PITTSBURGH _ Unlike the millions of Americans who did it for only a few minutes, the Pirates spent most of the past week staring at celestial objects _ the Los Angeles Dodgers.
It took most of four days for Planet Hollywood to pass between the heavens and the earth-bound team on the North Side, an astronomical event detonating a supernova of storylines including the only game in history that ended when a home run broke up a no-hitter on the final pitch.
"We know who we're playin' against over there," Josh Harrison said quietly at his locker long after he trashed Rich Hill's no-hitter leading off the 10th Wednesday night. "We've had some tough games against them lately, but one thing we don't do is hang our heads. We come ready to play every day."
Nobody could blame these Pirates if this had descended into head-hanging week, which is about the only promotion they haven't thought of. In baseball's vast and profitable financial solar system, few bodies spin as far apart as the Pirates and the Dodgers, particularly these 2017 Dodgers, who are so galactically good that even when they lose they make history.
In fact, if they don't go into history as the best team ever, they'll almost certainly be the best Dodgers team ever, no small task, and apparently it's not even close.
"Oh yeah, by far," Keith Hupp was telling me near the Terrace Bar on PNC Park's upper concourse the other night. "They finally brought in management the fans can actually get behind."
Do tell.
Sporting an Utley jersey over a couple of wounded knees from his successful battle for a Jose Osuna home run ball in the left field stands the night before, Hupp is the antithesis of the casual fan. He was enjoying a cocktail with LA-capped Mari Monteil, and both estimated they'll see, in person, more than 100 Dodgers games this season.
"Hey, we just got two mixed drinks here for $17," Hupp noted. "At Dodger Stadium that would be $30."
"At least $30," Mari corrected.
Life is different in Dodger blue, where the Joys of Summer were never so evident. The Dodgers haven't lost a series since the first week of June. They took three of four in Pittsburgh without their best pitcher (Clayton Kershaw) and their best hitter (rookie Cody Bellinger), meaning they'd won 27 of their past 34, and left town on pace to win 116 games. No professional baseball team has ever won 117.
The explanations for this have been pervasively chronicled by the national media, and you'd be right to assume it has something to do with a $242 million payroll, baseball's most obscene, and an $8.35 billion local TV contract, also most obscene, which averages annually to about $334 million, or about 13 times what the Pirates are getting from Root Sports or whoever owns it today.
But fret not, because Pirates president Frank Coonelly frets not.
"We focus on what we have in Pittsburgh and how we can expand and grow our local resources rather than on any perceived 'inequities' in any industry landscape," Coonelly said this week in an email when I asked about those perceived 'inequities.' "We are fortunate to operate in a great baseball town with tremendous support from a passionate fan base.
"There are few, if any, industries in which all of the competitors are given identical resources or put on an even footing at the start of the competition. Baseball is no different and yet clubs from all segments of the local revenue spectrum can and have won on the field. We have shown that ourselves, at some level, in 2013, 2014 and 2015.
"While local television deals are meaningfully influenced by the number of people in a club's television territory, and particularly its core territory, MLB's local revenue sharing system mitigates to some extent the revenue differences that these population differences can produce in television rights and other sources of local revenue. The Dodgers' financial strength, for instance, is also driven by the fact that (they are) again leading the league in attendance this year, and it is not really close. Our great fans' remarkable support of the Pirates produced franchise attendance records at PNC Park in 2014 and 2015, but I need to do a much better job of filling our ballpark year in and year out."
Well yes, he does, because the four games against the pending greatest team ever drew on average fewer than 20,000, and while I'd agree with most of the preceding paragraph, it has to be pointed out that among the "few, if any industries in which all of the competitors are given identical resources," are the three other major American team sports, which all have salary caps.
The five-time Stanley Cup champion Pittsburgh Penguins, for example, would still be two-time Stanley Cup champions were in not for the salary cap, for which the league fought to the point of shuttering the game for the entire 2004-05 season. With the cap, hockey went from a situation in which the Penguins were spending $19 million on players while the Detroit Red Wings and New York Rangers were shoveling out in the neighborhood of $80 million, to its current arrangement in which, save for an overtime goal by Chris Kunitz, small markets Ottawa and Nashville would have met in the Stanley Cup final.
"Without a salary cap, we probably couldn't have kept (Sidney) Crosby and (Evgeni) Malkin when they became unrestricted," Penguins CEO David Morehouse said this week. "What the cap did for us was it allowed us to compete with New York, Chicago, Boston, L.A., Philly, much larger markets. Without the cap, any of those markets could have thrown more money (at them) than we possibly could have been able to afford. New York still makes more money on ticket sales and corporate revenue and their TV deals, but they're limited on what they can pay players."
What a concept.
Coonelly pointed out that if the season ended today, five playoff teams would come from among the top 15 payroll clubs and five would come from the bottom, but baseball has never crossed the line in this argument between what is possible and what is probable.
Baseball is a wonderful game filled with art and happenstance and ridiculously difficult tasks, all of which have a leveling effect on the competition, but arguing that a team spending two-and-a-half times on talent what your team spends is not a prohibitive advantage has to be a thankless task. At the weekend, five of the seven teams with the best Vegas odds of winning the World Series came from among the game's top nine payrolls.
This is why the Pirates, stuck between an ominous financial landscape and the forbidden depths of the Nutting portfolio, are essentially screwed. They've got to be creative, and they've got to be lucky, and their options have permanent limits.
Just looking at the Dodgers' uniformed personnel, and since the Pirates had no evident interest in recent L.A. acquisitions Yu Darvish or Curtis Granderson, I'd say there are two people in Dodger blue the Pirates can put to good use and probably afford.
One is Juan Castro, No. 13 in road gray this week, who is the member of Dave Roberts' coaching staff in charge of quality assurance. That's right, Castro is the quality assurance coach. Seeing as how they were 90-36 at the weekend, I'd say Juan Castro is doing on heckuva job.
The other is none other than Turner Ward, the Dodgers hitting coach, a guy who'd run through a wall for you, or at least for Gene Lamont (go ahead a Google it from 1998).
"You can definitely feel the financial struggle in smaller markets," Ward was saying in the visiting dugout the other night. "I was always a blue collar guy, so Pittsburgh's always been a very special place in my career. It'll go down as my favorite place to play. Just the blue collar grind type of players they've had, and they still have those kind of players. They go out every single day and play hard, guys like Harrison, (Andrew) McCutchen, that style seems like it's been pretty consistent."
But like everyone else, Ward sees not only the distance between the two clubs who met this week, but in the Dodgers and just about everybody.
"The run that this club has been on is historic," Ward said. "We don't play attention a whole lot to it, we just try to win the game today. To watch it come to fruition like it has is pretty remarkable. I mean winning streaks, 10-gamers, nine-gamers; it's been incredible. It's hard to win four in a row at this level."
Hey the Pirates have done that twice, and it's only almost September.
If it helps in any way, Pirates fans should know that baseball comes with misery and angst no matter how well your team is doing. A recent online comment about the Dodgers went like this, approximately: "Lets face it the (front office) (stinks). How did they get they're job? The team (stinks) and so does the farm system. They are all frauds."
Imagine if they'd won only 89 of their first 126 instead of 90, right?
"It feels like the best team ever so far, but personally I've been let down so many years, in a row especially, that I'm still skeptical," said Mari, who learned baseball from her dad in Santa Barbara and still feels the burn of four consecutive postseason Dodger implosions. "Every time something happens, it's like, 'How could that happen? How could we pull that off,' but we've been pulling it off all season. I'm not expecting failure, but I'm bracing myself."
Yeah, things are tough all over.
