There are Major League Baseball teams that can only compete for a couple years at a time or every few years because despite Commissioner Bud Selig’s best efforts to play up the league’s new, pretend “competitive balance” they can’t keep all their good players from leaving for large-budget teams when they reach free agency.

Those teams often overlap with other teams that can’t compete because their ballparks simply don’t produce enough revenue to keep up with the Red Sox and the Yankees, who just successfully bought their latest World Series championship.

Finally, there are teams who might fall into either of the previous categories but who really can only blame their own organizational and management ineptitude.

The Pittsburgh Pirates, as we’ve written before and will write again, have once again fallen into that category. The fans in the Steel City have had little reason for nearly two decades to maintain any optimism about this team, despite ponying up a few years ago to build one of the nicest new ballparks in the country.

Two years ago the Pirates were coming off one of the few promising seasons they’d had – they still posted a losing record but they had several young players at key positions entering 2008. By the All-Star Break in 2009 they had traded or otherwise gotten rid of seven of eight position players and several members of the pitching staff as well.

The 2009 season included trading Nate McLouth for prospects among other transactions that moved players around but did little to show the organization actually has a plan for getting better in the long term.

The Pirates’ latest blunder was non-tendering Matt Capps. Capps is coming off a bad, injury-riddled season no question. But for the three seasons before that Capps put up good-to-great numbers as both a setup man and closer. As he heads into his arbitration years he deserved better from the organization than this sudden boot. And the fans continue to deserve better than an organization that seems unwilling to pay anybody to get into their money years with the team.

I have a friend that grew up in the 1970s who is a huge Pirates fan going back to the days of Willie Stargell and Roberto Clemente. He speculates that the Pirates didn’t want to run the risk that Capps could make $5 million or so in salary. Instead, he thinks, the organization hopes to re-sign the reliever to a contract more along the lines of $2 million.

Good luck with that.

Capps, when healthy, is a proven closer and even if a team doesn’t want to gamble on his health as a 9th inning pitcher he’s put up numbers that will no doubt result in some team offering more than $2 million for him to take a setup role.

If the Pirates thought $5 million – or whatever relative pittance he would have received – was too much, they should have signed him anyway and then put him on the trade block after the All-Star break. This asinine maneuver most likely prevents the Pirates from  getting anything back for someone who, I believe, would have proven to be among their more movable chips at the trade deadline.

But that’s how it goes when you are the Pittsburgh Pirates. They’re the equivalent of the Cincinnati Bengals and Arizona Cardinals of the 1990s in the NFL or the Minnesota Timberwolves of the NBA. It’s a shame – Pittsburgh is a proud city and a great sports town. But the Pirates are a joke – an organization in shambles. And moves such as this prove once again that there is no long-term plan in place at all.

Sorry Pirates fans. At least you have football and hockey to be excited about.