Major(s) fail

My Cruds are eight losses away now, and baseball has meaning again. The Pittsburgh Pirates, America's Reamed, are at 92 losses for the season with 16 games to play, which means if they manage to go .500 the rest of the way -- and past performance indicates this is unlikely -- they'll finish the season with 100 Ls.

This is my pennant race, in other words. When you're my Cruds, you don't aspire to success, and you don't aspire to just any old off-the-rack failure. If you've got any pride at all, or at least a sense of history, you aspire to epic failure.

Because, really, if you're gonna lose, dammit, lose. Ninety-nine losses? Meh. All that would mean is you didn't fail hard enough.

There's been pretty hard failing going on around the majors this summer, in case you haven't noticed. With any bad luck at all, four MLB teams could finish with 100 losses this season: The Cruds, the Baltimore Orioles, the Arizona Diamondbacks and the Texas Rangers.

The O's and 'Backs could hit the magic 100 today, because they each have 99 losses. The Rangers, like the Pirates, have 92 Ls. If both lose like they should in the next two weeks, it'll be the second time in three years MLB has had four 100-loss teams -- and the only reason it didn't last season, probably, is because the season only lasted 60 games thanks to the Bastard Plague.

I don't know what exactly this says about the state of baseball in America, but it's nothing good. Mostly, I suspect, it says revenue-sharing doesn't work very well; the rich keep getting richer, and the poor keep getting poorer but don't really care because they're still getting their cut.

This is certainly what's happening in P-town, where ownership has dropped all pretext and simply functions as a farm team for the haves. Sign prospects, develop them and then, when a handful of them get good enough to demand real money, trade them to the Yankees or Red Sox or Dodgers or Cubs for more prospects. That's the business plan.

It's an absolutely heinous way to run an MLB franchise, especially one that represents one of the game's landmark baseball towns. The home of Roberto Clemente, honored the other day as one of baseball's enduring icons, has become nothing but an ATM for crass opportunists who care nothing for the team or its heritage or its fan base. 

They've got a great ballpark and the TV dough, and so the ballteam, the product itself, doesn't matter. Let all those yinzers in their Clemente jerseys eat cake.

And, yes, I'm as bitter as I sound. When you've got a Clemente jersey hanging in your own closet, these things will happen.

There is a solution, however.

What you do is, you take the last-place teams in each division, and you create a whole new league. Call it Triple-A Plus, and make the six scrubs play one another there until ownership either sells (because there'll be no revenue-sharing jing for the Triple-A Plus teams) or promises a good-faith effort to put a major-league product on the field. 

Only then do you let them back in the majors.

Of course, I imagine Bob Nutting, the Cruds' owner, would find a way around that, too. Pirates fan, thy glass is always half-empty.