I understand that the Pirates primary concern is player development, but the Spikes have a business to run too. Attendance is still ok, but it’s slipping and the number one complaint from all of the fans is the quality of the home team. It may just be that the two businesses cannot find a way to make it work for both sides. No hard feelings. It’s just business. The Spikes originally became a Pirates affiliate because they were originally owned by the same group that owns the Curve. But since then, the Curve was sold to one of it’s original founders. Also, State College has a fair number of Pirates fans, but I don’t think that really helps attendance, since most of the Pirates fans are pretty cynical about their club’s management. There are as many if not more Phillies fans around here (a lot of glory- hunters, but still). It’s nice to be able to go down to Curve games in Altoona and see former Spikes, but I’d be ok with giving that up if it meant the Spikes had better players to begin with.

The Pirates could maybe help out the Spikes without changing their development strategy by skipping fewer guys past this level or maybe not being so quick to call-up guys from State College to West Virginia. It’s not that much of a change in the standard of play so it wouldn’t really stunt player development by keeping them here two months longer. And guys like Stetson Allie who are still very raw could be kept in the GCL where fan attendance isn’t an issue.

I can’t really comment on the soundness of the Pirates development strategy because the current regime hasn’t been in place long enough to judge the results. I can say that I have seen some cosmetic improvement in the aspects of the Spikes that the Pirates control. For example, in the first year of Pirates affiliation, the guys wore whatever they wanted to around the park. Now they have to always be seen in Spikes or Pirates gear and everyone has to wear their socks the same way. The idea is to push a professional atmosphere, which makes sense. But by the same logic, creating a “culture of winning” and training guys to care about each and every game like it matters sounds like a great idea too, but the Pirates seem to be conceding that that minor league games are just practice.

The perennial favorites in the NYPL are Staten Island and Brooklyn, affiliated with the Yankees and Mets, respectively. They have relatively big stadiums and draw big crowds by trying to win. This isn’t hurting their big league clubs, but of course those teams have totally different financial constraints, or lack thereof, than the Pirates. However, the Indians’ NYPL affiliate won the title not long ago and the Red Sox affiliate in Lowell was terrible last year, so size of the big league team’s market doesn’t necessarily correlate to success on this level.

Acquiring the Wild Things is not really an option because that would mean some existing team in the NYPL would have to fold. None are going to do that voluntarily. Certainly not the Spikes. The Spikes’ stadium is state of the art and it’s a fairly affluent community here that is generally ideal for an NYPL team. In fact, a higher level team could do well here, but that wouldn’t work with the ballpark sharing arrangement the team has with Penn State. The college team/short-season set-up works well. So well that other universities, including WVU, now want to copy it.