Pittsburgh’s mayor is not hiding the ball on this one. Acrisure Stadium and PNC Park both need work, and Corey O’Connor says Pittsburgh stadium public funding belongs in the conversation. His logic is simple enough. The city pulls tax money out of those two buildings, so keeping them standing is good for everybody.
Fine. Both places opened in 2001. Twenty five years is twenty five years.
I just have a couple of notes before anybody signs anything.
The Building Was Fine Until They Sold the Name
That football stadium was Heinz Field for 21 years. Nobody complained. Nobody wrote stories about the seats. It was a big gray horseshoe on the river, it was freezing in December, and everybody loved it.
They sold the name in 2022. What changed?
Since then the place has been falling apart in public. Seats started rusting loose from the concrete. Some of them stopped opening at all. The accessible seating broke. Last October, Aaron Rodgers took one look at the grass and called the field borderline unplayable, and players on both sidelines backed him up. The league heard about it. New sod showed up fast.
Now there is a $17.8 million project running to replace the seats by 2028.
Twenty one years with a ketchup bottle on the sign, ZERO problems. Change the name and the whole thing turns into a fixer upper.
I know that is not how concrete works. The building does not care who is paying for the sign. But the timing is still funny to me..
What Pittsburgh Stadium Public Funding Should Actually Buy
The Steelers side of this I can live with.
Say what you want about the Rooneys. They put a product on that field. The place is full every Sunday. They are in the playoff conversation most years. There are six trophies in the building. When they walk in and say the seats are rusting off the concrete and the grass got a national quarterback’s attention, the city can have that talk with a straight face.
The Pirates are a completely different animal.
Bob Nutting Has Not Earned the Meeting
Bob Nutting has not put a winning team on that field since 2018. Seven straight losing seasons. This year sits at 61-66, so the eighth one is basically in the mail..
PNC Park might be the prettiest ballpark in America, and it has been half empty for most of a decade. That is not the ballpark’s fault. The ballpark has never once dropped a fly ball or refused to sign a free agent.
So somebody explain this to me. Why does the guy with seven straight losing seasons get to sit at the table and talk about who pays for new bullpen benches?
The answer you will hear is that PNC Park is a public asset, and that is true. It is. But a public asset with a tenant who will not spend is still a bad deal for the people paying.
WIN FIRST.
That is the entire ask. Put a real team out there three years in a row. Give the city actual September baseball. Let people see a packed house on a Tuesday night in August instead of a few thousand and a lot of empty green. Then come back and we can talk about the clubhouse.
The Lease Clock Is the Only Real Leverage
Here is the part nobody in Pittsburgh should sleep through.
The Pirates lease runs out in 2030. The Steelers lease runs out in 2031. That is it. That is the leverage. A city gets that moment roughly once every thirty years, and most cities completely waste it. They panic about the team leaving, they write the check, and all they get back is a promise to stick around.
Pittsburgh is not in danger here. O’Connor already said the Steelers stay in the city as long as he is mayor. (He is probably right.) And the Pirates have a lease, a ballpark on a river nobody is replacing, and an owner allergic to spending money. Where exactly is he going?
So use it. That is what leverage is for.
Fix the football stadium. Get the seats right, get the field right before somebody tears something up on it, and let the Steelers pay their share the way they always have.
But when the Pirates side of the table slides a number across, the answer should be the same thing Pirates fans have been muttering every September for eight years. Show me something first..
