How The Pirates Treat Their Paying Customers

On Saturday, July 11, my friend David Cicotello and I attended the 4:05 game between the Pirates and Brewers at PNC Park.  The Pirates won the game, which was nice, but that wasn't my biggest take away from the "ballpark experience" that day.  You can read about it in this letter that I will be sending to Pirates President Travis Williams.  I reproduce it for you below:

July 19, 2026

Mr. Travis Williams

President

Pittsburgh Pirates

115 Federal Street

Pittsburgh, PA 15212

Dear Mr. Williams,

On Saturday, July 19, I attended, along with over 29,000 other fans, the second game of the split double-header between the Pirates and Brewers.  We arrived on the north side early, around 2:30.  Realizing the logistics involved in emptying PNC Park after the first game of the double header, which concluded at about that time, we waited until about  3:00 to get into a line to enter the ball park.   We got into a line that began at the corner of Federal and General Robinson Streets, a line that would eventually lead to the left field gate where the Willie Stargell statue is located.

Eventually, the line started to move. Then it stopped moving.  Then it moved a couple of feet.  Then it stopped moving. You get the idea.  It soon became apparent that there was a strong likelihood that we would miss the beginning of the game (which, in fact, did happen).  After about thirty minutes or so, the Stargell statue came into view, and I could see that there was one gate open.  In a gate area with four portals for entry, there was ONE GATE OPEN.  We also could see that there was another line to get into that ONE OPEN GATE that was coming from the  other direction on Federal Street.  It was like trying to funnel the Mississippi River through a drinking straw.  

At some point a gentleman wearing a Pirates lanyard and ID badge, Ryan Niemeyer, your VP of tickets sales appeared, and I asked why was only one gate open?  To which he replied “we didn’t have sufficient security to open more that one gate”, and to that I replied “Why not?”  He had no answer for that.   This was a day where a huge crowd was expected because of the highly promoted (hyped?) Pirates Country Weekend, where there was a highly promoted give-away item involved, and the Pirates didn’t anticipate having sufficient security on hand to allow more than one gate to be open to ease the entrance of paying customers into the ball park?  Did the team learn nothing from last season’s Paul Skenes Bobblehead debacle?

There is a term in the military for this: “Cluster____.“ I will let you fill in the last syllable of this term.

It has become a cliche in Pittsburgh to say that “the Pirates are cheap” or “the Pirates can screw  up a one car funeral” or “do these guys have ANY idea of what they are doing”, but after being a part of that mess on July 11, what else can one think?

Let me say that I am not a casual fan.  I attend roughly 10-12 games a season.  I have come to accept that the actual part of the organization that, you know plays the games, operates with one hand tied behind its back due to Mr. Nutting’s, uh, shall we say, frugal way of operating the team, but still, I come to the ball park, buy the merch and the eight  dollar soft drinks, and watch the Pirates on TV.  I will be a fan until I die, but, WOW, considering how the organization treats its paying customers, as exemplified by what happened last Saturday, you folks don’t make it easy to be a Pirates fan.

I am anxious to hear your response.

Sincerely,

Bob Sproule

I shall let you know what response, if any, I receive from Mr. Williams.  By the way, here is a picture of the scene at PNC Park that day as we tried to get into the ballpark.

Sports Happenings on Pittsburgh's North Shore

What a few days it has been on the Pittsburgh sports scene, and where do I even begin?  

Let's start with last night's Steelers 27-14 win over the awful Miami Dolphins.

When I got home from the Caring Place last night and turned on the TV, it was early in the second quarter, the Steelers were down 0-14, and Mason Rudolph was standing in his own end zone to take the snap from center.  Things looked grim indeed.  Well, you know what happened next.  The Steelers drove the field and kicked a FG to make it 3-14, and then proceeded to score 24 more unanswered points to win the game 27-14.  Obviously, my presence in front to the tube cheering them on made all the difference.  I will try not to miss any more action in future games.

Mason Rudolph in action last night

Rudolph, playing for the first time since October 10, looked horrible at the start, then he shook off the rust, and performed admirably, I thought, in leading the team over the last two and one half quarters of the game.  He was helped by a strong game from James Conner, and great play from WRs Diontae Johnson and JuJu Smith-Shuster.  Rudolph is still very much a developing work-in-progress, but I see some good things there and am encouraged by how he has performed thus far.

