Money is not the answer to all of life’s problems. As John, Paul, George and Ringo famously reminded us, it can’t buy you love.
However, in Major League Baseball, it can go a long way towards ensuring a spot in the postseason and a path to the World Series.
A simple comparison of MLB team payrolls and current playoff odds shows what most fans already know. Of the 12 teams that – barring any catastrophic collapses – will fill out this year’s playoff brackets, nine of them are in the top 12 for total payroll, including allocations.
And really, that’s all Pittsburgh Pirates veteran outfielder Andrew McCutchen wants, to play for a team and an owner that make the necessary commitment to building a legitimate shot at winning baseball’s ultimate prize.
“You gotta pay to win, because it’s not always going to be the team that doesn’t spend as much that ends up in the playoffs,” McCutchen recently said to Jose Negron of DK PGH Sports. “Very rarely does that happen. It does happen, but it doesn’t always happen that way. For us, it hasn’t happened. There has to be that. There can’t just be the shot in the dark of, ‘We hope this happens.’ We gotta go out there and make a push.”
Heck, at this stage of his career, having played in 17 seasons and 2,238 regular season games, McCutchen is simply hoping to find out what it feels like to do the whole jumping up and down, hugging at the pitcher’s mound thing that teams often do after getting through a single playoff series.
Andrew McCutchen’s Playoff Dreams Remain Unrealized in Pittsburgh
But that won’t happen this year – at least, not in Pittsburgh, which ranks 27th in payroll. It doesn’t seem likely for next season either.
Currently at 57-74, the Pirates sit 24.0 games behind Milwaukee in the NL Central and 12.5 games out of the third and final wild card spot. With eight more losses in its last 31 games, Pittsburgh will finish with a losing record for the seventh consecutive season and the 29th time in the last 33 years. In 13 of the previous 32 campaigns, the Pirates finished as the worst team in their division, and with a 7-game gap between them and the St. Louis Cardinals, they seem destined to earn that distinction yet again.
Even the most optimistic of Pittsburgh fans had to know that this was the likely outcome in 2025. Unfortunately, it comes down to money, and team owner Bob Nutting’s apparent refusal to put any of it toward improving the on-field product.
It’s not what McCutchen envisioned when he returned to Pittsburgh in 2023, signing the first of three one-year contracts to don the black and gold once again. A beloved figure in the Steel City, McCutchen was a team leader and one-time National League MVP during the Pirates’ brief stretch of winning baseball from 2013 to 2015, and he came back hoping to be part of what appeared to be a team heading in the right direction.
But it hasn’t happened. And for a 38-year-old player who has appeared in only 13 playoff games, winning a trio of wild card contests but never enjoying a series win, McCutchen is left wondering “what if.”
Perhaps the Los Angeles Dodgers can provide him with a positive answer to that question.
MLB Analyst Proposes Andrew McCutchen as a Waiver Wire Pickup for Dodgers
After McCutchen’s recent airing of grievances with the current state of the Pirates, it seems highly unlikely that he would return for 2026. Given Nutting’s penny-pinching ways, Christopher Kline of FanSided suggests that Pittsburgh could release McCutchen, giving him the chance to catch on with a contending team.
A team like the Dodgers, who could use an alternative in left field to the struggling Michael Conforto.
“The only reason Conforto is still logging at-bats every day in L.A. is because the alternatives aren’t any better,” Kline writes. “James Outman was demoted and shipped away. Their current outfield reserves — Buddy Kennedy, Alex Call, Justin Dean — are either woefully inexperienced or just plain unreliable.
“McCutchen is far from his prime self at 38 years old, but he has still slugged 12 home runs with 47 RBI and a solid .715 OPS. He’s one of the few semi-decent hitters on the Pirates roster and he’d bring some legitimate noise to the back half of the Dodgers lineup.”
He would also bring the hunger of a proud veteran who would love to capture that elusive ring.
“I want to win,” McCutchen stressed. “That’s all.”
Dodgers Could Offer Proud Veteran a Way Out of MLB Purgatory