I wanted to take sometime to discuss both the Pirates T.V. Contracts and Dejan Kovacevic and his echo chambers continued whining about wording they've cherry picked with regards to Bob Nutting and the Navy Seals Exercises.
First we have the issue about the T.V. Contracts. The morning of Pirates Fest on Friday, Dejan throws out a column of questions to ask at Pirates Fest. It was an amateurish maneuver that to me looked like some scorned highschool kid who rightfully got beat up and is trying to get revenge through fabricated embarrassment.
Below is the question Dejan wanted someone to ask at Pirates Fest regarding T.V. contracts...
Quote:
For Coonelly: Baseball‘s local TV contracts are becoming wildly lucrative, and not just for the Dodgers. The Padres, in a market smaller than ours and with lower TV ratings, earlier this year signed a deal that will pay them $50 million annually, plus a $200 million bonus and a 20 percent equity share in that network.
By comparison, the Pirates‘ deal with Root Sports, which you signed just two years ago, will pay in the range of $16 million to $20 million annually for the next decade. No big bonus, no equity.
Was this deal, in fact, more damaging to the Pirates than any on-field decision this management team has made?
If so, who‘s accountable?
Here's Frank Coonely's response that I pulled from audio i recorded during the Q&A "
Frank : Fortunately the facts that are out there regarding the TV contracts, other teams contracts and ours are wrong. All of those contracts are subject to a confidentiality agreement at the Broadcasters demand.. but our Television contract is well over $16-20 million dollars. It did include a Signing Bonus. In fact, even though we're the 27th market in all of Major League Baseball in terms of market size, our T.V. contract is well above that... in Major League Baseball. So I think we, I think we have a very good T.V. contract that'll help us compete, in fact the Signing Bonus we received allowed us to be the biggest spender in the Amateur Draft before the Cap came in. So we're well positioned with our T.V. contract. I'm not sure where those numbers came from, but they're not even close.
Ouch.
Yet, somewhere out there are going to be those strange loyalists to Dejan Kovacevic that will claim that he is telling nothing but the truth and Frank Coonelly or anyone else is lying. I had a couple of folks on Twitter Sunday come out of the woodwork. One was someone claiming to be a good friend of Dejan's. The other was some guy that claimed to be a Grammar guru that doesn't like when people call out someone for believing a lie but will call out someone else for believing what he thinks is a lie. Hypocrite, double standard.. it is all there. I'm going to take Frank's word because Frank Coonelly not Dejan Kovacevic should know the exact details of a confidentiality agreement. Most likely, Dejan got this information from one of his infamous "anonymous sources" that managed to deliver the only details of any offering of Chase Headley to the Pittsburgh Pirates that not even ESPN, MLB Trade Rumors, Tom Singer anyone from the San Diego Padres media/blogosphere etc... had reported. The same sources that claimed a group of Pittsburgh Penguins players held a 45 minute meeting to discuss a Temporary Captaincy because they were growing suspicious that Sidney Crosby should've been playing. That was debunked by the players in unity the next morning wearing fake "C's" on their jersey's making a mockery of Dejan's bogus story. The players who were asked about it, denied a meeting occurred. Dejan has since in a roundabout way has said those players are lying, since if he was telling the truth, then what were they doing? You see the picture here. Everyone else besides this columnist seem to "lie".
Frank appeared ready to take on this question. As soon as it was asked he jumped at the opportunity. I don't recall who it was, if it was Charlie from Bucs Dugout but it was a Blogger that made a comment that they saw Frank earlier at Pirates Fest and he made a comment asking them about "seeing what Dejan wrote this morning". So Frank was fully aware and prepared. There's nothing wrong with that but you could sense that he was chomping at the bit for one of those Questions to be asked so he could debunk them. Debunk it he did. Was Frank Coonelly telling the truth? I don't know. I don't care either, but if you give me the option of believing the Team President or a journalist who has a habit of omitting important information when crafting columns to push an agenda... I'm certainly not going to believe the columnist.
Steelreign and myself went down to Pirates Fest Friday and probably should've gone Saturday. During the Q&A Friday, nobody had brought up the Navy Seal's Training. That was all saved for Saturday and to be honest, the entire Navy Seal's debacle wasn't even present in my mind Friday simply because I found it to be an irrelevant topic over-pursued by an agenda driven columnist with an axe to grind in the first place.
Saturday the questions came about it.
I followed on Twitter some what was being said and of course there's Dejan rallying up the angry trolls that hang on each and every word he says as if it were some Religious premonition.
