The Pittsburgh Pirates named Frank Coonelly their new president last week, ending the 11-year reign of oafish wire service heir Kevin McClatchy and bringing a new hope to Pittsburgh, which hasn’t seen the Pirates win more than they’ve lost since 1993. This is a really good day for baseball.

Coonelly, one of the most powerful men in baseball, is an interesting choice for this job. Before taking it, he had been general labor counsel for the Office of the Commissioner of Baseball since 1998, and was thus involved in some of the most contentious negotiations the game has seen in its history — addressing issues ranging from steroids to salary caps. Whatever criticisms you can make of central baseball and the players’ union, none of these negotiations led to a strike or a lockout, and so in one sense, this generation of baseball labor lawyers is the most successful the game has ever seen. I’m not surprised to see a blighted franchise turned over to one of its most prominent members.

With the good comes the bad, though, and Coonelly comes to this job with a reputation as baseball commissioner Bud Selig’s bagman. At issue are the various quasi-collusive mechanisms baseball instituted this decade to try to slow spending on free agents and amateurs. After the 2002 and 2003 seasons, there was talk of a central data bank being run out of the commissioner’s office. The way it was said to work was that before making an offer to a free agent, a team was supposed to call Coonelly and let him know what that offer would be. He would then issue them informal guidance on how that offer sat relative to the market (read: other team’s offers). Player agents and the union fumed that this was holding down free agent salaries, and that if it wasn’t technically collusive, it was so close as to make any distinction meaningless.

This has to be seen in context. From 1985 to 1987, baseball owners openly and illegally colluded against free agents by agreeing not to sign them. In 1990, they had to agree to pay $280 million ($456 million in 2007 dollars) to free agents harmed by their actions, and the profound mistrust their illegal conspiracy caused was one of the key factors in the brutal 1994–1995 strike. Thus, anything that even looks like collusion is radioactive in baseball.

Whether or not actual collusion was going on, the union and ownership settled the matter without too much fuss. In 2004, central baseball agreed to keep paper records of any recommendations it made, and sent out a memo stressing to teams that any “advice” given by Coonelly or anyone else from the commissioner’s office regarding salary offers and the market was simply that — advice. Two years later, without admitting any guilt, ownership gave the union $12 million to settle up a few outstanding grievances alleging collusion.

The other controversy in which Coonelly has been involved is the draft slotting system, wherein the commissioner’s office “advises” teams how much each draft pick should be paid, and then harangues them (with Coonelly said to be a chief haranguer) if they spend more than that.

All of this has some fans worried that Bud Selig has just managed to put a mindless flunky in charge of the Pirates, and that Coonelly will, seeking to carry out Selig’s economic policies, continue to run them with the astonishing combination of cheapness and appalling stupidity with which McClatchy ran them for so many years. I suppose this is possible, but it doesn’t seem very likely.

Coonelly is a lawyer whose client was the commissioner. If Coonelly was my tax lawyer, and proved very effective at following my instructions to hide my income in shady Caribbean tax shelters, no one would assume he was shady; they’d simply assume he was good at his job. He deserves the same benefit of the doubt here, especially since coming on as president of the Pirates involves assuming legal obligations to put the interests of his employer ahead of those of, say, people for whom he doesn’t work.

Moreover, Coonelly is universally regarded as having been very, very good at his job, one of the more important in sports. Even were we to assume him to be nothing more than a mindless henchman, why would he give up such power to go carry out illegal orders in one of baseball’s smallest markets? It’s not as if the Pirates would, in Coonelly’s absence, be ruining the sport’s salary structure with wild spending.

One doesn’t have to like the idea of quasi-collusion to admit that the most likely explanation here is simply that Coonelly, a powerful and effective baseball man, has agreed to try and turn around perhaps the game’s least effective franchise. This is a good thing! Pittsburgh is a small city, but the Pirates have a lot going for them. PNC Park is probably the best ballpark in the country. The city has a healthy economy based around fields like biotechnology and education, and can thus attract the high-end patrons who drive revenue growth in today’s game. The Pirates have also been losing fans in the surrounding region to the Cleveland Indians for a decade, simply because they’ve been so bad; a real turnaround would lure those fans back and expand the team’s revenue base. A savvy president who exploits these opportunities isn’t going to turn Pittsburgh into San Francisco or Chicago, but he can certainly build a successful franchise, especially in the game’s worst division.

Coonelly may or may not prove able to take full advantage of what Pittsburgh offers, but if he can identify and hire a reasonably competent general manager and avoid doing anything egregiously stupid, he’ll represent profound improvement over the status quo, and his record suggests he’s capable of a lot more than that. That alone makes him a great hire.

tmarchman@nysun.com