Forget any individual cause for any individual loss.
Forget Derek Shelton. Forget whatever perceived bullpen mismanagement you think there is (although that stuff strikes me most of the time as Monday morning quarterbacking). Forget griping about late game pinch hitting decisions. Forget about the hitting coach who has gotten zero results anywhere he’s gone. Forget about the bullpen implosions. Forget about every conceivable individual cause for any of the losses on the now nine-game losing streak that has sent this Pittsburgh Pirates team plummeting into last place in the NL Central.
That doesn’t mean ignoring all of those issues, it means taking a step back and a deep breath and accepting the big picture reality that this roster is not good enough. They lack the talent that it takes to compete.
Scream from the rooftops to fire Shelton and Andy Haines all you want, and I’ve written before that I think both deserve to be, it won’t solve the team’s continuing issues with identifying, acquiring and developing talent. That starts and ends at the very top of baseball operations. It starts with General Manager Ben Cherington.
This isn’t an acceptable place for your organization to be talent wise after a four-year tank job. You go into this sort of operation hoping you’ll come out the other side looking like the Houston Astros or the Baltimore Orioles. Instead, four of the team’s top six players by bWAR are players that were already inside the organization when they initiated the tear down and they’ve been totally unable to assemble a complete roster around that.
Cherington was hired here because he was the development guy, his process was going to fix what was wrong with the Pirates’ pipeline. They were going to stop losing trades, players were going to stop going elsewhere and getting better, and they were going to draft well, and – oh, they’ve done none of that. The farm is currently ranked worse than what they started with.
They traded multiple years of Starling Marte for Liover Peguero who is currently trying to scratch and claw his way to being a replacement level AAA player, multiple years of Jameson Taillon for guys who all busted. Then there’s the players they traded and who got better elsewhere like Clay Holmes (who also had multiple years left) and Robert Stephenson. They traded Tyler Anderson for a can of beans instead of keeping and resigning him, and he’s since gone on to make two All-Star teams in the last three years.
Now headed into year six they’ll need improvement from catcher (20th in wRC+), first base (20th in wRC+), second base (22nd in wRC+), bullpen (25th in ERA), third base (29th in wRC+), center field (29th in wRC+) and right field (30th in wRC+). Ben Cherington will have to do a whole bunch of things correctly that he’s failed at for half a decade now to get this team anywhere close to the stated goal of playoff action.
They didn’t arrive early, they aren’t ‘on track’ for anything next year, and at 56-63, they’re dangerously close to having a lower winning percentage (.471) than where they ended last year (.469). This is what failure looks like, but I’m sure you’re familiar from decades watching this franchise.
So fire Shelton, fire Haines, fire Radley Haddad, fire Mike Rabelo, fire Kevin Roach. Scapegoat whomever you like on the MLB coaching staff, I’m sure they all deserve it, but they’re not the root of the problem that starts at the top of baseball operations.