5-12-25 – By Gary Morgan – @garymo2007 on X
Big week of news, we’ve touched on a lot of it already but this feature is always about looking a bit deeper at it.
Lets Go!
1. Bring Up All the Kids?
I keep hearing calls for it, it’s not happening, and today I’m going to give you a couple reasons why.
The first one, you’re absolutely going to think is wrong, because it came from Bob Nutting, but the sole reason Bob felt it was time to fire the manager, even this early in the campaign was that this team should be playing better than this.
I don’t think he has the belief it’ll become a playoff team, but it should be much better and he’s giving Ben Cherington and Don Kelly room to prove that is indeed the case.
It might be misguided, but it is the right of any owner to proceed as he sees fit and this owner wants to see how this team performs with one big swap of his skipper.
Calling up all the kids, well, that’s what you do when you don’t think the season is worth playing out with an eye toward righting this particular ship, but an eye toward making the 2026 team better. Understandable for fans, maybe not so much for an owner who feels like he can’t evaluate who he’s kept around if they were to act as though the cause is lost.
Now, that’s from the owner, from me…
Most of “all the kids” who are truly ready, are pitchers. They will add them in, but it’s going to be one by one, as needed via injury, performance, or even just an undeniable improvement plausibility.
Bubba Chandler will be first, it’s not really worth debating at this point.
Offensively, they have some interesting guys, but nobody beating down the door. Also, they really do need to get some of these injured players back. Call up Yorke now and then you have IKF, Gonzales coming back, so Yorke is right back to not having a starting spot. Call up Malcom Nunez and well, Horwitz is coming back. Point is, when this team gets healthy, most of these kids would go right back.
I get the sentiment, but in practice, it’s just not there, not the influx you think you’re calling for anyway.
Replacing Pham is an easy call, and yes, they could do that now for almost anyone on the roster, but guys like Adam Frazier, Isiah Kiner-Falefa, you kinda want to be able to trade them, and again, we need to see who’s pushing, as we sit here, the owner doesn’t want to see the team play these games for anything but the win in front of them.
Fans may be onto 2026 already, but the team isn’t.
2. Bubba Chandler #2 Prospect in the Game, #1 Pitching Prospect
MLB Pipeline released their latest update and Bubba Chandler took a big jump.
You all know how I feel about these rankings, but when you start to get top 10-20, there’s a good chance you’ve been scouted to death. It’s not on reputation anymore, it’s now about performance, and in some cases readiness for the league.
I’d expect Bubba to get the call in the next home stand, so this won’t matter for all that long I’d imagine, but Konnor Griffin continues to rise, and welcome Hunter Barco to the top 100 where he’s sure to progress through as the season plays out.
3. It Wasn’t All Shelton’s Fault!
Of course it wasn’t, and it won’t be all Don Kelly’s either. That said, I’ve seen some, especially in the national media try to paint this as somehow so much so not Derek Shelton’s fault that he actually was and is a good manager.
Listen, these people have an agenda.
They hate Bob Nutting, and really any owner who doesn’t spend, which is honestly a sentiment many of us share, but when you allow that bias to somehow talk yourself into pretending Derek Shelton actually did a good job here, or that some other team was going to snap him up or that you need to ask the players how many of them got better playing for Shelton, you’re proving you haven’t watched this team play baseball, not that you have the moral high ground.
Derek Shelton was a really, really bad baseball coach. He was stubborn about roles for bullpen arms. Stubborn about pre-planned decisions in spite of changes in the variables. Foolish about ever playing someone who performed in the next game. Incapable of transitioning players from AAA to MLB because frankly, he’d rather play a 39 year old pushing a walker than a 26 year old who finally made it to the league.
He never had answers beyond platitudes, certainly none that pointed at him as a problem.
Flatly, his players didn’t get better.
The national media, and some locals have chosen to defend the indefensible simply because they hate another target worse, and that is a disingenuous place to act from in any walk of life, let alone schilling for a pile of crap.
He was an objectively bad manager, one that gives you an opportunity to still hit your favorite target. Bob and Ben never should have extended him.
It’s not like those two should come out of this smelling like roses, but you don’t need to pretend he should have kept his job, or that you could pop him in LA and he’d have the Dodgers humming. Fact is, Dave Roberts did a job in the World Series last year with his decimated pitching staff that Derek Shelton NEVER would have pulled off.
This management team watched a guy manage a unit that throughout his 5+ years here never improved fundamentally. Never improved defensively, despite having 3-4 gold glove winners and finalists on the roster. Never stopped changing the lineup every game until finally a player publicly called him on it like 3 weeks ago.
Never played a guy the next day when he’d done well the day before, unless it was his pre planned 2 or 3 guys who play every day.
Refused to give kids a real run of games to try to latch on.
Never stepped in to correct obvious and repeated game after game mistakes.
No, I’m sorry, crying for Derek Shelton to the point you pretend he was competent, well, it just shows you aren’t yourself.
