The Pirates 35 Games In (21.6% of the Season)

The Pittsburgh Pirates have now played 35 games, or 21/6% of the 2-25 season.

They are 12-23 and on pace to lose 105 games.

The only teams with worse records are the White Sox (on pace for 114 losses), and the Rockies, who are, incredibly, on pace to lose 133 games)..

They have been shut out 6 times, most in MLB.

They rank 26th out of 30 teams in run differential.

They routinely trot out starting line-ups with three, four, or five guys hitting BELOW .200. 

They continue to make boneheaded base running mistakes, the outfielders routinely throw to the wrong base.  Oneil Cruz in CF is making Dave Kingman look like a Gold Glove outfielder by comparison. (For you kids out there, I consider Dave Kingman the worst defensive outfielder I have ever seen.  Many will agree with me.)

A case could be made that their best player is (still) Andrew McCutchen who is now 38 years old.

After falling into a once-in-a-generation pitcher in Paul Skenes, GM Ben Cherington beefed up the team around him this past off season by signing two washed up free agents, Adam Frazier (current BA: .227) and Tommy Pham (..184), and trading for a first baseman named Spencer Horwitz, who showed up in Spring Training needing arm surgery and has yet to play a game

They have a team loaded with utility infielders, but nobody can seem to play short stop.

They have the demeanor and the body language of a team that has flat out given up, four weeks before Memorial Day.

I could go on, but you get the idea.  The biggest question to date is this:  Why are these two guys still employed?

Sheltie and Ben C

We all know that the owner Bob Nutting is a cheapskate money grubber and won't spend money, but other teams with small budgets and cheap owners have been able to compete.  We will stipulate that Nutting deserves the fires of Hell when his time comes, but what about GM Ben Cherington and Manager Derek Shelton? They have been in place for six seasons now and the team is no further along than they were after the 2019 season when the Coonelly/Huntington/Hurdle team went away, and let me remind you that those guys steered the team to the post-season three years in a row before Nutting's penury caused that team to fizzle. 

ABOUT NINE HOURS LATER

Okay, I was interrupted as I was typing this post this morning and found myself busy with other matters all day until now.  (It is 8:50 PM).  The Pirates are playing the Cardinals in St. Louis and held leads of 2-0 and 3-2, but now trail the Cardinals 6-3 in the seventh inning, so I am figuring to Hell with trying to finish this other than by saying how much I look forward to Sheltie's post-game bon mots where he will say things like :we're just not getting it done" and "we just have to work a little harder"

Like I said, why are GMBC and Sheltie still on the job.

It has already been a long season, and it is only going together longer.

Sheltie's Future - What Should It Be?

As we all anxiously await the start of an NFL Sunday, let me take a few paragraphs to contemplate the fate of the woeful (is there any other word for them?) Pittsburgh Pirates and, more specifically, their field manager, Derek Shelton, aka, "Sheltie".

"What, me worry?"

A season that held such hope for a post season berth - right up until a dreadful ten game losing streak in at the beginning of August and has spiraled down ever since - will end one week from today with the twenty-eighth losing season over the last thirty-two years.  The management team of GM Ben Cherington and his hand-picked manager has yet to put together anything even resembling a winning season, and one could argue that this five year rebuild has resulted in nothing but the team running in place and with little hope for turning things around come 2025.

In almost any business, this would call for some significant, if not drastic, changes.  In sports, the obvious fall guy would be the manager or head coach.  We are looking at you, Sheltie.   One could make a case that in the analytics driven sport that MLB has become, the field manager makes very little difference.  His roster, his starting line-ups, and pitching rotation are dictated mainly by the Suits that sit at their laptops and tell the manager what the algorithms decree.  So, some say, Derek Shelton has very little to do with how the team is run, and even John McGraw, Miller Huggins, Leo Durocher, and Danny Murtaugh put together wouldn't be able to make chicken salad out of the chicken shit that the Pirates have put in uniforms over these past five seasons.  

I would agree with this up to a point.  Once the game starts, it is the manager who makes the in-game decisions, even though many may come from the binders that the analytics guys have given him.  It is on this point where I believe that Shelton has come up short.  Woefully short, in some instances.  Also, and I really think that this is the critical factor, at some point players just plain tune out and STOP LISTENING to whatever the manager (or head coach) is saying night after night.   That is what I believe has happened to the Pirates in 2024, and that is why a change needs to be made.  A fresh voce needs to be installed in the manager's office at PNC Park.

