The chant started small at PNC Park. Then it grew. By mid-season, whenever the Piratas de Pittsburgh fell behind, sections of fans would rise and call it out: Sell the team. Not angry. Not quite. More like a ritual. A statement of fact disguised as a plea.
What makes that chant sting is the math behind it. The Pirates are worth $1.62 billion as of 2026—up 20% from the year before. They reported $48 million in operating income in 2025. That’s real money, clean money, the kind that shows up on a balance sheet. And they did it while fielding one of the thinnest rosters in baseball.
The Profit Without the Wins
Robert Nutting has owned the Pirates since 2007. He has not won a World Series since 1979. He will not win one this year, or next year, or likely any year soon. The team’s payroll sits at the bottom of Major League Baseball—a deliberate choice, not a circumstance.
Yet the franchise is profitable. Wildly so. The Pirates rank 28th in franchise value across all of baseball, but few teams in the lower half of that list generate the kind of operating income the Pirates do. The gap between what comes in and what goes out is wide. The payroll stays low. The stadium still fills, at least enough. The local media—Nutting owns newspapers in Pittsburgh—keeps the team in the conversation.
This is the contradiction that makes fans furious: a team can be a terrible baseball investment and a tremendous financial one at the same time.
Paul Skenes arrived in 2025 as the top overall pick, a generational talent, a reason to believe. He threw hard and he threw often. Fans showed up. But one star pitcher does not make a contender, and the front office showed no signs of building around him. The payroll did not budge. The roster remained thin. By late summer, the chants returned.
The Business Model That Works Too Well
This is not unique to Pittsburgh. Small-market teams have always operated on tighter margins. But the Pirates represent something sharper: a case study in how modern baseball ownership can divorce winning from profit.
The Pirates have a historic ballpark. They have a fan base that shows up even when the team doesn’t try. They have local media under their owner’s control. They have revenue sharing from baseball’s central fund. And they have the discipline—or the willingness—to keep payroll low enough that every dollar of revenue becomes gravy.
Robert Nutting is not breaking any rules. He is not doing anything illegal. He is running the team the way his ownership group decided to run it: as a business that returns money to its owners rather than as a competitive enterprise that chases championships.
The problem, from a fan’s perspective, is that baseball is supposed to be both. The sport has built its entire structure on the assumption that owners want to win. The draft, the salary cap structure, revenue sharing—all of it assumes competitive balance matters. When an owner decides it doesn’t, the system has no answer.
Why It Still Matters in 2026
The chant at PNC Park is not going away. Paul Skenes will pitch. The Pirates will win some games and lose most others. Fans will show up because they always do, and because hope is cheap in April. By July, the chants will return.
What makes this story urgent now is that it is spreading. More owners are learning what Robert Nutting already knows: you can run a profitable team that doesn’t win. You can have a young star pitcher and still cut payroll. You can fill a ballpark and still treat it like an ATM.
The Pirates are not the only example. But they are the clearest one. They prove that the anger fans feel is not about jealousy or entitlement. It is about a simple betrayal: a team that can afford to compete but chooses not to, wrapped in the language of business necessity.
The operating income tells the story. So does the payroll. So does the chant. They all say the same thing: the Piratas de Pittsburgh are working exactly as designed—just not for the fans.
The number: The Pirates reported $48M in operating income in 2025 with baseball’s lowest payroll, proving a team can be highly profitable while refusing to compete.
Ownership data verified as of 2026-08-12.
