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.

10-1-24 – By Gary Morgan – @garymo2007 on Twitter

It’s just day 2 of the offseason, so we may not be looking at the complete picture here, but the Pirates moved on from Hitting Coach and Coordinator Andy Haines, Bullpen Coach Justin Meccage, and Conditioning Coach Adam Vish and to just about nobody’s surprise, Pirates fans are dissatisfied.

I think its fair to say most wanted to see at least one of Ben Cherington or Derek Shelton, but again, it was always going to be met with MORE!

I’m not here to tell you you’re wrong if you feel that way, but I’d hope at the very least most people would be honest here. We (fans) are trying to punish the organization for another decade of losing, almost more than what this regime has gotten done and the real target is Bob Nutting, you just know he wasn’t plausible as far as getting got goes.

I’ve made clear my feelings that the entire coaching staff needed replaced. I felt Derek Shelton was a traditional starter coach, meaning the team knew they were in for losing for a while when they hired him and in my mind, 2024 was his opportunity to show he could take what was probably too green a batch of kids and the rest of what they already had to push the team over the .500 hump.

Clearly the Pirates had no such expectation, or maybe more accurately, the Pirates weren’t prepared to put repercussions on it.

Let’s talk a little about each departing member. What they did, what they didn’t do well, and what replacing them is expected to fix and then we’ll circle back to some guys they chose at least so far to retain.

Adam Vish

Adam was the Minor League strength and conditioning coach for the Giants for the better part of a decade before joining the Pirates in 2020.

Anyone who’s blogging and pretends to know why this University of Pitt Alum was let go is probably lying. This is an area even actual experts don’t truly understand.

That said, I do believe the Pirates have had some issues in this department and I’d gather from this firing that at the very least the Bucs didn’t feel Adam was helping enough with.

The Ke’Bryan Hayes back pain drama has gone on for a couple years now and while it appears the club and Hayes have finally found some consultation they both believe in heading into the offseason, one has to ask what their internal staff tried, or if they just didn’t try enough and that’s the change they’re looking for.

Vish didn’t create Hayes’ issues, but he certainly didn’t help keep him on the field either, and much of the same could be said for Henry Davis, who spent all offseason bulking up only to find he showed up for Pitchers and Catchers on just about zero rest from the previous campaign.

Again, I’m grasping at straws, this is one of those positions that no fan really has business pretending they have opinions on.

Justin Meccage

This one caught me off guard if only because Justin is one of the few coaches who survived the regime change form Huntington to Cherington. He’s been with the club in some capacity since 2011, usually as a pitching coach at one of the MiLB affiliates and transitioned from there into the Pirates Minor League Pitching Coordinator in 2017.

In 2018 he was promoted to assistant pitching coach under Ray Searage and then when Cherington arrived he was retained but moved to the role as Pirates bullpen coach right before the 2020 season.

During a season, a bullpen coach is typically the coach that works with the bullpen arms pre- and post game as it comes to analytics and normally they observe and oversee their warm ups so they can offer advice or notice mechanical issues.

That’s not to say Oscar Marin isn’t ultimately responsible or that he doesn’t personally work with relievers, it just means that physically speaking, relievers probably talk to and work with Justin a lot more than Oscar.

I have no problem with this move, I’ve long believed that for whatever reason the Pirates relievers always seemed to need an at bat or two before they really started getting their stuff together. Could a solution really be this simple? Probably not, but moving on from Justin and not Oscar is a sure fire sign he’ll be the scapegoat for the pitching woes.

Andy Haines

The most well known by far, Andy Haines in my mind should have lost his job at least a year ago and further, his performance at his last stop in Milwaukee probably should have helped the Pirates avoid the entire episode.

He’s overseen a bottom 5 offense every year he’s been here and while that certainly isn’t all his fault, there seems to be an almost artificial ceiling on everyone he coaches.

More than anything, he never helped get guys turned around quickly enough. It doesn’t matter if guys got help from outside, he had to allow that and work with those entities and as far as I’ve heard from anyone who matters, he always was more than happy to do so.

Thing is, when something wasn’t working, it was just not going to work for however long because there were no answers coming aside from maybe trying a toe tap for timing or changing hand position. What was never addressed was his overarching ethos that didn’t take into account different players need different approaches to be successful.

There’s nothing wrong with his philosophy and that’s a good thing because Ben Cherington believes in it and will likely bring in another coach who feels the same thing. In fact, I’d bet 90% of his “approach” is replicated in the locker room of 25-29 other teams. The problem has always been primarily that there was no adjustment with anyone until such a time as they desperately asked for it, or he was approving an outside entity’s suggestions.

