10-5-24 – By Gary Morgan – @garymo2007 on Twitter
The Mandela Effect is a phenomenon in which a large segment of the population misremembers an event or shares a memory of an event that did not actually happen.
For Pittsburgh Pirates fans, that effect is fully at work as it comes to the oft referenced Cherington 5 Year Plan. That’s not his plan, never has been. Cherington’s goal is a sustainable franchise and frankly, I don’t think he was all that concerned with how long it would take.
Don’t get me wrong, you have every right to believe 5 years is plenty of time and to be mighty angry about it. I’m inclined to agree, I think 5 full seasons is plenty of time to at the very least be over .500 and knocking on the door of the playoffs if not sneaking in.
Yes, yes, COVID Year messed with one of those years, but if you choose to not give them that kind of grace, have at it.
None of that matters for what I’m about to talk to. Because this isn’t a story about our expectations, instead it’s about Ben Cherington’s and more importantly since Bob Nutting has decided to keep him and allow him to make minimal changes to his staff, I want to explore how it could effect this offseason.
We have plenty of time to discuss the decision to retain him, in fact, I’ve already done it a bit, so has our own Ethan Smith.
Ben is a Theo Epstein disciple, with a hint of Ross Atkins baked in. He did legitimately inherit a messy situation in Boston and he remade that team overnight, and leveraged the few stars he didn’t trade off at the Owner’s request to win a World Series in 2013 most fans in Boston still kind of wonder where it came from.
He made some key trades, including creative parlays to fully recover from the mess his first season was. Ownership had to wear at least a bit of his first season in Boston, after all, they rejected every manager he offered as a finalist in favor of Bobby Valentine who had been out of the game for quite some time.
He clashed with the team, and what you watch today should probably paint a picture that he and Ben weren’t very likely to be on the same page. That said, the performance of that team opened the door for Cherington to make some moves.
Long story shorter, he did well to recover from Epstein leaving, put a good team together, augmented it at the deadline and won a World Series in 2 seasons in Boston before the wheels fell off.
Now, in part the wheels fell off because Cherington fought against and lost the battle with ownership over signing Pablo Sandoval and his choice of Hanley Ramirez didn’t pan out any better. Buying those couple players cause him to have to let a couple big World Series contributors walk and before you know it the team was tanking.
It didn’t matter who chose what, the Team President was resigning and they were bringing in a new President of Baseball Operations to oversee Cherington. Knowing what that really meant, he chose to just leave.
I put all that out there because when he came here, the most appealing part of it was he’d get to start this entire thing from scratch. There’d be no pressure to spend in any way he doesn’t want to because well, the owner doesn’t spend.
Bob of course didn’t tell him everything that would await him, he didn’t prepare him for how pissed the fans already were when he got here and worse, Ben Cherington has no feel for, or ability to communicate with us.
What types of things could he possibly have not seen coming?
Here’s an example. Just about every team in the league has their 2025 budget established and if they’re out of the playoffs, they’re probably already looking at free agents. Bob, and I have this double sourced, has yet to provide his budget for next year to his team.
This isn’t so you feel bad for Ben or whatever, but think about this for a few seconds. He’s sitting there stumbling through a press conference trying to explain how he’s going to make it better in 2025, and he can’t even speak with the backing of his budget in his back pocket.
Knowing how frugal this owner is, I’m sure Ben thought he’d just get to take his time and build. Eventually he’d get to the point where the team is winning regularly, and sure there’d be times when he’d need to add from outside in a meaningful way, but you have to figure this was his plan, and this is what he sold to ownership.
Only someone incapable of understanding where fans are could possibly believe they’d just sit around happily watching a tenth straight year of missing the playoffs and let the whole thing operate as normal like it wasn’t strange at all.
Now that should be painfully obvious.
His plan not being acceptable should be too, even as his boss sure as hell should have known better himself.
I have no clue what that’s going to cause.
Will it make Ben push in all his prospect chips and bring in what he needs for a shorter window than he planned? Will it cause him to sign something that handcuffs a future GM but makes his job doable? Will he at some point just have enough of being told there’s nothing to fill the wallet while at the same time slapping hands away from the empty vessel they give him and tell Bob off?
History has shown us what a pushed to produce quick results looked like twice. Once it turned into a World Series out of nowhere, and once it sent a franchise back into a rebuild, in fact, Ben Cherington did more in Boston to ensure the next GM would succeed than his own time there.
He’s got another year, and he chose to keep the same guy who he lost 5 seasons in a row with to steer the ship.
Put up or shut up. We all know the restrictions Bob forces his GMs to work under, but that doesn’t mean you have to do it badly.
One last shot at seeing this through.
Steel City Pirates 