It’s impossible to take them seriously anymore.
Last night, on the north side of Chicago, the Pittsburgh Pirates were on the wrong end of a combined no-hitter. They lost 12-0.
An offensive offensive approach led by a rotten hitting coach who is past his due date by at least a year, a largely talentless roster that features a player with a sub .300 OBP and sub .400 SLG hitting third, a bullpen that gave up four more earned runs, a hitless day for a number one overall pick that dropped his OPS to .454, a position player pitching for the third time in 12 days, a loss that drops the team to nine games under .500 near the end of the GM’s fifth season.
Somehow all of that doesn’t even come close to topping the most disgusting embarrassment of them all; Domingo Germán’s presence on the roster. Which did come to a merciful end today as he was the corresponding move for LHP Joey Wentz being claimed as I speculated he might be. It doesn’t matter though; Germán was on the team for nearly a month, and it showed just how much of a joke the Pirates actually are.
Germán was shelled again, allowing seven runs, six of which were earned, across three innings of work, getting taken deep twice, jacking his ERA up to 7.84. Even before his Pirates debut a little less than a month ago, Germán had done everything in his power to not earn this opportunity.
Multiple suspensions, including ones for violating MLB’s domestic violence policy and for violating the foreign substance policy, had caused him to miss entire seasons in New York, the final straw coming when Germán showed up drunk to the clubhouse late last year, flipping couches, getting into altercations and smashing TVs. He was placed on the restricted list, and the Yankees convinced Germán to check himself into rehab by threatening to not pay the rest of his salary if he didn’t go. All this for a backend starter with a career ERA well north of 4.00 who had only pitched more than 100 innings twice in his career. It wasn’t worth it anymore. The Yankees had had enough.
With Germán set to become a free agent, and despite an untrue rumor strategically leaked by his agent to media about the Yankees and the Boston Red Sox showing interest in Germán, his former organization made no attempt to resign him. He went unsigned until March 15 when the Pirates signed him to a one-year Minor League deal with a team option for 2025.
As one does when you sign a player with past character concerns, the Pirates rolled out the canned statements about how many former teammates they talked to, how many executives they had discussions with, how well they felt their talks with Germán himself went and how committed he was getting back on track. Any illusion of truth to any of this was promptly blown out of the sky when Germán, speaking through a team interpreter in an interview with NJ.com, openly admitted that he was still drinking, denied having any kind of alcohol abuse problem, denied ever being drunk in the Yankees clubhouse, and painted his time in rehab as some sort of unjust punishment or that it was just some big misunderstanding.
Signing so late into camp as well as issues with Germán’s work visa delayed his debut in the Pirates system, and when he did pitch in games, the results were disastrous. In 72 innings, he ran up an ERA of 5.12 between Low-A Bradenton and AAA Indianapolis. His stuff was underwhelming at best, and his control was nonexistent at times.
On July 16, Germán exercised an opt-out clause in his contract to seek out MLB opportunities with other teams. When no suitors were found, Germán signed another Minor League deal with the Pirates on July 21. Then on August 9, after nobody else wanted him multiple times over, after a putrid performance at AAA, after doing nothing at all to have earned such a thing, the Pirates, and only the Pirates, with better options staring them in the face, decided Germán was a guy they wanted on their MLB roster.
It would be one thing if Germán made an emergency spot start or got a few innings of work as the last man out of the pen in a single series, but that’s not what this was. He was on the roster for a month, chucking 87mph fastballs to get crushed and nobody could be bothered to care that he’d come nowhere close to earning this opportunity or that were better options to be had.
Just caring seems to be a major issue for the team. In year five of the worst stretch the franchise has seen since the 1950s, it’s obvious how little this Bob Nutting-owned, Ben Cherington-run team cares about the actual results. Here they are again, in August and September, rostering players the rest of baseball wanted nothing to do with. It’s a joke. A joke that you, the fan, are the butt of.