I could have copied and pasted this from my pitch to have him fired last year or the year before.

I’ve heard this called a scapegoat or sacrificial lamb, and honestly, I don’t care what you call it, I’m just glad he’s gone.

Everyone Else

I wouldn’t be shocked to hear some other changes coming. Tarik Brock has been a pretty poor fielding instructor in my mind for instance. That said, it hardly warrants deep discussion. What would I do, break down how good a 3B coach is at sending guys? C’mon, even I think that’s too granular.

You want to know why Shelton, Cherington and Marin keep their jobs I’d wager.

All I can say is one choice probably saved them all. Bob kept Cherington, Cherington kept his main coaches, and if my sources are to be believed, Derek Shelton was essentially given a lose him or lose yourself ultimatum.

It’s also my understanding even if Shelton was ultimately moved on from, Cherington likely would have wanted to retain Oscar Marin.

Ben Cherington

This has just about always been at least partially about how long everyone involved knew it was going to take to do it the way they intended to do it. If you believe they planned on 2024 as a locked in playoff year back when Cherington was hired, well, I wish you would have read or listened, because we’ve kinda been hammering the timeline all along and 2024 under this ownership was a pipe dream.

That doesn’t mean you have to believe Cherington is the right guy any more than you have to believe ANYONE could win under this ownership, but to me it was always hard to believe he’d be removed after this year.

I kinda look at it this way.

It takes about 10 hours to drive from Pittsburgh to the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Just about regardless of when you start unless you’re a numbnuts and hit the Beltway around rush hour.

If I make a lunch meeting in Outer Banks and leave 15 hours before I’m supposed to meet up, then run into construction, and my boss calls me half way through and tells me some roads I planned to use are off the table for me because he doesn’t want to pay for the tolls and if my tire blows I have to make the rest of the trip on a donut regardless, I’d like to think my friend probably understands why I’m late.

GMs get no such understanding.

What they tend to get instead? Is an ability to blame the people they hired to work under them first, and if they choose to not cut deep enough to ensure they’ve removed all the disease, it’s on them.

They either get it turned around quickly or they become the blamed.

The threshold for fans is never as high as it is for ownership, let alone one who probably knows he makes this one of the hardest jobs in sports.

We’re two days in. None of these moves have even been officially announced, so clearly it’s possible they aren’t done here, I just find it incredibly hard to believe they’d wait to make a move with the GM as Bob was rather vocal he waited to long into the offseason to remove Huntington.

9-28-24 – By Gary Morgan – @garymo2007 on Twitter

I’m going to write a lot about what these other smaller market teams have done today in this piece, and before I even start, there is one big reason we all know that sets them apart. It’s of course Bob Nutting, but more specifically than just being cheap, it’s his unwillingness to trust the potential reward for investment and an inability to absorb risk even at a very high odds position.

Tell you what, you know what he is, you know what he does, let’s start looking at some other franchise’s who we consider “small market”. What did they do? What have they invested? Is it just smart hires? We’ll do that for a bit, see what we learn and apply it back to our good ole miser.

Lets keep this fairly modern too, like back to 2010’s, there’s no need to be jumping back 3-4 GM’s and 2-3 Owners.

The Milwaukee Brewers

They’ve been in the playoffs 6 of the last 7 seasons, still yet to win a World Series as a franchise. Payroll has fluctuated from low points around 68 million to peaks of 135 million. Nothing crazy, and they’re actually a slightly smaller media market than Pittsburgh.

Mark Attanasio is a terrific owner, a true civic partner in Milwaukee. Rumblings that the Brewers might relocate were quickly squashed because rather than just holding his hand out to his city that is not thriving financially and threatening to move somewhere that would pay for his ballpark that doesn’t need improvements, he put up 150 Million from the team and partnered with the city and fans to ensure the Brewers would play there through at least 2050.

I’m sorry, I’m passionate about how very much so an owner in a non cap league can make a difference, and how often this one has overseen some really good baseball teams.

Some Brewers fans would probably prefer they spend even a tic more to try harder for a World Series (at least my Brewers fan friends) but they win, a lot and coming from my perspective as a Pirates fan, it’s very hard for me to imagine it not being better.

They’ve hired good GMs and allowed them to cultivate internal candidates to become GMs elsewhere or in some cases, take over right there in Milwaukee. The owner’s flexibility to spend when needed and the GMs ability to develop the talent the draft and trade for into quick turnaround replacement players is next to none.