Quote:
@Dejan_Kovacevic For those with kittens: No one's more sick of
.. but as long as
Here's the problem with this Quote and I've heard some of the DK echo chamber on Twitter defend ... Bob Nutting never said that the Navy Seal's training was going to end. The full Interview is out there. Kristy Robinson over at Pirates Prospects translated it all Here rather than the cherry pick job Dejan Kovacevic and his minions do. Below is a link to the audio interview with Bob Nutting where he addresses the Navy Seal's Exercises. I translated it as well :
Link to Interview with Bob Nutting on 93.7 The Fan
Bob Nutting : "What I've said there is that our training needs to be Baseball centric, we need to be focused on developing Baseball players to win Championships at PNC Park. We are not a Military Organization. We should not be and will not make.. try to run a Boot Camp. However I do believe that there are valuable lessons that we can learn from lead organizations in other areas.. of TREMENDOUS amount of respect for the military. I think that would be shared by most people in Pittsburgh, what they go through for our Country. So I don't want to have anything that projects anything but the utmost respect for their training, their team work, their leadership and what they go through .. and I think we should be proud of the relationship that we have and take and take the best pieces of that out of what they do but not try to recreate a .... Again, we aren't running a boot camp, we need to be running a Baseball organization and then supplement that Baseball first. I believe that is what Neil at this point would say is where we need to be heading forward. So that's not saying we're never going to do innovative training. We need to. We need to do something. We need to be better than our competitors. We need to continue to explore but we need to be Baseball centric. We need to recognize that we're not a Paramilitary Organization.
What I underlined are the pieces that have been generally cherry picked by those saying that Bob Nutting claimed the Navy Seal's training would end and Frank Coonelly and Neal Hutnigton are at Pirates Fest talking about the positives of it and undermining his wishes. They're not undermining anything. The only people that are undermining anyone are columnists like Dejan Kovacevic undermining the public's ultimate desire to have the actual facts.
Bob Nutting bounces around in that section of the interview talking about doing things like the Navy Seal's training. Taking the mental strength building that comes from that, which is applicable to Baseball or anyone really. Bob Nutting doesn't want the Pirates to run boot camps and they don't. That Navy Seal's training wasn't boot camp and it's an insult to the people in the military who go through actual Boot Camp to claim that these training "exercises" are equal. You might as well go slap a Navy Seal upside the head if you are going to insult them with insinuations that running on beaches with telephone polls voluntarily is the same as mandatory Navy Seal's training.
There's more. Bob Nutting was then asked if this meant that the relationship with the Navy Seal's won't continue or at least next year, if that was accurate :
Bob Nutting : No, I think what it's saying is that we are continuing to review and I don't want to speak to specific training and I am not sure where we stand with any specific trainer group technique. What I absolutely know is, we're going to be Baseball centric, we're going to make sure the safety of our players is first and foremost. That every piece of training that we do will be to drive a Championship team to Pittsburgh
He says is "No". it's as clear as day. The first word out of his mouth when the question was posed to him was "No". He bounces around the response afterward simply because he doesn't know if there will be more Navy Seal's training or if the Development team has something else top try out. He probably doesn't want to say something that the media in Pittsburgh will take, twist and use against him. So, why wouldn't a journalist who according to his minions has "ethics" and his place of work would forbid him from releasing fabrications (ya know, because the media has a habit of only allowing the truth to get through), why would he cherry pick and omit the facts that are as clear as day?
Because he doesn't give a **** about the facts. He cares about continuing an agenda that is getting him attention. That is his job. His job is to make the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review money and that happens by getting more and more people reading his columns. He's getting himself a lot of recognition and that in return is getting the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review a lot of action. There's an angry base of fans in Pittsburgh. If something starts to go a sour, those fans get mad. All you need to do is poke the stick in the hornets nest and they will all come out. This is about the only thing Dejan Kovacevic has become good at since he stopped being the Pirates beat writer years ago. He feeds off of anger and anger only wants to hear what angers them, not the opposite. What do you do when the team collapses in August? You push forward some non-issue agenda driven piece about Navy Seal's training. That riles up an already angry and disappointed fan base and gets them to overreact and wrongly tie this training of prospects to the collapse. neither of which had anything to do with each other. Had the Pirates not collapsed in August, nobody would care about the Navy Seal's exercises and I doubt Dejan Kovacevic even releases this useless piece. He had an angry Pirates fan base so the time was ripe. It's good car salesmanship, it's crappy journalism, especially if you are a fan like me that wants to know nothing but facts and the truth and you get cherry picked pieces that leave out everything that debunks your claims.
The unfortunate part of all of this is, that this was a great Pirates Fest. The numbers were huge, the participation was excellent and rather than deal with factual stories or ones that weren't blown completely out of proportion, Management has to answer bogus claims about T.V. contracts and questions about Navy Seal's exercises.
I apologize for any grammatical mistakes you might see. My post education didn't involve being an English major, so I hope you're not disappointed if you see sentences structured incorrectly. We here at PSF do not have the funding for editors to correct our mistakes :D:D
If anyone wants the exact audio from Pirates Fest I can hook you up. There's a lot of laughing by me and Steelreign during it and a little bit of talking over. I had to listen to it a few times to get all of Frank's response out perfectly.