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

 

It Looks Like Baseball Is Coming Back!

During these last several months, we have all wanted to see our favorite team sports in the worst possible way, and if you have been following the negotiations between MLB owners and players these last two months, you know that that is exactly how MLB has arrived at an agreement to stage a season:  In just about the worst possible way.

What we are going to get is a sixty game season.  As I understand it, each team will play forty games within their own division, and four games each with teams in the other league's corresponding division (NL East vs. AL East etc). Still not sure if  the playoff fields will be expanded from 10 to 12 or 14.  Looks like they're gonna make it up as they go along.  We get the DH across the board, which I like.  We also get extra innings starting with a runner on second base, which I am not so sure about.  No world about double headers with seven inning games. But you know what?  If ever there was a year to throw anything, and I mean anything, up against the wall, then a sixty game pandemic shortened season is it.  Hell, institute a mercy rule while you're at it.

While I said last week that I fall into the category of "I Don't Care" if there is a season, I also fall into a sub-category.  Call it "I Don't Care, But Now As Long As They're Going To Play, I'll Look Forward To Watching The Pirates Again."

I will also tell you the one guy for whom I am really happy.  Pirates new manager Derek Shelton.

I mean, here was a guy who has waited his whole life to get his shot at being a major league manager, only to see it waylaid by the unimaginable circumstances of the corona virus pandemic.  I will be really happy to see him get the chance to finally walk a lineup card out to an umpire as a Manager in the Big Leagues.  He has been  regular weekly guest over the last three months with Ron Cook and Joe Starkey on 93.7 The Fan, and he seems like a genuinely good guy.  As a Pirates fan, I hope that he succeeds beyond all of our wildest expectations.  Working for Bob Nutting's Pirates, he's going to need a lot of luck.

Let's hope that we can all get some joy out of this bastardized season of Major League Baseball.  Enjoy it while we can before those negotiations for a new CBA begin in 2021, because we all know how really, really ugly those are going to be.

#letsgobucs #raisethejollyroger 

The Week 13 GPR , plus Pirates and Pitt Thoughts

As you have all no doubt been on the edge of your seats awaiting this, here are the Grandstander Power Rankings for the NFL after Week #13:

1. Ravens
2. Seahawks
3. Saints
4. 49'ers

Knocking at the door....Bills, Chiefs, Packers, Patriots, Vikings.

No change in the Top Four teams from last week, but the Saints and 49'ers swapped places.  I wanted to put the Steelers as a team "knocking at the door", but I'm just not ready to do that quite yet.  If I was going on defense alone, they might be in the Top Four.

My pal John Frissora has his FGE top four as follows:

1. Saints
2. Ravens
3. Seahawks
4. Patriots

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The Pittsburgh Pirates were in the news last week with the announcement that Derek Shelton will be their new manager.

In a manner that was so typically Pirates-like, they made this announcement on Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving when most people, if they were thinking about sports at all, they were thinking about football, and they did it via a press release, and Shelton wasn't even here in town for the announcement.  

Way to get the maximum publicity bang for the buck, Bucs.  Why didn't they just wait until Christmas morning to make the announcement?

Shelton will be formally introduced to the media and to Pittsburgh at a presser on Wednesday (tomorrow) of this week.

Shelton spent the last two years as bench coach of the Twins and, prior to that, was the hitting coach of the Rays for several years.  He combines, according to the press release, both old school baseball knowledge and familiarity with new age analytics/metrics 21st century baseball acumen.  Personally, I am glad the the Pirates went outside of the box and brought in a new face and not some retread who has been hired-and-fired by several teams (Jeff Bannister, e.g.).  Is he the right guy for the Pirates?  Who knows?  

The former Best Management Team In Baseball has now been overhauled and replaced and the BMTIB 2.0 (Williams, Cherington, Shelton) is now on board, but Bob Nutting is still the guy steering the ship and controlling the purse strings.  One thing that the Nutting Administration has done is make me a complete and total cynic when it comes to the performance of the Pirates.  I hate that this is what they have turned me into, but there you are.  I hope, I really, really hope for good things ahead for the Pirates, but I am no longer accepting anything from 115 Federal Street on blind faith.  They've got to show it to me.

********

Pitt ended it's 2019 football season by laying two colossal eggs, a 28-0 did-they-even-show-up? loss at Virginia Tech (when a chance for the division title was still there) and a 26-19 loss to Boston College at home on Senior Day. They finish the season at 7-5 with some nondescript to-be-announced bowl game ahead of them.

This is the year-by-year W-L record for Pitt in the Pat Narduzzi Era...8-5, 8-5, 5-7, 7-7, 7-5 = 35-29 (.555).  In ACC play, they have fared slightly better under HCPN...6-2, 5-3, 3-5, 6-3, 4-4 = 24-17 (.585).  

They have won more games than they have lost, they have more often than not put an entertaining product on the field, and there was that ACC Championship game appearance last year, but... Yes, there is always a "but", and it was posed by Joe Starkey and Ron Cook on The Fan yesterday, and that is..."Has the Pitt program improved or moved forward under the HCPN regime?"

I guess it all comes down to what you want your University and its athletic teams to be.   I wonder if even the staunchest Panthers Fanatic out there would like his or her University to surrender its soul to the likes of Nick Saben or Urban Meyer and all that that entails just to have a string of double digit wins seasons.  Be careful what you wish for.

And bring on the Mienecke Car Care Pizza Pizza Weedeater Bowl!