Nick Castellanos is on a tear. Not only is he blasting big home runs, like Thursday night’s game-winner but he’s nailing it with his opinions:

“I would change that ownership doesn’t have any severe consequences for losing for an extended period of time. Just like if we’re in the big leagues and we don’t perform well we get demoted or cut, if their organization didn’t perform well, somebody else would have an opportunity to buy it from them. To you know, keep it to where nobody can really own the game of baseball, cause the game is above is true ownership. But that would never happen.”

He’s asking for promotion and relegation. He doesn’t say those words, but that’s the solution to the problem. It “would never happen,” as he points out, the idea of giving someone else the opportunity to buy the floundering Pirates, but if they continue to suck, send them down to Triple A and watch the fans disappear as Bob Nutting wonders what happened to his balance sheet. Call up the first-place Columbus Clippers and they play Major League Baseball in 2025.

It’s what they do everywhere else in the world. If you suck, you get sent down. If you’re good, you come up. It incentivizes owners to spend and prevents situations like the one Castellanos is talking about it. We don’t do it in Major League Soccer for a variety of legitimate reasons, the main one being that the league isn’t even 30 years old, and some teams might not survive the drop financially, with no guarantee that new ownership can dig them out of it. We’re trying to punish underachievement, not kill off the San Jose Earthquakes entirely. Case in point, you see English teams go from the Premier League to bankruptcy every so often. But it works more often than it does not, and keeps England/France/Spain/Germany from having a Colorado Rockies, Oakland A’s, or Chicago White Sox stinking up the joint. They go play in the second division and the bad owners sell.

Nick Castellanos, you are the man!