They aren’t afraid to dish out a bigger contract when it’s warranted and even when it mostly looks like an albatross such as Christian Yelich, they find a way to make it ok. Shrewd moves to acquire MLB help that were blocked like William Contreras or Willy Adames for peanuts. Go back farther and they traded a bunch of prospects for Christian Yelich before extending him to a mega deal taking a swing at a star since they didn’t have any internally coming, and it really worked one year.

The culture works because everyone involved wants to win, for them, for their profits too of course, but legitimately for the city of Milwaukee and the fans. They don’t spend what they can so much as spend what they need and make good deals when they have to make one they don’t really want to make.

Good, well run organization.

Maybe the best word, sustainable. Every year they lose stars, every year they create new ones and when necessary, they sign one to plug a hole they failed to prepare for. They’re the Rays with a soul for their fans.

Cleveland Guardians

Paul Dolan is a cautious owner, but one who recognizes a moment, or a special player and steps up periodically to make sure his team keeps them and he’s never been afraid to recognize a down year and their limitations to authorize his GM to do what’s necessary.

MLB does have a financial imbalance problem, but much like our last team, the Guardians will allow stars to stay there when it’s a special player and he’s willing to work with them too of course.

Trading players doesn’t always mean a step back for the Guardians, in fact it often looks a lot more like recognizing a trend and selling high on something instead of a costly extension or arbitration award.

As a Pirates fan, I’ve certainly seen this tried enough, but think back, the Pirates almost always do it a year too late. This might not sound great, but you almost have to do it when it’s going to piss people off or it’s too late to get the kind of value you want, the kind that probably returns something you can use quickly along with a few pieces that might be something later.

The Guardians have done this with pitching for years, and they certainly did it with Lindor. It’s not like they “won” the trade, but they got players back who stepped right in and they coached the shit out of them.

They’ve had great coaching to make the most of every drop of talent, and while it hasn’t lead to any World Series, the Guardians have made the playoffs 5 out of the last 10 years and their payroll has fluctuated from 53 Million to 155 Million or so.

Again, a well run organization. They do what they can, fans support them when they win, not so much when they don’t and there will be valleys here and there with this org, but they’re the kind of valleys you can see both edges of, unlike the Pirates where you at times can’t see the high on either side any longer.

It certainly wasn’t always this way, certainly wasn’t for the Brewers either, more on that later.

The Kansas City Royals

A little shorter on this one, mainly because I’d really rather focus on perennial playoff participants for this piece for all out praise and analysis. Instead, I’m just going to talk about how they got here, it’s yet to be determined if they’ll sustain it like our first two although inking a generational kid like Bobby Witt Jr. is a nice sign that they intend to try.

The Royals have for years in the eyes of the baseball world spent money when it seemed like a very strange idea to do so. I mean, they’d have like 1 or 2 players worth a crap and sign some high second tier free agent type to a couple year deal.

Sure, they’d trade the guy eventually, but in the process they brought back some really nice players who have lead their charge to the playoffs, helped out by a historically bad Chicago White Sox Team so the division will produce 3 playoff teams this year.

There is reason to expect the Royals are just getting started, but it’ll be years before we know how well they keep it together or transition around Bobby Witt as he spans windows.

It’s been ten years for the Royals, so as rebuilds go, they’ve had a few stutter starts and they will likely lose two key contributors who delivered more than anyone including them. Bottom line, they brought in temporary help for the rotation to augment their youngsters who performed very well too, and to repeat their performance, they’ll likely have to back fill these spots, and they’ve proven they will, but taking runs at guys to over perform is a hard to replicate effort.

Detroit Tigers

The Tigers were supposed to come out of their rebuild years ago. They had a mass of youngsters from high drafting lined up and on the cusp of making the show, so they went out and bought themselves some free agent help to make a splash, and announce to the league they and their young pitching staff were back and to be taken seriously.

Javi Baez was the biggest of such signings, but his completely terrible performance and near constant injuries to their top end prospects essentially left the Tigers with some high priced vets either finishing out the string like Miguel Cabrera or the formerly mentioned Baez just taking a paycheck to be bad at baseball.

Well, those arms are slowly getting healthy and their poor play has lead to even more picks to augment their core.

They reached on a historic end of the season push in 2024, repeating it won’t be easy as the Guardians and Royals look to be poised to stay competitive for a while, the Twins are always floating around .500 and the White Sox won’t be this bad again next year, that low water mark lasted as long as it did in this game for a reason.

Point is, I can’t tell you the Tigers are back, I can’t even tell you if they’ll do it again next year.

