Pirates Once Again Prove They're Trash by Suspending Retirement Benefits for Baseball Operations Employees

The Pittsburgh Pirates have been known as one of the cheapest franchises in all of sports for years. The team routinely trades away top talent in order to keep what seems like a perpetual rebuild in place.

The latest news surrounding the team fits into this category, sadly, as ownership has reportedly stopped contributing to employee retirement plans during the league's hiatus. Just another stingy move for an ownership group that clearly only cares about the bottom line.

The worst thing about this is that it could start a chain reaction across the league. It only takes one owner to make a move before others can cite is as reasoning to do the same. Another major problem, as Ken Rosenthal points out, is that teams could keep the changes in place once everything gets back to normal again.

One argument is that the team is losing revenue and cuts unfortunately have to be made. However, Nutting is a billionaire and isn't going to go under if he continued to match retirement benefits for an extra couple months.

Sometimes doing the right thing is more important than maintaining that net worth, but the Pirates wouldn't understand that, would they?