Pirates fans voice frustration with ownership during home-opening loss

As Noah Hiles, Pirates beat writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette pointed out, it was an especially grim mood for a home-opening day with manager Derek Shelton — and several players — getting booed during the pregame introductions, and fans just being generally angry. 

The Pirates entered Friday's opener with a 2-5 record and did not look particularly good in the first seven games to reach that record.

But it is not just the record that has fans angry. It is the general lack of effort from ownership and the poor work from the baseball operations department to build anything even resembling a contending team. 

Especially after it had a gift in starting pitcher Paul Skenes, a generational talent that is already one of the best players in baseball, fall right into their laps at the top of the MLB Draft a couple of years ago. Instead of doing everything in their power to build something around him, they brought back largely the same roster from a year ago that only managed to win 76 games. Which followed another 76-win season the year prior. 

The only major additions were trading for first basemen Spencer Horwitz, who is sidelined for a yet-to-be-determined period of time due to a chronic wrist injury, and veteran free agents Tommy Pham and Andrew Heaney on one-year deals.

They once again have one of the lowest payrolls in baseball and do not have any immediate position player help in the farm system on the horizon. It has been a bad team for almost a decade now, and it is going to be a bad team again this season. Overall, the Pirates have had just six winning seasons since the late 1980s and have not actually won a playoff series since 1979. They have been a franchise defined by losing, and fans just want to see that start to change. Especially before Skenes is traded to the Dodgers or Yankees in four or five years.

The clock is ticking, and the Pirates as an organization do not seem to have any urgency. The fans are out of patience. They expressed that loud and clear on Friday. They might start expressing it even more with their wallets after the home opener by not going.