It’s Rare for a Manager to Escape the Stink of Rebuilding

5-24-24 – By Gary Morgan – @garymo2007 on Twitter

I think it’s funny how often baseball mirrors life. My kids probably have an encyclopedia worth of life lessons taught to them through the prism of baseball.

Kid fails his driver’s license test, hey bud, it’ll be ok, even Ted Williams failed 60% of the time.

I’m sure most of you have done the same, even if it was completely by accident and reading this has you thinking back to your own experiences where all these baseball truth bombs have come out of your mouth at work.

There’s always something to learn in life, and in baseball, I mean, that’s the beauty of the game right? Once a week there’s a good chance, despite all the games that have been played through the years, you’ll see something you’ve never seen before.

This Derek Shelton managerial tenure though, you’ve seen this before too. Way back when he was hired and the Pirates started out on this rebuild, I was talking to Jim Stamm my podcast partner for the Pirates Fan Forum about Derek and whether he had a chance to coach winning baseball in Pittsburgh.

We didn’t know much about him, general trappings like former hitting coach, made a silly video about hitting, worked with some really good people in the industry, universally liked and respected. Seemed like a good fit for a young team that wanted a modern coach to apply their analytics based philosophy.

We asked the question because, we knew no matter how good or bad a coach he was, he was going to oversee a team that was sure to lose minimally for the next three seasons, probably four.

Thing is, it’s really hard to delouse yourself from a record like that. In a way, it’s almost like how some fans treat Mitch Keller. Pretty rotten as a young pitcher learning his craft at the big league level on a rotten team with a bunch of young coaches overseeing their first rosters.

People that want to say Mitch stinks will read off his career stats to make sure you know just how bad he is. People that want to be fair to the kid tend to speak to his 2022-now, after all, the Pirates signed the player he is now, not the one he was as a rookie.

Managers rarely get that benefit of doubt. John Russell was so bad in his three years following 3 years of Jim Tracy being not good that it greased the wheels for Clint Hurdle to walk in to a more talented team than they’d had and reinvent the culture.

Even he was well into 2015 before some fans started to lay off and accept him as an “OK” manager. They had to forgive him for 2011 and 2012 after all. Remember the “epic collapses” he was not only the manager for but also responsible for?

Some never let go of those years. Some never let the stink of those two campaigns wear off to the point revamped calls for firing Clint started right back up in 2016.

Win and have good players, genius, legend. Lose with bad players, moron, worst manager ever.

Asking a young coach with no track record like Derek Shelton to endure 4 years of having next to nothing to work with, and purposefully using players who probably have no business being in the league because the GM wants a look at them, at the very least is setting that coach up for wearing the stink of losing.

All the way back to the top, baseball is life, and when we hate, we cloud our own judgement.

I don’t expect to change your mind if you’ve uttered such words, I mean, ideally it takes you a lot to actually use that word in the first place and I’ll refrain from lecturing about how it really has no place in sports unless it’s the playful “hate” of rivalry.

Instead, I make this point because I hope you stop and at least recognize the film over your eyes on this subject and try to see if you can at least peek under it on the off chance maybe this thing you’re mad about isn’t actually a manager thing.

I’ll be the first to tell you, the likelihood that Derek Shelton oversees this team through this decade is slim, again, the stink is real, and eventually every GM has their he who smelt it dealt it moment.

I’ll also say, very little of what this club has been through since 2020 is actually a product of Derek Shelton making a decision. Further, the next manager will do much of the same, because this is a GM who has an idea of how he wants his club run, and for the most part, you’ve seen it play out.

That’s right, the GM wanted to see Ka’ai Tom get 117 plate appearances in 2021. The GM gave Derek Shelton 3 starting pitchers to finish the last month of 2023.

He may have too much stink to recover, but let’s be very clear, he had a bucket of it dumped on his head.

This is the first year he’s had enough talent to compete, and fair or not, the first year he can really be judged in my mind for his acumen.

Here is what I know so far.

1. He is completely in charge of the lineup this year. Meaning, he’s not being given a number of ABs guys have to have, he’s not being told where to play guys, he’s simply being given the analytical data and forming his plan. Derek has said he does this in tandem with Don Kelly.
   Where I am – I don’t care for the near constant shuffling. And I now think I can say it makes it much harder for guys to get out of slumps, along with easier to fall into them.
2. He’s got a rotation that 3/4 of the league would swap places with.
   Where I am – He either asks too much of them or restricts them too much to let them shine. There really doesn’t seem to be an in between. I’ll give him acknowledgement that it’s hard to look smart here when the bullpen isn’t working.
3. The bullpen pieces lack identity outside of David Bednar.
   Something we’ve seen through the years is a reluctance to let guys settle into roles in the bullpen, I’ve always assumed it has more to do with talent and his options, but now seeing the construction of this team, I see now it’s more about fear. Fear of injury, fear of extending a guy, fear of making a change with a guy who has been trusted, just fear in general. The bullpen performance absolutely plays in here, but the usage, well, sometimes I think you make your own problems in a bullpen. Pitchers, even relief pitchers enjoy order and repeatability.
4. He motivates these guys.
   To a man, you won’t hear a bad word about Shelton. I can’t say I’ve talked to all of them, but I’ve talked to enough and no, I don’t expect players to tell a total stranger they hate their manager. There are just things players say or more importantly don’t say when they have an issue with their coach, I don’t pick up any of that.
5. He’s not a yeller.
   If you want a guy to flip over tables, Dereck ain’t your guy. He’ll save his freak outs for the occasional umpire and even then it’ll almost always be in defense of his player or players.

He’s overseen a raunchy 218-328 record in his tenure, again, this might be too messy to clean up. Here’s what I need to see during the rest of 2024 before I say he deserves a 2025.

1. Find a way to get this team into the wild card. It may be asking too much, but let’s be real, what’s wrong with asking your coach to win more than his talent says he should?
2. Don’t allow your hitting program or who oversees it to trump what you need this team to do to accomplish goal 1.
3. Make decisions to win the game in front of you, not tomorrow or next week.

I’m not convinced Derek Shelton is in any danger after this season regardless, and I know beyond a shadow of doubt that Ben Cherington isn’t in any, but the pressure will build, and eventually Cherington will very likely sacrifice the lamb he’s been shepherding all these years in an effort to get a spark and cast blame in another direction.

This is likely a conversation a ton of you are shut off to all together. You hate him and that’s that. I get it. I also don’t feel like answering the same boring question until the day they agree with you.

I mean, it could be argued that the very act of having a guy oversee that much losing, and I mean losing you knew you were going to endure, is dooming him to the eventuality of losing his job, and likely never being the top guy again anywhere. I could argue that losing that much almost “infects” a guy and changes him into someone that can’t see the sun for the shadows. Constantly expecting defeat to be lurking around every corner. A self fulfilling prophecy if you will.

I can’t hate Derek Shelton for a few reasons, first, again, I think it’s dumb to hate sports figures. Second, I’d have to ignore that the GM gave him a team that had no chance to win, purposefully and then handed him restrictions on how to use it. Lastly, he’s a really nice guy, like sickeningly so.

Think what you want, just don’t expect me to see everything bad as his fault. That’s not running cover for him, that’s just being real about who does what, and what levers he actually has to pull.

Hate clouds you. It might lead you to the right answer anyway, but I’d much rather get there by way of fact and observation as opposed to unbridled emotion. The manager position in MLB is not what it was, the men who fill the role aren’t either.