Editorial: Pirates, politics and accountability

It may have been as much of a surprise to the Pittsburgh Pirates’ faithful fans as it was to their manager, Clint Hurdle when he was fired Sunday.

The announcement came 90 minutes before the Bucs took the field for the PNC Park swan song of a season that was just bad.

But the Pirates management didn’t blame the guys who didn’t hit the ball or didn’t catch it or the guy who wasn’t there to pitch Sunday because he is sitting in jail for child sex charges, or themselves — the guys upstairs who actually make the decisions about who to keep and who to cut and how much to pay.

Sounds a lot like politics.

No matter who is in the driver’s seat — whether in the White House or the governor’s mansion or the Legislature or Congress — there is seldom a push to follow the skid marks to just where the car went off the road.

Instead, the emphasis is on how to sell a narrative.

Just like the Pirates want to show that something has changed and give the impression that putting a new hood ornament on their bus is going to make it drive better, politicians push the idea that the other side is at fault and the people need (insert party here) to fix what is broken.

Let’s be honest. The two parties have been doing all the breaking.

People have to pay more attention to the evidence. There has to be a demand for accountability as a practice instead of as a buzzword. Blame has to be something that is shouldered and not ascribed.

And it should not be bipartisan but nonpartisan.

We do not look at the questionable front-office decision-making of the Pirates and say, “But what about the Yankees?” What the people in blue pinstripes do does not bear on what the black-and-gold decide.

We should do the same with politics, because looking at problems through a partisan lens makes all questions partisan. We should remove party from the equation and judge actions on their own merit.

Politics, like the Pirates organization, would be better off if we all paid attention to the details like a good umpire and called the balls and strikes of bad decisions objectively.