We have 700 games with which to evaluate this management group.
Mitch Keller was bad, career swingman Nick Martinez and the Cincinnati Reds shut out the Pittsburgh Pirates through six, third base coach Mike Rabelo made perhaps the worst send of the season with two outs, down by seven in the seventh when he waived 37-year-old Andrew McCutchen bad knees and all to get thrown out at home on a groundball to left even though outfielder Wil Benson had the ball before McCutchen had even touched third, Pirates batters struck out 11 times, Oneil Cruz stamped a 20/20 season with a home run off lefty reliever Brent Suter, Rowdy Tellez snapped an 0-for-very-large-number hitless streak with a two-hit game, the Reds win by a score of a lot to not nearly enough.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Blah, blah, blah. Blah, blah. As if the specific details of how they find ways to lose games has any meaning.
More significantly, it was the 82nd loss of the season, a yearly tradition. The fifth losing season in five years under Ben Cherington. A five-year span worse than any in the infamous drought that lasted from 1993 through 2012, the worst five-year span in franchise history since the 1950s.
They’ve now had exactly 700 games to show something, anything, to prove they’re the right baseball people to run this team. All they’ve shown in half a decade is that they can produce a confusing roster with inadequacies across the board and an alarming lack of ability to identify, acquire, develop or instruct MLB talent. Seen enough of this Mickey Mouse operation yet?
OK, just for the heck of it, let’s look at some people with important jobs here. Let’s start with hitting coach Andy Haines and how an offense that was already very bad, somehow got worse despite getting Oneil Cruz back and Bryan Reynolds returning to All-Star form.
In 2023, the Pirates had a team wRC+ of 89, in 2024 with eight games left to play, it’s 86. From an already bad 26th to an even worse 27th. From 10th-most strikeouts, to fifth-most in baseball (that’s before accounting for the 11 they had last night), with a real chance to set a new franchise record for the most strikeouts in a season, a record set under you guessed it, Andy Haines. Massive regression from Jack Suwinski, a total inability to translate AAA results to the MLB level for a whole host of players, including former number one overall draft pick Henry Davis.
This is all just business as usual for Haines, who has now spent six consecutive seasons as a Major League baseball team’s top hitting instructor, three with the Milwaukee Brewers before being fired and now three with Pittsburgh. In exactly zero of them has an Andy Haines-coached offense finished with a wRC+ of 100 or better. It was bizarre to hire him immediately after a division rival decided he wasn’t good enough, and it’s been even more confounding to watch the exact same team approach issues that got him fired in Milwaukee plague his Pirates tenure without any action from those above him.
OK, how about manager Derek Shelton? Well, he’s been at the helm for collapses in two straight years. The Pirates were in first place in the NL Central as late as June 15 in 2023, and this year, the team was two games over .500 heading into the trade deadline and swiftly imploded after it, including a season-sinking ten-game losing streak. Shelton hasn’t exactly been given a roster of world beaters, but these results matter.
Any argument that his voice is the one that the Pirates need is hard to make given he hasn’t shown in five years to be capable of anything other than keeping a clubhouse from tearing itself apart in lost season after lost season. The team’s consistent poor fundamental play that has contributed to these collapses also can’t be hand waived away.
Then there’s Ben Cherington. When Cherington was hired and he and his staff decided that making the team bad on purpose was just the best path to take, they botched the sell off, trading the majority of the MLB pieces left on the roster for peanuts.
Joe Musgrove, Jameson Taillon, Starling Marte, Josh Bell, Clay Holmes and Adam Fraizer in the years of control they all had left provided a whopping 29 bWAR to their respective clubs, and in return, Ben Cherington and his front office got David Bednar, Endy Rodriguez, Jack Suwinski, Liover Peguero and a bunch of players that aren’t even worth mentioning. Many names have washed out of the organization altogether. An inability to identify and develop talent that has largely defined his tenure.
The General Manager who was brought in to fix the development woes that sunk previous GM Neal Huntington’s front office has managed to create a development pipeline that has produced exactly one MLB OF to date, and it’s Oneil Cruz, a player that was already inside the organization when Cherington arrived who got moved to the OF just last month because the team couldn’t find anyone else to play there.
At 72-82, with a slightly lower winning percentage than last season and a farm that has rapidly moved backward to being Baseball America’s 27th-ranked system, the only possible case that the team has actually moved closer to its alleged goal of competitive baseball this season revolves around Paul Skenes, who they lucked into acquiring via the draft lottery.
Andy Haines’ continued employment is a Ben Cherington issue. Derek Shelton’s continued employment is a Ben Cherington issue. Joe DelliCarri getting promoted to Vice President after years of overseeing bad drafts is a Ben Cherington issue. The subpar hitting development across the system featuring the same issues seen with the MLB club at every level is a Ben Cherington issue. He’s shown nothing to date to warrant any kind of trust to be able to fix these issues.
700 games, 410 losses.
Happy 82 day.