5-31-25 – By Gary Morgan – @garymo2007 on X
It’s the last day of May.
A time that I arbitrarily like to look at what’s been, where we are and where it’s headed. By this time, you’ve seen a couple months of baseball, enough to really make some judgements on things.
Don’t get me wrong, you don’t need 2 months to decide anything, and you as a fan get to make up your own mind about when you’ve seen enough.
Personally, I like to see a solid 150 at bats, or 60-70 innings from a stater, and those marks tend to start coming to life around now in a season.
But we’ve had a rather large disruption in our season already, the firing of Derek Shelton. The team performed a certain way under him, and they’re performing a certain way under Don Kelly.
Kelly has also had the benefit of Reynolds turning things around, but he lost Cruz for a week too. He’s had Horwitz, Shelton had Valdez.
Point is, it’s probably not fair to just say, welp, Donnie got ’em playin’ like a team. I think there’s some truth to that, but he’s also got better play on a lot of fronts, and it’s not like someone just told the guys it’s ok to hustle.
So let’s look at where we are, and how the season could play out under some very specific discussion buckets.
The Don Kelly Difference
First, is there one? I personally think so, it’s just surface level observational stuff for me really at this point, but I see more focus in general. I see more in the moment decisions that don’t exactly line up with what the math would have you decide.
I’ve seen more of an emphasis on stringing together opportunity for youngsters, a real shot at seeing what a player could do, I mean scratch that, it’s more accurate to say the fair shake they give all these scrub pickups like Tommy Pham or Rowdy Tellez, now is being given to younger players.
It doesn’t always have to be what Kelly has done with Canario either, sure he’s simply turned him into the just about every day starter in Left Field, but the small changes he started making with how he used Henry started to get him going before Joey Bart hit the IL and opened a spot. Making Henry the dude for Paul Skenes and Mitch Keller ensured him two back to back starts every week and helped him put less stress on the 3 cracks he’d get in a week before.
There’s a fire in Don Kelly and slowly but surely you can see it sweeping over the team, not just last night’s outburst by seemingly everyone in black and gold toward the AAA call up umpire, but certainly illustrated well by how the night played out.
There’s more swagger, and more than that, a clear belief that they need to earn more. Andrew McCutchen did a great job of illustrating that last night too. I’m not sure I feel the team is purposefully robbed of calls, but he’s right about earning calls. If a pitcher is always around the plate, they’ll get more calls, and if a team is going really good, I am convinced officials somehow feel the vibe and tend to lean to the side of most everything they do being a safer bet to be right.
The point is, Don Kelly is doing at least on the surface a better job with just about all the same pieces to move around the board.
The next big question is, can he survive a GM change, the best thing I can tell you here is, yeah. Bob Nutting doesn’t just like him, he thinks he’s the right guy for the job, and I don’t think he’ll change his mind for a new GM hire, at least without making him or her try it for a season.
I can honestly and unironically say, the Don Kelly product has been more fun to watch than the Derek Shelton product, and a big part of me doesn’t care if it’s Don’s doing or not.
Improved Offense
In April, the Pirates hit .236, in May .226
In April, the Bucs hit 20 Homeruns and in May only 17.
I can go on.
April they scored 91 runs, and in May 79.
So, maybe my assumption that the offense is looking better, is, well, bunk.
Or, maybe, more accurately, it really just took a turn a couple weeks ago.
In the past 15 games the Pirates have scored 46 of those 79 runs. So leaves 25 for the first roughly 15 of the month.
Hey, that smells like marginal and recent uptick, but nowhere near enough to pretend they’ve really turned things around.
I’m afraid I need to see much more, and it needs to improve even more if it’s truly to support the pitching they’ve gotten.
A -61 Run Differential this early in the season is brutal especially when your team has given up the 10th fewest Earned Runs in baseball at 228.
There is still room for better than they’ve done, even with this roster and the trend is certainly positive, but they’ll need to take a rather sizable jump to balance the scales and that’s just to make them a lot more competitive, not climb back into anything.
Ch-ch-ch-changes
Much like a butterfly, it’s never uglier than before it’s metamorphosis.
That’s what you have to hope we’re watching this year.
One criticism I’ve had of Ben Cherington throughout the years has been his seeming unwillingness to really see what young players had in lieu of playing completely proven out veterans or worse veterans with severely depleted skills.
Hell, he even placed more emphasis on giving shots to waiver claims than his own internal prospects.
Don’t get me wrong, Will Craig, Travis Swaggerty, and guys like that weren’t exactly thrilling, but the Pirates had absolutely nothing in the outfield, and I find it hard to believe we couldn’t have made an effort to just see what 50 games of Travis might look like? Defensively, it certainly would have been ok, and hell I had to watch Dyson try to hold on for half a season instead.
Just sayin’.
And probably focused on it too much but it was bugging me. The point is his unwillingness to start the hard work of on boarding youngsters when the record was supposed to be bad has created a team with a lot of long in the tooth prospects standing at the bottom of a hill looking up at a big task. A task he simply refuses to let begin even as he’s watched and pushed the pitching side along.
This is a long winded way of saying the team didn’t come together in part because the vast majority of Cherington’s draft capital has gone to pitching, and in part because he and his development team have done precious little with the few hitters they did select. Even when he has brought in even interesting talent, it’s been loathed to be used. This changed for me when Don Kelly decided to use Alexander Canario in his first lineup and then played him continuously.
Sure, it’s easy to call out when it works, but even if it doesn’t, you can turn guys who even show flashes of something like Rodolfo Castro into a starting lefty for a few years. So…do more of that. See what the hell you have in Peguero ya know?
This club needs to do better at on boarding, and frankly, they need to have better talent to do so with, that’s kinda why we need a better GM.
That said, this team started ugly and no matter how ugly it might get, they need to make this the cocoon season. Sell off what you’re going to sell off. Do it whenever.
It’s going to make Don Kelly’s job harder, and the team might wind up looking worse, but hopefully its heading in the right direction by the end.
Meaning, as you replace guys like Pham and Isiah Kiner-Falefa and Adam Frazier, and you start infusing Nick Yorke, Nick Gonzales, maybe Peggy, who knows, you hope that the ship doesn’t take on too much water and Kelly can keep the nose pointed up as they go along hopefully a new GM has enough to work with to make a go of it next year.
In some ways, what’s done is done. The start was brutal, the team seems to have caught it’s balance under a new coach and improved performance coming along with some health. That’s where it is right now, the more answers this team forces themselves to answer in 2025, the fewer they need to in 2026.
More money, sure. But better choices with money too. Fill one hole well as opposed to patching 3 poorly.
2025 still has a lot to stay interested in, they are playing better baseball, but a win at this point might be playing .500 ball from here on out.
Subscribe to our site, it’s free and all you’ll get from us is a notification when there’s something new to read.
Steel City Pirates 