Perrotto: Will Pirates Ever Hit Rock Bottom?

It’s hard to know for sure when rock bottom has been reached.

There is no metric providing a precise moment when rock bottom has arrived. It’s an art, a feeling that things can’t get any worse.

The season is less than two months old, and the Pittsburgh Pirates have appeared to hit rock bottom on multiple occasions.

However, it keeps getting worse by the day.

The Pirates’ losing streak reached seven  games on Wednesday as they lost to the Cardinals 5-0 at St. Louis. The three-game sweep left the Pirates with a 12-26 record.

The Pirates are more than three times away from fourth place in the National League Central than first place. The Pirates are 10 games behind the division-leading Chicago Cubs and seven games behind the three teams tied for second place – the Cincinnati Reds, the Milwaukee Brewers, and the Cardinals.

Furthermore, the Pirates again played dead-ass baseball on Wednesday as they were shut out on four hits. The punchless Pirates have scored just 18 runs in their last 10 games.

Worse yet, the Pirates were in the news again on Wednesday for off-field reasons.

Many national news outlets picked up on an incident between a PNC Park employee and a fan on Sunday during the game between the Pirates and the San Diego Padres.

A lot was happening in the video, and both sides were wrong. However, it was a bad look for the Pirates to have a security guard remove his belt and attempt to whip a fan.

Regardless of how much the fan might have baited him, the guard’s job is to de-escalate the situation. He did the opposite.

Of course, that’s just another day in Buccoland following the Roberto Clemente fiasco, the Bucco Bricks fiasco, a fan falling off the 21-foot-high Clemente Wall in right field, and an airplane flying over PNC Park before the home opener carrying a sign imploring owner Bob Nutting to sell the team.

Nutting has a reputation for not caring about anything but making money. This reputation gets further burnished as he watches his franchise disintegrate both on and off the field.

Embarrassing isn’t a strong enough word to describe the Pirates,

It’s one thing to be awful on the field. That is a Pirates’ tradition with 28 losing seasons in the last 32 years.

It’s another thing to have constant off-field crises that further alienate the fans. The Pirates are lucky that people still buy tickets, though that is a testament to baseball being the best sport in the world rather than fans clamoring to watch Alexander Canario.

Amazingly, no one has paid for all this chaos.

Travis Williams is still the club president despite all the off-field missteps. General manager Ben Cherington and manager Derek Shelton are still employed despite the Pirates having a 306-440 record since replacing Neal Huntington and Clint Hurdle.

Nutting doesn’t have much feel for baseball, and he must also be oblivious to public relations disaster. Yet Nutting has to make changes, and they need to happen now.

Maybe he is waiting for rock bottom. Perhaps he doesn’t think the Pirates have gotten there yet.

Surely, it can’t get any worse.

Can it?