Pittsburgh Pirates manager Derek Shelton is held in the canoe in a baseball match against the Padres de San Diego in Pittsburgh, Friday May 2, 2025. (AP Photo / Gene J. Puskar)
Pittsburgh – Derek Shelton was strong when he was presented before his sixth opening match as Pittsburgh Pirates Manager last month. He rocked it the next day, attributing the reaction to the understandable frustration of a database of tired fans of a reset to the scale of the franchise that looks and feels blocked.
The man who arrived in spring training by saying that it was time to win promised to clean it. A little more than a month later, the hazarding hackers in the middle of a wave of missteps on and off the field, Shelton was out of work.
Pittsburgh dismissed Shelton Thursday, the director general of the decision Ben Cherington – who hired Shelton for months after taking control of the club's baseball operations in 2019 – called difficult but necessary to recover a season dangerously close to being finished before the Memorial Day.
“We are not doing the way we need it,” said Cherington a few hours after Shelton became the first manager of the Major League in tears this year. “We are not playing in a way that our fans deserve. We know that we must be better.”
This decision came with Pittsburgh mired in a sequence of seven consecutive and languid defeats at 12-26 in total. Shelton went 306-440 in five seasons and more with the pirates. He sailed in the first days of the reconstruction of Cherington with good humor and thanks, but had trouble finding the right buttons to press a small market team that has little margin of error.
The longtime bench coach and former major feature, Don Kelly, will take over for the rest of the 2025 season, a full moment for the native of Pittsburgh. Cherington called Kelly “an elite human being and a teammate” with a “professor's heart”.
These skills appear to the test while supervising a program that ranks among the worst majors in almost all major offensive categories.
Cherington was quick not to put the burden for the failure of the team entirely on Shelton. The managing director who won a world series with Boston a dozen years ago said on several occasions that he was “more responsible than anyone”.
Perhaps, but Cherington will show up to work on Friday as usual when the pirates open a series of three-game weekends against Atlanta. Shelton, which would be in the last season of an extension of the contract he signed in 2023 during a departure of 20-8 which turned out to be a mirage, he looks from far away, if he looks at all.
This is not what imagined the start of the season.
The pirates, classified 26th of the 30 MLB teams in the wage bill of the opening day, hoped to take a step towards affirmations with the recruit of the National League, Paul Skenes in mind.
Although the starting rotation in general was stable, the largely inept offensive of Pittsburgh was a problem. A 2-1 defeat against St. Louis Tuesday encapsulated the season of Skenes and Pirates. One of the brilliant young stars of the game made a single error in six rounds. It was all the cardinals had to earn a night in Pittsburgh when he only managed four strokes.
St. Louis finished the scan of three games less than 24 hours later in a 5-0 victory in which the pirates showed little life. This was enough in Cherington to recommend the owner Bob Nutting and the president of the Travis Williams team that it was time to change.
Nutting described the first six weeks of Pittsburgh in the season “frustrating and painful”.
What he should not have been, perhaps, is surprising.
The team did little during the offseason to address an offense which was the main culprit in an August fainting which abandoned the hackers of the competition in the playoffs.
Rather than finding a way to make a significant investment in tested major league talents, Cherington has rather reasted parts of coaches staff and the scouting department, including the strike coach Andy Haines and replace him with Matt Hague. The modest movements of the team staff included bringing it back to the Andrew McCutchen franchise icon, the acquisition of the first Spencer Horwitz goal and the taking of one -year leaflets on the veterans Tommy Pham and Adam Frazier on the eve of spring training.
McCutchen remains one of Pittsburgh's most productive strikers, even at 38. Pham, meanwhile, beats. Frazier is at .229 and Horwitz is currently with minors by rehabilitating a wrist injury that he suffered shortly after arriving in the team.
Pittsburgh finds himself in the same position offensively, it was a season ago. Cherington compared the first 38 games of the team “A Perfect Storm”, but tried to express optimism, both in its ability to bounce back and to its own long -term perspectives.
“I don't think you had to taste them too hard to see a better team in 2025, I really don't,” he said. “I am not blind to the fact that we have ourselves in a hole and we were able to get out of this. No way to do so but land at the time. We all have this goal. ”
When he was asked if he still considers himself as the right person to direct the pirates of a desert in which they are in most of the last 30 years – with the exception of the period of 2013-2015 when McCutchen led a brief Renaissance – Cherington hosted his head.
“I know there is frustration-and perhaps anger-that it has not yet happened,” he said. “I think it will happen. I believe that for strongly, I will be part of the realization. I have a lot of confidence in our baseball operations group. We have to get better. I know it. Period.”