You can want more done, but you can’t pretend this shouldn’t have been one of those things.
4. There is No Upside to Patience with Tommy Pham or Cherington’s Fake Numbers
Tommy Pham won’t be here next year. No matter what.
Tommy Pham hasn’t had a season batting average above .256 since 2019.
His current Average is .176 and his BABIP is .253, meaning even if he’s getting unlucky, it’s not so unlucky that there is some kind of hidden good here.
His expected on base average is .255, 3rd percentile in the league. At .202 his expected Batting average is in the 4th percentile league wide. .276 his expected SLG the 2nd percentile. Go down the list, the only thing he’s above average at aside from fielding is his chase rate.
10th percentile for Barreling up balls.
Ben Cherington’s silly comments about squinting and seeing a better team, or directly about how much better Tommy Pham should be based on their internal numbers. Folks, they’re lying.
They don’t have magic numbers I can’t get hold of. I’m subscribed to a couple services that dig in on stats, but that’s for convenience, you don’t have to be, you can find every number anyone has access to if you look around. The Pirates, and specifically Ben Cherington refer to their internal numbers to claim the defense is playing well, or that they are getting very unlucky, but the truth is, the numbers just aren’t there.
And they certainly aren’t as it comes to explaining why it’s worth anyone’s time to get what Tommy Pham has to give.
It wouldn’t be a big deal they make claims like this, IF they didn’t run the team based on them. Wanna know why so many moves they make don’t make sense? Here is the biggest answer, they literally think they have factors isolated that others aren’t seeing.
I say this again, completely unafraid of being wrong, they don’t.
They have an extreme belief that they know what they wanted and massage everything to continue convincing themselves of it.
Hence it takes all of 35 games to completely go from being tied to your manager to being ready to move on. It’s really easy to flip flop on fake numbers.
A manager can act as a brake on stuff like this. Shelton didn’t, that’s for sure, Donny might, we’ll have to see what he does when he’s got a healthy unit and what kind of autonomy he has to make decisions like that.
No matter what, we’ll eventually be told the time has come for Tommy, and when they do, we’ll hear about all the numbers we already knew about that led to the decision, the ones we’ve been talking about for over a month and guess what? We’ll never hear what magic numbers caused them to try the way they did. Care to guess?
5. Bunting Mentality, but No Bunting Execution
This team is caught in a way based on the way they’ve run and built it.
For instance, they recognize they have to play small ball to win, but they have about 2 guys who know how to bunt.
They don’t practice bunting, in fact, I haven’t heard of any team practicing it much anymore. Every team tends to have a guy or two who know how to do it and they’re usually speed guys.
Modern baseball has all but taken it off the table unless you’re trying for a cheap at bat.
And that in itself is a tangent. If you “know how to bunt” you probably use a push bunt or pull and you’re trying for a hit, which is a completely different kind of bunt from the hit the grass and deaden the ball sacrifice that gets the runner to second in a textbook fashion.
Even if you practice it, there are guys you simply aren’t going to ask to do it. Be honest with yourself, you don’t want Cutch or Reynolds, Cruz, maybe even Bart bunting. You want them producing.
So when guys are asked to do it, they usually haven’t had any experience.
In fact, last week there was a game where the Pirates asked Jared Triolo to lay down a sac bunt. He failed. But Jared hadn’t even attempted to bunt 1 time in his entire professional career. ALL levels I’m talking about here.
He tried it twice in college.
And he doesn’t practice it, AND the guys throwing 99 MPH with inside run or dropping a curve on the outside corner.
I miss this aspect of the game too, I grew up on Jay Bell moving whoever the Pirates were using as a leadoff hitter to second once or twice a game.
It’s just not there anymore.
ALL that said, I could suggest, when you built a team that has no power, has a little speed, struggles with Slug in general, it might pay to be different.
Maybe THIS team should be practicing it. Maybe they should be using it along with Run and Hits and hit and runs, steals, double steals, designed delayed starts trying to steal a run, all that stuff.
Shorten up, make contact, bunt, run, try to use the ingredients you do have.
The problem is, teams tend to not want to try small ball until the carrot is right in front of them. Then, it’s almost always someone who probably should just keep his head in the game and try to do the best he can to control the bat head. Hell, some of them would be better off trying to check swing it where they want it.
Small ball is just a catch phrase for scoring without hitting a homerun anymore. They say it on the broadcasts and I cringe every time because a single, stolen base and another single is just a run, a normal ass run scoring play. Not some overriding ethos of “small ball”.
Another reason this team can’t play small ball, they’re terrible at runners in scoring position. And I mean right now terrible, imagine if they hit into fewer double plays what those numbers might look like? lol
My buddy Sully from Locked on MLB said to me the Pirates right now are a fish with feathers, they have no power and no speed. How do they win?
Indeed Sully, indeed.
Steel City Pirates 