ATLANTA -- Paul Skenes was put to work on his day off, placing a headset over his cap to partake in the broadcast of the Pirates' eventual 4-2 beating of the Braves in this Sunday series finale at Truist Park and ... oh, it's better to just press play:
ONEIL CRUZ JUST LAUNCHED A 117.3 MPH MISSILE TO GIVE THE PIRATES THE LEAD
— Platinum Ke’Bryan (@PlatinumKey13) June 30, 2024
Paul Skenes: "Let's GO."
452 feet, HR in 30/30 ballparks pic.twitter.com/69ULhkSeTM
LET'S GET ROWDY!!!!
— Platinum Ke’Bryan (@PlatinumKey13) June 30, 2024
Keep Paul Skenes on the broadcast the whole game
108.9 MPH exit velocity, 421 feet, HR in 30/30 ballparks pic.twitter.com/FvvViwLxzZ
"Yeah," Skenes would reply when the play-by-play guy cracked that he might want to hang around for the next inning. "Just keep me on forever."
And as he spoke, several small objects were being sprayed into his face.
I had to ask.
"Sunflower seeds," Skenes informed.
Thrown by?
"Jones."
Of course. Jared Jones, the Perry the Platypus to Skenes' Doofenshmirtz with these two relentlessly pecking away at each other, though it'd been tough to tell since Jones never made it onto the screen.
"That's because he's too short," Skenes replied while scanning the clubhouse for Jones, who'd been seated at his stall too far away to hear but, upon making visual contact, not too far to raise one eyebrow as if to sense his name and/or stature were being taken in vain.
Beautiful.
Look, I don’t know where this is headed. Any of it. At least beyond Skenes and Jones being a blast both on and off the field.
These Pirates haven’t been good, but they also haven’t been bad. They’ve had plenty of disappointments, but also pleasant surprises.
That’s how a team gets stuck like a sardine in suck-the-air-out standings like these:
MLB
Could go one-way, could go the other. Could surge into the playoffs, could sink into a lottery pick.
As I see it, there’ve been all of three consistent factors throughout this 2024 season that just passed its midpoint here this weekend,:
1. The owner's cheap.
Oh, I know, Bob Nutting's for-real authorized Ben Cherington to spend significantly more than what he's spending. But last time I checked, all of Nutting’s various titles afford him the luxury of telling anyone in his power structure to do whatever he pleases. If he wanted a higher payroll, as far back as Christmas, he could’ve had one with the figurative snap of a finger.
As it is, the payroll's the same now as it was then.
2. The GM’s in a state of stasis.
As Cherington casually reminds us on a weekly basis, nothing matters to him more in the moment than ... doing nothing.
The latest gem from his weekly radio show on this day: “We're relying on young players, and we're always going to do that here in Pittsburgh," spoke the executive presiding over a lineup that's got a 29-year-old as by far his best hitter in Bryan Reynolds, a 37-year-old at leadoff in Andrew McCutchen, a 35-year-old at No. 1 catcher in Yasmani Grandal and, just for kicks, a 28-year-old journeyman with a .653 OPS at cleanup in Edward Olivares. "That's really important. We embrace that. It's exciting. It's a part of what we're gonna do as a team."
Eventually, I guess. Not in Year 5.
Oh, and this one, too: “I truly believe the current group of position players can be better in the second half of the season than they were in the first. And we need to sell out to that because the numbers say that, if that group improves, it's still going to make a bigger impact than any single external acquisition we can make.”
Well ... yeah, because there are 26 players on the active roster, and he's not about to add 26.
I can't on this anymore. Just can't.
3. The manager's been ... OK?
(Ducks for cover.)
Let's get this on the record first: No one in this line of work's been more critical of Derek Shelton than I have, especially over the past couple years, when the winning -- and a winning approach -- was supposed to finally take root.
And for sure, my stances against some of his managing stand, right through this weekend. I don't like his lineups, albeit while recognizing that lineups in and of themselves aren't that important. I don't like his bullpen usage a lot of the time. I don't like what I perceive as his lack of awareness. Deploying Colin Holderman in a blowout loss here Friday night, just because "he needed to get some work," as Shelton explained, almost came back to bite him in an ugly way on this day when the Pirates had to hold their collective breath through two innings of Kyle Nicolas to get to Carmen Mlodzinski and Aroldis Chapman for the save. If Nicolas doesn't surprise everyone and put up two zeroes, it's all anyone would be griping about.
But, that said ...
"It's definitely a good group of guys, and a good feel in here," Grandal was telling me after this. "We understand we're gonna have ups and downs, but we need to make sure that, when we have those downs, we get out of them as fast as possible."
Right. That.
Know how I'm always referencing that there hasn't been a three-game winning streak since early May? And only three all season?
OK, the flip side's that there also hasn't been a three-game losing streak since early May?
