They're here by now. They've flown back from the West Coast. They're home.
But they shouldn't be safe, any more than they've been sound:
— DK Pittsburgh Sports (@DKPSmedia) August 15, 2024
At least not those in charge.
Let's dispense with dialogue that isn't brutally blunt and broader in scope this morning, OK?
The Pittsburgh Baseball Club, as constituted in Year 5 under Ben Cherington in the front office and Derek Shelton at field level, still can't hit anywhere near well enough, still can't pitch anywhere near well enough, still can't field anywhere near well enough, still can't draft aside from the easiest No. 1 pick ever, still can't develop aside from the easiest No. 1 pick ever, still can't place a solitary prospect out of Latin America onto their own top-10 list, still can't evaluate external talent toward a trade, still can't instill discipline or accountability, still can't teach something as basic as a bunt and ... yeah.
A bunt. They can't lay down a blasted bunt. I could've/should've ended the column right there.
But no, instead, I'm going to issue this open, public challenge to anyone -- very much up to and including Bob Nutting -- to give me one good reason why Cherington/Shelton are the right people to run the Pirates from the baseball standpoint. One good reason why they should be retained through the coming weekend, much less into 2025.
I won't be greedy. I'm asking for one. Just one.
____________________
Good luck, everyone:
► THE RECORD
If this were a normal big-league sports entity, the 56-64 might be all that mattered, right?
The Pirates haven't been one of those entities in far too long, as we all know, and this entire calendar year underscored that in an excruciating way, with Cherington sitting pat through four months of actual excitement, actual hope, and not lifting a figurative finger to support what'd become one of the more dynamic starting rotations around. Even so, the team somehow stayed tight to the National League's wild card race until Cherington, finally succumbing to pressure from above and/or the outside, made a couple of meh moves at the July 30 trade deadline, adding Bryan De La Cruz, who's gone 9 for 46 with no extra-base hits and 18 strikeouts, as well as a veteran utility type in Isiah Kiner-Falefa and ... uh, them.
Then came 10 losses in a row.
Yep, 10, as of the latest sweep completed yesterday in San Diego by a sickly 8-2 count amid the hitters striking out 14 more times following 15 the night before.
Remember contention? Like, two weeks ago?
Take a look now:
MLB
That right there gets people fired. No questions asked. No answers sought. Bring the binder to the big office, leave behind any analytical justifications, and just get the hell out.
Not in this setting, though. No chance.
Not even with Cherington/Shelton having a combined 274-391 record for a locally themed .412 winning percentage. Not even with only three managers in Major League Baseball history having a worse winning percentage while having managed more games than Shelton: Two came before 1945, and the other was with the 1969 expansion Padres. (Take a stab at why there haven't been more.) Cherington/Shelton also have had two last-place finishes and are in the express lane toward a third, while never finishing higher than fourth place. And of most immediate interest, they now own three of the franchise's 26 losing streaks of 10 or longer.
That covers ground all the way back to 1882, for you Civil War buffs.
What could anyone say to defend this?
Payroll?
OK, but that only goes so far. Others have won with roughly the same and even less, not least of whom are the Rays, Cherington's role model. And really, if Cherington wanted to use this as a defense, he'd first need to justify why he didn't spend a penny of what I'm told was an eight-figure payroll allotment at the trade deadline. Both Nutting and Travis Williams wanted it used. Instead, he broke even on the exchanges, possibly because he wasn't competent at completing a deal -- hence all the reports about the Pirates being a close second on everyone -- or because he isn't competitive enough to ever embrace urgency.
I choose the latter, but I'm not ruling out the former.
Injuries?
Jared Jones is out, and that stinks. Nick Gonzales, too. Colin Holderman's on the IL, though it couldn't be known if he's hurt. None of which accounts for a complete collapse of this scope. Nor the rest of the four-plus seasons of failure.
What other defense for all this losing?
We still citing how COVID stifled development, even though that affected the entirety of civilization equally?
