CP Photo: Colin Williams
Canyon (left) and Carter Swartz protest Bob Nutting's ownership of the Pirates on Oct. 7.
“They're OK with being mediocre,” Canyon tells Pittsburgh City Paper of the team. The Swartz brothers have held season tickets since 2018. Canyon says the contrast with Pittsburgh's other teams during that time has been stark. “They want us to feel like it's OK to be bad.”
After a promising start to 2024, the Pirates once again finished in the basement of the relatively balanced Central Division. Underwhelming moves at the trade deadline didn't help matters, and fans' cautious optimism soon gave way to familiar complaints about Nutting's ownership and the Pirates' front office. Carter Swartz says he feels Nutting and general manager Ben Cherington have used coaches such as fired hitting coach Andy Haines as “scapegoats.”
“It just takes the right people in place to make a good baseball team, and not how much you spend,” Carter says. “[Of] the bottom 11 teams in payroll, five of them made it to the postseason.”
The Swartzes say they decided to protest after coming to the conclusion that past seasons' fan boycotts hadn't moved the needle with ownership. Following an initial meetup at the City-County Building, they planned to walk down to PNC Park. Carter says they'll continue to protest throughout the season if necessary.
“I feel like boycotting doesn't work. I mean, Pirates attendance is always low,” he says. “He's still making money off of it.” The Swartzes know some of the issues are systemic. Team ownership is often at odds with local fanbases, as A's and White Sox fans can attest. “You don't really have spending problems in the NHL or the NFL because of the cap and floor systems,” Carter says. “Even a floor would improve our situation tenfold.”
As a few passersby stopped by to express support, Pirates fan Rick Bosworth briefly joined the protest. Bosworth recently started a petition to further encourage Nutting to sell. He, like others, sees the ownership as unwilling to spend what's needed.
“If the team could afford a $100 million payroll in 2015, the increased revenues since then should allow them to easily raise the payroll to $125 million and field a competitive team,” Bosworth's petition reads. On the media front, Pittsburgh sports journalist Dejan Kovacevic has promised to stop covering the Pirates like a “normal team,” quipping that “[n]o team at their level has been as pathetic for as long as they have.”
The Swartzes feel similarly. They see the Milwaukee Brewers, a division rival, as a great counterexample — the Brewers, along with other low-payroll teams such as the Detroit Tigers and Cleveland Guardians, all made the postseason, while the Pirates are once again on the outside looking in.
With further personnel changes, both brothers see a path back to winning seasons. Canyon Swartz hopes their protest adds pressure to other local efforts for change on Federal St. But he worries Nutting and Pirates general manager Ben Cherington don't have the wherewithal to “make a splash.”
“That's what they are trying to do every year,” he tells City Paper. “Not make a big splash, just be under the wave, just roll through it, get their money, and then do it again next year.”
