year.
The individual players themselves will need to decide if they’re horses, or just riding along in the cart for all to see. Some of the players are like watching a horse trying to ride inside a cart.
Eventually, the Pirates might have enough horsepower to get their cart up to a contending speed. That will require the right moves from the top, and the right motivations from the players in this carriage ride.