So Back to Our Ownership

I could have kept going, Baltimore has obviously made a move, but they have a brand new ownership and I have no clue what they’ll do moving forward. They managed to acquire a ton of prospect depth, but the bill is coming due on some major contributors to their effort and I don’t see the pitching help coming to survive losing what it looks like they’re poised to lose.

Again, this owner could be different and they could go out and keep Anthony Santander or Corbin Burnes. Maybe they go pay for the bullpen help they’ve needed all year, maybe they trade some of that offensive talent for pitching. I just don’t know and again, I wanted to keep this more perennial winners, we have yet to see if Baltimore belongs there, all we know is they took 10-15 years of epic losing and fostered it into a very productive system.

What the Pirates have tried to do here is no different than any of these teams.

First, they all tried to stink, yes, even the Brewers way back when. Yes, Houston did too, Baltimore, Detroit, KC, Tampa, the Marlins, even the Braves. Every single one of them tried to stink so they could get themselves in better position to draft high end talent.

They all tried to invest heavily in some Latin American Country for more effective international signings.

Each and every one of them thought to themselves, they’d have to develop most of their “stars” if they were going to have them.

The real difference is throughout the years the Pirates have not spent enough money to help the MLB product succeed when the development failed. For Bob Nutting and the Pirates, every cycle like this will bring talent, and it’ll be enough to have the team reach the playoffs. Yes, I mean to tell you if they make no changes and just play out the string for the next couple years, this team will make the playoffs, maybe as early as next year, but Nutting has almost always failed to make it more of a sure thing.

His spending cost them opportunities in 2012 and 2016. The years bookending their playoff seasons last decade. A little spending on either side, and I’m not talking crazy, just up to the 130 territory and they probably add one playoff year to either end.

If you want to know the biggest difference, that’s it. Hiring executives of course has a large role, but even that goes back to the money a bit.

See, I don’t care who you are, or how you tell your story, if your plan is to spend as little as possible for 4 or 5 years, do little more than ship out veteran performers for prospects and wait, you will have officially hired a “Dumb” GM. Probably a really dumb coach too.

You can’t ask anyone to lose for 4 or 5 years and then expect them to be seen as anything less than losers.

It’s fair to conclude Cherington and Shelton are both failures. It’s also unfair to refuse to acknowledge they lost for 4 seasons by design. Mandated design. See Bob wants a system that will replenish itself, not unlike the Rays, but he also wants to retain some players so fans think he’s trying. Problem is, that’s usually the players who either don’t have a ton of options, or are willing to take less to be here.

Money is a problem, and it will be until such a time as they show us it isn’t. Money provides flexibility to adjust to sudden losses of personnel, or to swing a trade of a player they don’t want to part ways with knowing they can competently back fill the spot and acquire something else they needed in the process.

This deadline Ben Cherington was tasked with adding to this team, but not the payroll. Then we fans look at his product for those trades wondering how he thought they’d help bring a playoff run in 2024.

Truth is, he probably didn’t. Fact is, if he were given the ability to add to payroll significantly, he probably targets someone else.

I honestly hate hearing things as simplified as “Bob needs to spend” because yes, of course he does, but we also should be aware enough about MLB to know a team in a market like this is absolutely going to have things fall in such a way where it simply doesn’t make sense to throw good money after bad, the problem with Bob is that threshold so far hasn’t existed.

Bottom line, Bob lacks the willingness to take a risk knowing that good baseball brings higher revenue witch leads to higher payrolls, he refuses to make the investments that would create that environment. Worse, when he gets to the point where the team is actually primarily built internally, he lacks the foresight to take a risk and sign some guys who might stop being great players by the end of the deal, and that’s if he’ll pay arbitration figures for a generational talent.

This team can win. And everything I said tends to point the finger at Bob, but it doesn’t excuse Ben Cherington or his staff either. What I’m saying is Bob makes it hard to fairly evaluate any GM they hire, because they are often forced to make dumb moves for financial reasons as opposed to winning baseball games.

Maybe that’s the moral of the story.

When faced with a choice of spending a bit more than is comfortable or starting over, Bob almost always chooses starting over while his competitors often choose shooting their shot.

This Pirates team can win as early as next year, but to have it last, they’ll need to hit on extensions at a better rate than they have so far. 1 out of 3 performing like you expect isn’t good enough. They’ll need to invest in filling the holes that are there and being fine with wasting some money here and there. And lastly, they need to coach and develop what they do bring in much more effectively.

Maybe none of that is in Cherington’s skill set, maybe the truth is under this ownership, getting lucky is the best we can hope for. Some of these other small market teams are in the same boat, some are perennial winners. It can be done, but not until or if the owner is a partner with his GM instead of a boss paying attention to his bottom line.