Albert Belle on Pirates mistake on Paul Skenes

The former slugger joins the Bret Boone podcast

Transcript

00:00And then the interesting story, I think, is Pittsburgh.

00:04You know, what are they gonna do?

00:06And then when you look at the Pirates,

00:09and they kind of like shot themselves in the foot.

00:13I know why you didn't want Skeens to start the season.

00:17You know, he missed eight starts

00:19because you wanted to push everything back,

00:21his arbitration and his freedom seat.

00:25Obviously, he should have started, you know,

00:27the season with the big league team.

00:29But they're at 500, and he's missed eight starts.

00:33Their leading guy has 19.

00:35He has 11.

00:37And they have a pretty good winning percentage

00:39in his starts, his 11 starts.

00:41So if you have those eight starts and say,

00:44okay, if we would have won four of those games

00:48had he got his 18 starts, we'd be at 52 and 44.

00:53So we'd be pretty much, we'd be in a good, nice position.

00:57We wouldn't be that far behind the Brewers.

01:00And we'd be looking at a nice little wild card spot

01:02with a chance of winning division.

01:04And possibly, you know, you're gonna have to go out

01:07and make a deal at the trade deadline.

01:08So I understand what they were doing

01:11from a financial standpoint,

01:13but I think it's gonna take a miracle

01:17for them to pull that off

01:19and try to get a playoff spot or win a division.

01:22But they should have definitely have been in better contention

01:25had they had Paul Steves up at the start of the year.