So, we still doing that silly thing where we pick apart the one mistake a pitcher might make?

Not as much?

OK, cool, so I can skip past the part where I point a finger at Carmen Mlodzinski for serving up this four-seamer to Randy Arozarena ...

... in the sixth inning of what'd wind up yet another excremental 1-0 loss for the Pirates, this one a second in a row by that score to the Mariners, and a third shutout in a row for the weekend here at T-Mobile Park.

Point to the mound, right? Like Caleb Ferguson the previous night, even though he'd been superlative all summer?

Or to the dugout, where a dubious bullpen decision might've just been made?

Not as much anymore?

OK, cool, I can skip all of it. And yeah, I'm skipping the part, as well, where I blame the hitters themselves.

____________________

Want to hear about my weekend?

Pull up a symbolic stool, because I've got some stuff to share, and it might take a minute. Because, when I wasn't documenting all zero of the Pirates' runs in this series, all zero of their home runs, all one of their extra-base hits and all 36 of their strikeouts, I engaged in all kinds of conversation with all kinds of people I've come to trust over the years. 

And among what I learned here, in no real order:

• Bob Nutting needs to get in here.

He'll do that occasionally, so this isn't some blanket criticism. He did that after he fired Derek Shelton, and I found that commendable. Not sure all owners would've taken that step, never mind meeting with key players individually, as he did.

But these players, even though they're hardly faultless with under-performances within their own ranks, are confused. They're receiving the same cross-purpose messaging all the rest of us are. They're thinking they've got something in place, with all the pitching and a couple other pieces, and then they think it's all about to get blown to bits again ... and then they think that the worst general manager in any major sport could be the one making the trades in advance of the July 31 deadline ... and that might as well be an implosion unto itself.

In other words, everything that Nutting had hoped to avoid by firing only Shelton, and not Ben Cherington, is coming to pass, anyway: He worried at the time that a change at the top of baseball ops would create a broader dead-men-walking environment through the entire system and, whether or not that's happened at other levels, there's a collection of a couple dozen players and coaches who can't help but wonder if anything they're doing means anything to anyone.

Only Nutting can address that in this setting. Cherington wouldn't be -- and shouldn't be -- taken seriously.

• Why is that, exactly?

Put bluntly, Cherington's been at the helm for more than half a decade, and the number of hitters he's acquired through any means is ... well, see above: It's zero. Doubly so now that Joey Bart, who'd been his only success in this category, has regressed to batting .234 with one home run in 212 plate appearances. Say what one will about the aforementioned under-performers, but my goodness, Neal Huntington was at least able to land Bryan Reynolds and Oneil Cruz. This guy's claim to fame now is a No. 1 overall pick in Henry Davis who, even amid marked improvement in other areas, remains stuck at .202. Not to mention there's nothing on the imminent horizon, with both the Indianapolis and Altoona lineups bankrupt.

As one veteran put it, referring to the lone hitting prospect, Konnor Griffin, who's off to a prodigious opening year in the pros at the Class A level, "Why isn't he in Altoona? You see what he's doing? Why isn't he up? He should be here next year. You'd think they'd want that after what they've done."

Uh-huh. It was that kind of weekend.

• What rankles the players the most in this context is seeing, hearing and reading speculation of late that Mitch Keller might be traded. And I get that. Keller's a big part of this team, this internal family. He's also a fine starting pitcher and a total pro. But even beyond that, to repeat from above, it's impossible to find anyone who has faith in Cherington to pull off such a transaction, since it'd surely be aimed at acquiring a bat. Or worse, two or three, should Cherington try to kick the figurative can down the road by acquiring prospects.

This is a sore subject in there, to say the least.

• No, really, even when I'd share back information that I don't believe Cherington will be permitted by Nutting and Travis Williams to make any significant trade without the appropriate skepticism and/or rejection, all I'd get back was something along the lines of, OK, so why's he still here? And I'd have no good response. Since there isn't one.