► THE ACQUISITION
Hey, this can blossom into a full-blown thesis if I'm not careful, so I'll begin condensing a bit: This team's best hitter, Bryan Reynolds, was acquired by Neal Huntington. This team's second-best hitter, Oneil Cruz, was acquired by Huntington. This team's third-best hitter, a God-bless-him 37-year-old Andrew McCutchen, was acquired by Dave Littlefield, for crying out loud.
The best hitter acquired under Cherington, via any means, is embodied within 54 games of a late-blooming Joey Bart. Next-best is 65 encouraging efforts from Gonzales. And after that ... I'll repeat: Give me one. Just one.
Five years, and that's it.
Taking this into specifics, give me one outfielder. Just one. And again, Reynolds doesn't count. Neither does poor Jack Suwinski, now dying alive down in Indianapolis.
Heck, not even a No. 1 overall pick in Henry Davis could bring results once he'd arrived in Pittsburgh. And to think, I literally laughed off that American League scout in Bradenton who'd asked me, "What were they thinking taking him at 1:1?" I didn't like hearing it then, and I don't like reiterating it now. Davis is a terrific kid, and I'd hope the best for him. But, in the same breath, I've got no counter.
Cherington's had more successes in pitching acquisition, but there's no need to go overboard: Skenes is once-in-a-lifetime. Mitch Keller was another Huntington player. So all that's really on the positive ledger here is Jones, a full-credit W for all concerned, a couple months of Bailey Falter and promise, though no certainties, atop the minors.
Five years.
► THE INSTRUCTION
Martin Pérez has been in San Diego for three starts now, and all he's achieved for the Padres is a 1.96 ERA and 21 strikeouts in 18 1/3 innings. And against the Pirates out there yesterday, he was nothing less than dominant, highlighted by fanning five of the first eight hitters he faced, with those eight old friends doing him the favor of taking eight pitches for strikes.
The Padres, in contrast, took 18 pitches for strikes all day.
Oscar Marin's had his share of pluses in the past year. He really has. But I'm OK with pointing to Pérez as the latest example of someone getting set straight simply by leaving Pittsburgh if only because, even when Marin's been presented with such challenges, it can take far too long to find a fix. Whereas Perez pops his head into Petco Park and finds himself in his first start.
If that sounds unfair, so be it. Because the instruction on a team like the Pirates, as Nutting himself has strongly suggested in the past, has to be special. And what's been here for the better part of five years ... is nothing special.
Start with the fundamentals/discipline, for which Shelton can easily be singled out. It's not just the bunts. It's the baserunning. It's the throwing. It's not backing up the throwing. It's not hitting to the right side to advance a runner. It's never, ever, ever, ever, ever doing anything different at the plate to account for a given game situation. And if any of this has gotten better in his tenure, I'm having a tough time gauging it.
And then there's Andy Haines.
You know, the one responsible for this gem yesterday from Jared Triolo with bases loaded in the ninth and a full count:
— DK Pittsburgh Sports (@DKPSmedia) August 15, 2024
Right. Best to hope the pitcher misses, huh?
Haines' teams -- though it's worth refreshing that Shelton was a big-league hitting coach before this, as well -- from 2022, 2023 and 2024 are the only three in franchise history to average striking out more than nine times per game. The current one's averaging 9.34 after making more than half their outs -- 29 of 54 -- by way of the K the past two days.
If that's not apocalyptic enough, bear in mind that the pitching/hitting coaches in Cherington's culture govern the minors, too. So it can't be considered coincidence that, while the Pirates rank fourth in the majors in hitter strikeouts, Class AA Altoona leads its league in Ks, Class A Greensboro's second, and Class A Bradenton's first.
I'm all Haines-ed out. Nothing left to say.
