As a Pirates fan for more than three decades, let me assure you it is a curse.
An 11-year-old collector in Los Angeles has found one of the rarest cards released in recent history. He pulled a one-of-one Paul Skenes autograph along with the patch he wore from his Major League Baseball debut with the Pittsburgh Pirates.
It’s a card that only gained value as Skenes blew away batters throughout a brilliant rookie season. The former Air Force cadet turned LSU star proved every bit worthy of the hype that followed him to the top of the 2023 MLB Draft. He was an All-Star, finished third in NL Cy Young Award voting and won rookie of the year honors after 170 strikeouts in 133 innings in his pro debut.
That gives the card a value starting in the six figures and likely to rise dramatically from there. The Pirates, however, would like to have it on display in the annals of PNC Park. They’re willing to make a deal; two Skenes autographed jerseys, a chance to take batting practice with the team at spring training and, vitally, 30 (thirty!) years of season tickets behind home plate.
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Livvy Dunne, the LSU gymnast and social media sensation who dates Skenes, has even offered to share her suite with the lucky kid who pulled the card.
You can’t get a straight answer on Pirates season ticket prices from the team’s website (apparently they’ve gone up in recent years in a non-transparent way, which is a wonderful thing to do when you’re a franchise with three postseason wins in the last three decades and want to alienate your remaining die-hard fans). But NL Central rival Milwaukee prices two seats behind home plate at $214 per game. That’s $520,020 in ticket costs for 81 games across 30 years, not counting for inflation.
That’s before you get into the jerseys, chance to ask Dunne about Arabesques or the 30-person softball game you’d get to stage at PNC Park. Those won’t appreciate in value, however, and season tickets for a kid in California probably isn’t super appealing.
Here’s the other rub; those 2,400-plus baseball tickets? They’re to watch the Pittsburgh Pirates.
That’s the same franchise so poorly run its finest tradition is trading away whatever homegrown stars it creates for cheaper parts. It’s got a cheapskate owner as dedicated to casting malaise over a once-proud franchise as he is dismantling his own newsrooms. Skenes is under contract through 2030, but the moment he looks too expensive to retain — which doesn’t take much when your team hasn’t ranked higher than 28th in payroll in a 30-team league since 2020 — he’ll be shipped out for prospects in hopes Pittsburgh can find someone like, well, Paul Skenes.
The Pirates are an organization that puts cheapness above all else. They wallow in mediocrity because championships may bring pride, but not necessarily profit. They drafted Henry Davis, a catcher batting .192 across a meager major league career to date, first overall in 2021 in part because he’d sign a cheaper bonus than any of the other player considered for the top spot. They cut fan favorite Rowdy Tellez four at-bats shy of a $200,000 bonus.
They perennially waste the backdrop of one of professional sports’ true cathedrals by failing to build meaningfully around the young stars they occasionally create. This is a franchise that births hope, only to let it die of neglect over and over again.
An 11-year-old now has a decision to make. Hold on to a card potentially worth millions of dollars? Or subject himself to three decades of misery watching ambition starve in the nicest prison baseball has to offer?
Tough call.