Now the Dolphins, as I said, are truly awful, so a win over them must be kept in context, and at 3-4, the Steelers season thus far has been nothing to brag about, but I take joy in at least these two facts:

1. The Steelers are one game AHEAD of the 2-5 Cleve Brownies in the standings.  You know, the Browns who were everybody's trendy pre-season pick to storm their way to the Super Bowl.
2. Browns cinch-for-the-HOF QB Baker Mayfield has thrown six TD passes thus far this season.  Mason Rudolph has thrown seven.

The season is only half over, and the Steelers and Browns have yet to play each other, so things can certainly change, but for now, at least, those two facts are just delightful.

        ********

The bigger sports news this week, though, has been made by the Pirates. Last week, team president Frank Coonelly and the team agreed to part company. Yesterday, GM Neal Huntington was fired, and Bob Nutting introduced Travis Williams, an executive with the NHL Islanders for the last eight years, and more importantly, a native Pittsburgh who had served for many years as Chief Operating Officer for the Penguins, as the new President of the team.  Nutting, himself, actually met and spoke with the press on the occasion for the first time since Spring Training.

Travis Williams

In the end, Nutting did what Pirates fans had been screaming for - he cleaned house.  Since the end of the season, the manager, general manager, and team president have all been given their walking papers.  The so called "best management team in baseball" is no more.  Nutting also talked the talk and said what many fans have been saying....why haven't we drafted and developed players like other teams have, and why are our players suddenly performing so much better when they go to other teams?  He also tap-danced around questions about payroll and spending money, so we will wait and see if these changes will, in the end, really mean anything.  As one sports writer has said, he did what needed to be done insofar as cleaning house, so he deserves the benefit of the doubt and a fresh start - for now.

Travis Williams certainly brings a good resume as a sports executive to the job. He's not a baseball guy, but the team president doesn't really have to know who should be called upon to get Cody Bellinger or Christian Yelich out with the game on the line in the bottom of the ninth.  That's for the GM and the manager and the "baseball people" to figure out.  Williams first order of business will be a huge one: hiring the next GM to steer the ship in the days and years ahead.

One quote from Williams presser yesterday struck me.  Before taking the job, he asked Nutting if he was willing to do "whatever it took" to do things right and win and contend consistently, and Nutting assured him that he would.  Seems that I heard the same quotes from Coonelly and Huntington when they were hired in 2007 and from Hurdle when he was hired in 2011.

Like I said, we'll see.

A word about Frank Coonelly.

Full disclosure: Back in 2009, when I was working for Highmark, I met Frank Coonelly, and we became friends. He is a charming and engaging guy. He never forgets a name or a face once he meets you.  Marilyn and I would run into him at the ballpark, at spring training in Bradenton one year, or even just around town, like at a PNC Bank ATM machine, or the Ace Hardware in Wexford (true stories!), and he always  would take time to chat and engage with you.  Every year in November, I would have lunch with him, and I considered him a personal friend.  Often times at those lunches, the state of the Pirates was the least of what we talked about.  I never wrote about what we discussed during those lunches, and I was always reluctant to be critical of him in all of the many posts I've written about the Pirates over the years.  Hey, I never claimed to be Woodward and Bernstein when I write this blog!

So, as I mentioned to a pal on Facebook when the news of Frank's departure became known last week, I take no joy in this.  I look at it as a friend of mine losing his job, and I feel bad about that.  Not that we need hold a benefit for him.  He will bounce back from this, and I know that he will land in a good spot for him and his family.

Maybe Frank's departure and Williams' hiring will work well for the Pirates.  As a fan, I hope that it absolutely does mean good things for the team, but I am sorry that a friend of mine, Frank Coonelly, will no longer be a part of the process.  I wish him well, whatever he does.

********

And while we are talking about sports on the North Shore, how about the Pitt Panthers spitting the bit last Saturday against a not-great Miami team?  After winning five straight games and sitting at 5-2, there was talk that it was certainly possible for Pitt to win their remaining five games, finish at 10-2, maybe getting to the ACC Championship game, and getting a really nice Bowl game for their efforts.  

Then they fail to put the ball in the end zone and lose 16-12 to Miami.  They are now 5-3 with four games left.  They could win all four of them.  A case can be made for that.  It is also possible that they could go 1-3 in those games.  I doubt that they'll lose all four of them, but I wouldn't be totally shocked if that happened either.

As Dan said when we left Heinz Field on Saturday, "I've followed Pitt all my life.  I'm used to this."