• The change from Shelton to Don Kelly was and very much remains immensely popular. And that matters. Don't let this weekend totally ruin that the previous six games saw the Pirates at their peak in all facets, even offensively. And, to this point, they were crediting Kelly, even out here, where one veteran told me, "Donnie's the difference. He's had us loving the game again. You need that." Whereas Shelton had been "checked out," as far back as the beginning of spring training in Bradenton, Fla.

But here, too, as I'd learn, there was a whiff on Nutting's part.

Several players noticed the checked-out thing with Shelton and, since the season hadn't even started, they weren't sure how to handle it. They weren't about to tell Cherington since those two were seen as close, and they didn't, for whatever reason, feel comfortable enough going straight to Nutting. So they talked about maybe finding ways to send vibes through the media, and that didn't really click, either.

Bottom line: None of this should be a problem. This is dysfunction. These individuals, more than anyone else, represent the Pittsburgh Baseball Club every time they take the field. There have to be open lines. And that starts with having faith in the very top.

Why should they have that faith when he's still employing an executive that pretty much everyone expects could be -- no, should be -- gone on any given day?

• Taking a pause here: The perception in the clubhouse isn't that they're perfect. Or that they're ready to go off on some historic bender if there's a new GM. Rather, it's that they're a couple bats away. And that's not a stance I'd argue, at least not in the rough sense. I mean, my goodness, all this team does is lose eminently winnable games day after day after day.

• And they do so, incidentally, with Cherington barely breathing, much less budging. One might think after Nutting unilaterally fired Shelton -- Cherington was willing to keep him on indefinitely, I've since found out -- that Cherington would've been moved to some action, any action, if only to save some face. Or his job, for crying out loud. Instead, the number of bats he's added is ... you guessed it, zero. Nothing's changed. Not after Shelton's firing. Not after the six uplifting games last week. Nothing.

• Meanwhile, on his weekly radio show that Cherington did on this day from some other place that wasn't around his team, he had this to say about the upcoming deadline: "You have to be honest about where you are right now and recognize, we're not like a win or two away, we're more than that. If you're more than that, then you have to be pretty open-minded about the things that have to happen to get to where we want to be and get there as fast as we can, at least put ourself in a position to have a chance to do that."

The players hear this trash, too. It's everyone's fault except his.

If, indeed, "you have to be honest" about the reason a team with Paul Skenes is dead last in the Central, that requires nothing more than a mirror.

• Picked this up, too: The players, the coaches and Kelly -- everyone at field level, basically -- is pushing the hitters to get more aggressive early in counts. That tendency, they believe, led to the big week in Pittsburgh. And reverting to waiting, waiting, waiting and digging holes, that showed up out here again. Meanwhile, in two separate interviews over the past month, Cherington, whose hitting background is about the same as a commoner off the street, continued to emphasize how the hitters need to see more pitches.

Talk about dysfunction.

I can't stress this bullet point enough. If this is the only point that resonates, that'd be fine. The Pirates hit last week because they were doing the opposite of what Cherington and his analytics army want. The literal, polar opposite. And they're planning to get right back to it with their next stops in Kansas City and Minneapolis.

• Field level's also using a ton less analytics. And there's a very real resentment that Cherington, afforded the budget by Nutting to add to the big-league payroll -- and I'm not guessing at that -- instead applied even more money to analytics. I don't know a dollar figure for that, but I'll presume, since it keeps coming up, that it could've at least contributed meaningfully toward an actual athlete.

Talk about dysfunction.

____________________

This is the part Nutting doesn't seem to get ... or doesn't want to get, for whatever reason: Nothing changes until baseball ops change. And baseball ops don't change until the GM changes. And, as the Nationals showed on this same day by firing both their GM and manager, the planet doesn't stop rotating if that happens in July.

Make the difference now. There are qualified candidates galore to replace Cherington and, even so, there's no rush to make that hire when capable interims are already in house.

There's undeniably a rush to make clear to everyone what the hell's going on.