That's hardly cause for celebration, but what Grandal described happens to represent a massive percentage of a manager's challenge, as anyone in the baseball community would attest. The owner carries the wallet, the GM constructs the roster, the coaches instruct and implement fundamentals, and the manager ... more than anything, sets the tone.
I'll never forget, as a cub reporter on the beat, asking Lloyd McClendon once before a game in Cincinnati to identify his leader in the clubhouse.
The big man's reply: "You're looking at him."
Shelton doesn't show much emotion, which still has some fans hilariously comparing him to John Russell -- they couldn't be more different if they'd hail from separate solar systems -- and he doesn't cuss out or even criticize his players in public, which still has some older fans contrasting him to Jim Leyland, even though Leyland himself has expressed strong regret over his famous Barry Bonds tirade, flipping food tables and the like. And in this sense, he's very much a manager for 2024, a combination of free, fun spirit who prefers a light, friendly approach to reminding players when they've screwed up, as well as one who'll legitimately go at his players when people like me aren't around to record it.
Like it or not, it's not 1965 anymore. Going nutso won't work with this generation of professional athletes anymore than it does in pretty much any walk of life.
This does work, though:
One for the record books. pic.twitter.com/Iv69juzR2S
— Pittsburgh Pirates (@Pirates) June 30, 2024
That's cool. Chapman will remember that. He'll take the ball for Shelton. He'll battle for him.
Don't dare downplay or dismiss that. Because it's everywhere within this group.
Again, it isn't the manager who signs Rowdy Tellez as a free agent. But it's the manager who has no choice but to stick by him through the ugliest struggle of his baseball life, and it's the manager -- among others -- who Tellez credited for a .333/.380/.545 resurrection in June.
"My teammates, the staff stuck by me. I don't think I ever lost confidence in that," Tellez would say after his two-run home run in the fourth inning, after Cruz’s had given the Pirates the lead for good. "It's hard not to see the writing on the wall sometimes. And I think, as a pro athlete, if you don't understand that, if you don't think that at some point the worst can happen, then I think you kind of lose sight of that drive.”
Shelton wouldn't let him go. I witnessed it myself. He kept Tellez engaged and involved even when he couldn't put his slumping bat in the lineup.
“At the beginning of the year, we thought he was going to be a guy who was going to hit in the middle of the order," Shelton would say, sounding exactly the way he did a month ago. "He had a tough couple of months, but he’s continuing to bounce back and continuing to have big at-bats for us.”
Check out Tellez now, when I asked him to take me through his home run:
Don't skip this one. I'm not typing it out. Hear him.
He still might not be the best choice Cherington could've made at first base, but that's a confident, composed vibe. And that's a must in this cruel game.
Cruz, it seems, does something to make everyone mad at least once per series. In this one, it was some visible nonchalance in the field Friday that had several inside the Pirates' orbit seething. But not Shelton. Never Shelton when it comes to this player. And I know for a fact that's because it's been tried in the past and doesn't achieve a thing. Cruz needs to be smiling a mile wide to be at his best, so that, when he lugs a 1-for-14 into a game as he did before this one, he's still capable of obliterating a ball at 117.3 mph.
He's a different dude. In so many ways.
"Sometimes you go through tough times as a player," Cruz would say after this, via interpreter Stephen Morales. "You just have to battle."
I'm capable of stretching this into a long list, from how he handled Reynolds' now-complete hitting streak to Nick Gonzales' maturation into a capital-B ballplayer to the heavy attention on Skenes and Jones everywhere they go, but I'll wrap up with Bailey Falter, the starter here who'd put forth five innings of one-run ball despite a trying fourth in the heat of which Shelton said, "I don’t know if I’ve ever seen anyone that red on the mound. It was hot." I mentioned that to Falter, to which he quipped, "And I'm a ginger, too."
Falter was left for dead by nearly everyone, myself included, following a calamitous spring. Here again, Shelton wouldn't let him go. Talked him up. Assured him he'd get his chance in real games.
"The people in here believed in me," as Falter told me, "and that meant everything."
Prod Nutting to pony up. Prod Cherington to do his job without telling us how hard it is. Make the roster stronger. That's the answer for what's still missing from this team that, in my view, doesn't need much to support the superlative starting pitching it's getting. And it's an answer over which the manager -- very obviously, for anyone who follows baseball even peripherally -- has zero control.
To put it another way: It's not on Shelton when he pinch-hits .161-hitting Jack Suwinski for a .191-hitting Michael A. Taylor. It's not like he's looking to his left and seeing Travis Snider, R.J. Reynolds or Mike Easler on that bench. He's managing the hand he's dealt.
And he's managing it, I dare say, better than most seem to realize.
• I've also got a full column on Skenes that compares him to ... oh, I can't say.
• I've also got tons from the game on the Pirates Feed, including Reynolds on his streak, Taylor on his outstanding catch and more.
• Thanks for reading my baseball coverage. Flying home by nightfall.