Well, except this: The first major investment the Pirates made in this player group, authorized by Nutting, was Ke'Bryan Hayes' eight-year, $70 million extension signed in 2022. And the best we'd seen Hayes in the box since then came after Jon Nunnally, the Altoona hitting coach, offered some tips. To which Nunnally, as has become commonly known, was fired by Cherington for having breached his protocol, presumably because he'd make Haines look bad.
Try to imagine the power structure in which that was prioritized over, one, winning games and, two, protecting the boss' big investment.
Give me one good reason. I'm waiting.
► THE MINORS
Drafting's tough to analyze even a half-decade deep, to keep this real. And, as Gonzales has shown, even a first-rounder can take time.
But consider these three subtexts:
• Baseball America's new organizational rankings, released just last week, placed the Pirates at No. 27. This despite Bubba Chandler, Braxton Ashcraft and Thomas Harrington all raising eyebrows with recent pitching. This despite Termarr Johnson, the fourth overall pick two years ago, still being in the system. This despite all those trades when Cherington took over that sent out Starling Marte, Joe Musgrove, Josh Bell, Jameson Taillon, Adam Frazier, Clay Holmes and several others with a stated aim of flooding the internal prospect pool.
Know what's left from the return on all those?
A flood of David Bednar. And an injured Endy Rodriguez. Some rebuild.
Know where the Pirates were in BA's organizational rankings in 2019 when Huntington was fired?
Try 24th, or three places better than now. And per MLB Pipeline, they were up at 15th, or miles better than now.
As veteran prospect analyst Tim Williams wrote a week ago, "In five rebuilding seasons under Cherington, the farm system has dropped in the rankings, which is the single most damning statement you could make for a general manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates.
• Don't make me mention that the Padres' wunderkind, Jackson Merrill, was drafted 26 spots after Davis. Don't make me do that. Please.
But, truth be told, those are kinds of victories a team like the Pirates needs to have. And on a regular basis. There's no salary cap, so it's an imbalanced game at its core. The wannabe Rays need to be like the real Rays in these areas and others. They need to pull off the big heist at least once in a blue moon. But not never.
• The Latin American pipeline, a facet of operations that I know has always been of personal interest to Nutting, barely even exists. Unless one counts a couple of 19-year-old A-ball infielders, Yordany De Los Santos and Jhonny Severino, one of whom is ranked 13th within the Pirates' system, the other 19th, by MLB Pipeline.
Only player to make it under Junior Vizcaino since assuming the Latin American scouting director's job in 2017: Luis Ortiz.
It takes half a decade for Latin American players to make it, but Vizcaino's been employed here longer than that, with one result and a bunch of maybes. So when he spoke in an interview a year ago that, "Since we’ve been here, I can honestly say that we’ve pretty much changed the way things were being run,” I'll assume he meant changing from that way that Rene Gayo used to actually get prospects to Pittsburgh.
It's a killer. In addition to leaving the system shallow, it's making the very least of the $7 million-plus the Pirates can -- and do -- spend on their international class every single year, per the cap, not to mention the state-of-the-art Dominican facility that, when constructed, Nutting flew there himself to oversee.
This alone, my baseball-loving friends, is so much more important than anything else I'll type onto this screen for this column, and it'll just go on getting ignored, I'll bet.
____________________
Look, this is on Nutting. Every buck stops there and, believe it or not, I'll duck the easy joke about what happens to those bucks once they stop there. He's the owner. He sets not only the much-discussed payroll, but also hires people to operate both the business and the baseball. And if he either hires the wrong people or doesn't create a competitive culture in which to work ... again, this is on him.
Thing is, he's not going anywhere. He just isn't. The entirety of Western Pennsylvania and fandom far and wide can wish that he'd go, and there'll still be zero indication he'll sell, every indication he intends to keep the team in the family for the foreseeable future.
But everyone else?
Still waiting. Just one.
• I'll be back at the ballpark, like the team, Friday night for Paul Skenes vs. the Mariners.
• Thanks for reading my baseball coverage.
• And for listening:
