The Plan: How the Pirates Pivot, and Why it’s Rarely Fast Enough

4-21-24 – By Gary Morgan – @garymo2007 on Twitter

There’s something troubling that has bothered me from the very start of the Ben Cherington and Derek Shelton era of the Pittsburgh Baseball Club. It’s endured every season and overcome all my understanding about the realities of rebuilding a franchise.

I think the Pirates are simply planning too far in advance.

More specifically, I think the Pirates are too prone to stick to that plan regardless of factors that should lead to adjustment.

Example? Let’s go hypothetical, but lets go all Law and Order on it and base it on real life.

The Pirates are 1-1 in a 3 game set and Ke’Bryan Hayes is not in the lineup against a lefty who he has great career numbers against on a Wednesday afternoon.

After the game, Shelton says something like yeah we just had planned with the off day tomorrow we’d get Ke’ down for a couple days here.

Well, I’d like to buy that. I get that Ke’Bryan has a tender back and it needs rest. So I can accept it, but when I look at the schedule, I see the Friday game they’ll be facing a crafty righty that has given Hayes fits through the years.

So, Why can’t we adjust said plan to give him a couple days down, by shifting it to Thursday and Friday instead of Wednesday and Thursday.

See what I mean?

Think on it for a minute, you’ll think of a ton of other scenarios when it feels like they could have pretty easily avoided a less than ideal situation if they were only willing to adjust their thinking.

This overriding thought process leads to an awful lot of stuff I think is counter to the very idea of trying to win in a 162 game season.

We can blame whoever we want for this, frankly, I don’t care, I just want it to go away.

They use this to form lineups, make roster decisions, bullpen usages, start to start starting pitching inning or pitch counts, and unless there are injuries that force them to change, they almost 100% of the time don’t alter it in any way.

Let’s do another hypothetical, just because I really want to drill home what I’m talking about here. In no way do I just want this to be seen as complaining about decisions, I’m specifically complaining about decisions that are made weeks in advance and won’t take in new data or information to adjust.

It’s Wednesday, and the Pirates planned to have Ryan Borucki not go back to back days in this particular week. He had gone back to back or at least had that availability all year long, but only was needed to do so 1 time a few weeks ago and yesterday he only needed 7 pitches to work his outing.

It’s the 8th inning in a tie game, you’ve already burned Chapman and Fleming, Bryce Harper and Kyle Schwarber are due up. You go with Roansy Contreras because according to your plan, Borucki is down.

All I’m saying is, far too often the answer about things like this is simply, Yeah, we had planned to keep him down today. Specifically not “he’s unavailable”, not “he couldn’t go”, instead, “we had planned” and while I of course get the though behind it, I don’t like boxing yourself into winning with an arm tied behind your back because you arbitrarily decided it a week ago.

You’ve all heard the team makes out their lineups sometimes weeks in advance. Lets be clear, that’s not some fan creation, that’s not a misquote of a Jason Mackey report, it’s directly from Derek Shelton.

Clearly they adjust, like when a guy gets hit with a homerun in the head during batting practice. But as you play out a season, you should start to see things not working in a certain way and do something about it.

Well, with this method, sometimes change to the plan can be as much as 2 weeks away, or as little as a day.

When a team is losing, you can nitpick anything you like and maybe that’s what you’ll see this piece as.

I hope it comes across as something that has endured every season of this regime, regardless of talent level, regardless of their options, regardless of the moment in time, the plan always wins.

I’m not ignorant here, there’s a lot of science that goes into what they’re doing or any team for that matter, they have far more data than I and these questions like I’m posing in these hypotheticals, you have to understand, they’ll never directly answer. It’s been asked.

I guess at my core, I’m irritated seeing 20 different lineups in 20 games with more established talent than we’ve had and then squaring that with the knowledge that they’ve every bit planned for it to be that way.

The former player in me (very amateur) can’t fathom walking in every day having no clue who’s hitting beside me, behind me, in front of me and I may never get past it.