Of course, GMBC has already stated that Shelton will be the guy to manage the Pirates in 2025, so it would seem that the only way for Sheltie to go would be for Cherington to go as well.  Cherington's failures as a GM are also many, but that would require more paragraphs than I am willing to write as Steelers kickoff time nears.  The guy who would make that decision would be team owner Bob Nutting, aka, the worst owner in all of Pittsburgh Sports Franchises History.  Both Cherington and Shelton are in the midst of multi-year contracts, and the thought of Nutting firing them both and paying them multi-millions of dollars to not work  for him is, well, that just ain't gonna happen.

So we wait to see if the Pirates can go 4-3 over their last seven games (1 with the Reds, 3 with the Brewers, and 3 with the Yankees) just to see if that can EQUAL last season's dismal 76-86 record.  Then the season will end and we Buccos fans will have no real positive things to look forward to in 2025, other than the games that Paul Skenes starts.

The Katzenjammer Kids

 

GMBC Acts - Finally

New Pirates General Manager Ben Cherington made his first significant move, player personnel-wise (the signings of two sub-.200 hitting catchers and an outfielder DFA'd by the Rays don't count), as Bucco GM when he traded outfielder Starling Marte, 31 and scheduled to make $11.5 million in 2020, to the Arizona Diamondbacks for shortstop Liover Peguero and pitcher Brennan Malone, both players are highly touted prospects in the D'backs organization and are both 19 years of age.

Marte, the last remaining Pirate from the 2013-15 playoff teams, is coming off of his best season, and he should bolster the Arizona line up, but, at age 31, he could soon be hitting the wall and starting to see a decline in his skills.  Peguero and Malone, if they end up helping the Pirates at all, don't figure to be able to do so until at least the latter half of the 2022 season, at the earliest.

It is a trade that makes sense, kind of, for a team that knows it's going nowhere in the immediate present and needs to build for the future.  The Pirates, of course, aren't saying that.   The new regime is telling us that they do not need to go into a rebuilding mode, that they feel that they can compete now. Yes, the team that lost 97 games last year, they are ready to go to the post with THAT team, minus Marte, of course.

And that $10 million in salary that they jettisoned yesterday (the Pirates agreed to pay $1.5 million of Marte's '20 salary) will pretty much cover what Bob Nutting owes Clint Hurdle and Neal Huntington over the next two years, so that's good news for BN's bottom line.  No small consideration down there on Federal Street.

One of my gripes with Neal Huntington was that he always thought that he was the smartest guy in the baseball universe, and that we, the Pirates Fan Base, was stupid, so he continued to insult our intelligence with his wordy pronouncements.  I really and truly want to keep an open mind about the Williams-Cherington-Shelton team, but please, please don't tell me fabrications about the prospects of this team NOW, in 2020, if the real plan is to start from scratch and rebuild for a better future two, three or four years down the road.

As for Starling Marte, he was and is a talented player, although he never reached the Five Tool heights that were predicted for him, and his tendency to suffer mental lapses and appear lackadaisical way too often were maddening.  The case can be made that he was the Pirates best player this past season, and they are a poorer team today than they were yesterday now that he is gone.   Still, the Pirates finished in last place and lost 97 games with him last year, so they can easily do the same without him this year.

However, they don't play a game that counts until March 26, so who knows what rabbits Cherington may be able to pull out of his hat between now and then, but a wise gambler should probably take this opportunity to head on down to the Rivers or Meadows Sports books or one of his online gambling apps and bet heavily on the UNDER for Bucco wins in 2020.

Welcome GMBC

GMBC, the New Guy

Word leaked out over the weekend that the Pirates will be hiring Ben Cherington as their new General manager.  The hiring will be formally announced at a Noon presser at PNC Park today.

Cherington, who now assumes the social media acronym among us Pirates yakkers of GMBC, spent the last two seasons in the Toronto Blue Jays front office.  Prior to that, he served as GM of the Boston Red Sox.  During that period, he added a notation to his resume that no Pirates GM has had in several generations: He was the GM responsible for fielding a team that won a World Series (2013).

Cherington's credentials are a mile long, and he certainly seems to be a good hire for the Pirates at this moment.  Unfortunately, the Pirates' front office, in the person of principal owner Bob Nutting, has screwed the pooch so often in the last four years, that it is hard to get excited about anything that they do.  Thanks for that, Mr. Nutting.

But let us give the new guy a clean slate upon which to write and see what he can do.  He did it in Boston when billionaire owner John Henry was writing the checks.  Good luck to him with Nutting setting the fiscal policy of the franchise.  He's going to need it.