The Pittsburgh Pirates completed a painful bit of business Tuesday afternoon, designating journeyman first baseman and refrigerator-shaped fan favorite Rowdy Tellez for assignment, effectively ending his 2024 season. Tellez was in Pittsburgh on a one-year contract; in all probability, Tuesday's release brings to a close his days with the Pirates. The timing of this otherwise minor transaction is pretty icky: As first noted by Pirates fans on Twitter and then confirmed by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Tellez was cut loose at the threshold of a performance bonus written into his incentive-laden contract. Tellez would've earned a $200,000 payout for hitting 425 plate appearances on the season; instead, after this last-minute maneuver, Tellez ends his campaign stuck on 421.
Ben Cherington, Pittsburgh's general manager, insists this is an unfortunate but otherwise pure coincidence. "Zero factor in the decision," Cherington said Tuesday, ahead of a game against the Brewers. "Aware of it, certainly. I’m aware of the contracts that all players have. No factor at all, zero." According to Cherington and Pirates manager Derek Shelton, the team wants to prioritize giving roster spots to the players who are most likely to factor beyond the end of this shitty, disheartening, last-place season. In related moves, the Pirates released veteran outfielder Michael A. Taylor, also wrapping up a one-year contract, and promoted a pair of minor leaguers into the big club's two fresh vacancies. One of these call-ups, 23-year-old Liover Peguero, is a gifted infielder with a somewhat faded prospect profile, the type of youngster that non-contenders traditionally do like to promote in September. The other, 29-year-old outfielder Joshua Palacios, is just a guy. Maybe one or both of them make the Pirates next season; for what it's worth, both of them have already seen time with the big club and played their way back to the minors.
If you slide an envelope over the bonus part and look at the rest of it, there appears to be nothing particularly unusual about any of this. Pittsburgh's Triple-A affiliate wrapped its season on Sept. 22; the Pirates had a day off on Sept. 23; on Sept. 24, they called up a couple of youths and jettisoned a couple of inessential veterans. This is the sort of grody but normal business that occupies front offices in the final weeks of every baseball season. Good and bad teams alike are managing roster crunches: The Orioles, by way of example, optioned Eloy Jiménez to Norfolk on Tuesday. Not so long ago, MLB teams could call up any member of their 40-man roster in September, which made it easier to navigate the competing priorities of day-to-day competition and longer-term prospect development.
Now, with September rosters capped at 28 players, the process is inevitably a little bit crueler, as Cherington noted Tuesday. "Guys understand where we are," he said, by way of explaining why he doesn't feel the need to justify the move to the other players in the locker room. "In the old days of expanded rosters, we probably wouldn’t be sitting here having this conversation." Given the circumstances, even if the move is motivated in part by money, that's a calculation that plenty of terminally GM-brained baseball fans are prepared to swallow. The Pirates of 2024 are headed nowhere; Tellez is not expected to play any role at all for the Pirates of 2025. Therefore it is a kind of queasy but mathematically sound "good business" to save $200,000, or approximately one-260th of the $52 million price tag for the team's active roster this season.
On the other hand, if this all looks more or less like bog-standard autumn baseball business, it's also true that nothing in Tuesday's roster shuffle scans as at all urgent in pure baseball terms. Peguero and Palacios will get six games in Pirates uniforms, at most somewhere between 18 and 30 chances to stand in the box and swing a bat. Big whoop! Cherington is also shaving it pretty thin when he talks about identifying the 14 position players in the organization who "have the best chance to contribute past this year." For one thing, unless the promotions are ceremonial, it's hard to figure the value of making that determination at this precise moment in time. For another, if Palacios is contributing much more than best wishes to the major-league roster next year it will mean either that several players ahead of him on the organizational depth chart suffered calamitous injuries or, much more likely, that owner Bob Nutting once again refused to let his baseball honchos spend money to upgrade the big club's roster in free agency.
In either case, the baseball justifications are not compelling enough to help rinse away the bad taste of seeing a substantial payout yoinked out of the grasp of a fan-favorite galoot like Tellez, especially when the entity doing the yoinking is a miserable cheapskate organization like the Pirates. In general I hate activating PR Brain to try to sketch the fallout of someone else's actions for some sort of half-assed post-mortem, but it's also true that the Pirates have burned their fans one jillion times over by being cheap, callous, and unapologetic. Whatever benefit of the doubt is usually tentatively extended to semi-respectable baseball clubs in moments like these is hilariously undeserved here. I feel a little bit tainted even having unpacked this transaction and probed it for fidelity, like I have done some of Nutting's insanely dirty dirty-work. To be safe—to avoid the torment of reckoning in wasted good faith with future Pirates maneuvers of this sort—we should go ahead and contract the team. Let's throw in the White Sox and Marlins and Athletics, while we're at it.
