PITTSBURGH — I can't be the only one confused here.

Two local publications have posted fresh stories on the Pirates' finances — and have come to violently different conclusions.

The Post-Gazette's Mark Belko reported that the Pirates are profitable and could easily be spending more on players.

Dejan Kovacevic also reported on his site that the Pirates are losing money and have "taken on debt the past couple of years, including 2024."

Both are fascinating deep dives.

Both are also stocked with enough financial minutiae to make your head spin like a Paul Skenes splinker.

The bottom line for me: If the finances are as challenging as these stories claim, why hasn't Bob Nutting sold the team? What's in this for him?

If he's actually interested in winning, then why isn't Nutting already fighting Major League Baseball before the current collective bargaining agreement expires on Dec. 1, 2026?

And why wasn't he first in the protest line before the last CBA was ratified in 2022? To the contrary, he quietly signed off on it.

It seems awfully curious that Nutting would put himself through such financial hardship every year if there wasn't something in it for him. And again, if the Pirates are in such a disadvantageous position that even reaching, say, a payroll of $100 million would leave their business model in jeopardy, as team president Travis Williams suggests in the Post-Gazette piece, why isn't Nutting fighting MLB tooth and nail to improve the situation?

See, despite the differing conclusions of these two stories, there was a shared theme: Both, in part, painted the Pirates as a financially stressed organization. Kovacevic's piece reported that as literally true, and the Pirates portrayed themselves as such in Belko's piece, even if others decidedly did not.

Belko quoted several baseball observers, including Rob Mains of Baseball Prospectus, and wrote this: "In its latest Business of Baseball tallies, Forbes ranked the Pirates as the third-most profitable team in the major leagues in 2023, with a net operating income of $68 million."

Belko added, "If the Pirates are, in fact, able to cover payroll using mainly ticket and concession revenues, that tells Mr. Mains that 'they are not as aggressive in expanding payroll as other teams are who are able to preserve profitability.' "

"They could increase payroll and still make money," Mains said.

Belko then quoted Williams disputing those Forbes estimates, calling them "patently wrong." What's more, as Belko writes, Williams rejects the notion of increasing payroll with the goal of generating revenue for more spending, saying it's "not a sustainable business model and not responsible, either."

Yes, that is the Pirates themselves saying that modestly increasing their sickly, bottom-feeding payroll is "not a sustainable business model."

In other words, they consider themselves to be financially stressed. Kovacevic's report says that they are in debt.

So again, I ask: If that is true, why hasn't Nutting sold for a billion dollars or more (the going rate even for a smaller market franchise such as the Kansas City Royals)? If Pirates struggle year to year with all their many ancillary costs, and if raising the payroll would literally jeopardize their business model, and if Nutting isn't making money, what's in this for him?

Let's pretend for a moment that winning is paramount, that Nutting is putting himself through all this because he wants to bring Pittsburgh a winner.

If so, then he should be hammering MLB every chance he gets.

He should be shaming them. He should be staging a hunger strike on the top of Mt. Washington, shouting to the world that MLB needs a salary cap and that MLB's financial system is wrecking this proud franchise and others like it and that he has no chance to win. He should have been doing that for years heading into the last CBA.

But he wasn't doing that, was he?

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