John Perrotto was a guest on Friday’s episode of FanGraphs Audio, and among the subjects addressed by the longtime Pittsburgh Pirates beat writer was the team’s famously parsimonious ownership. The penny-pinching ways date back to the departure of Barry Bonds via free agency in 1992. I asked Perrotto if there was there any chance that the the reigning NL MVP was going to stay in Pittsburgh.“No, the Pirates weren’t going to pay him,” Perrotto said on the podcast. “The picture that has been painted here over the years is [that] Barry hated it in Pittsburgh and couldn’t wait until the minute he could get out of town. That’s not true…. In fact, during the 1992 season — this was some time after the All-Star break, probably in August — I talked to him after a game. Let me set a little background here before I get ahead of myself.
“The two Pittsburgh newspapers were on strike, so you didn’t have as much media as you normally would in the clubhouse after the game,” continued Perrotto, who was covering the team for the suburban Beaver County Times. “He’d been the star of the game… and after we talked about that, I said, ‘Hey, what would it take for you to stay here?,’ thinking he was going to say, ‘I don’t know. That’s something for my agent to discuss.’ [Instead], he goes, ‘Five years/25 million and I’ll sign tomorrow.’ I said, ’Is that on the record?’ He said, ‘Yeah, man. Write it. Five years/25 million and I’ll sign tomorrow.’”
Hall of Fame catcher Ted Simmons was the Pirates GM at the time. Perrotto walked back to the press box, picked up a phone, and called Simmons to pass along what Bonds had said. Simmons — equal parts excited and pleasantly surprised — proceeded to call the team’s president.
“Mark Sauer had been brought in to cut costs.” Perrotto said of the former Pittsburgh executive. “I know people will find this hard to believe, but the Pirates had the sixth-highest payroll in baseball in 1991. They weren’t always cheap; they weren’t always at the bottom of the payroll standings. They did spend money in the early ‘90s, when they won three division titles in the National League East from ’90 to ’92. But they were on a payroll-reduction kick, and Mark Sauer told Ted Simmons, ‘No, we can’t do that.”
Bonds went on to sign a then-record six-year/43.75M contract with the San Francisco Giants in December. As Giants owner Peter Magowan put it at the time, “It’s a lot of money, but there’s only one Barry Bonds.”