PITTSBURGH (AP) — Derek Shelton was booed loudly when he was introduced ahead of his sixth home opener as the Pittsburgh Pirates manager last month. He shook it off in the aftermath, attributing the reaction to understandable frustration from a fan base weary of a franchise-wide reset that looks and feels stalled.
The man who arrived at spring training saying it was time to win pledged to get it cleaned up. A little over a month later, with the Pirates languishing in last place amid a flurry of missteps both on and off the field, Shelton was out of a job.
Pittsburgh fired Shelton on Thursday, a decision general manager Ben Cherington — who hired Shelton months after taking over the club’s baseball operations in 2019 — called difficult but necessary to salvage a season perilously close to essentially being over before Memorial Day.
“We aren’t performing the way we need to,” Cherington said a few hours after Shelton became the first major league manager jettisoned this year. “We’re not performing in a way that our fans deserve. We know we need to be better.”
The move came with Pittsburgh mired in a seven-game losing streak and languishing at 12-26 overall. Shelton went 306-440 in five-plus seasons with the Pirates. He navigated the ugly early days of Cherington’s rebuild with good humor and grace but struggled to find the right buttons to push on a small-market team that has little margin for error.
Longtime bench coach and former major leaguer Don Kelly will take over for the remainder of the 2025 season, a full-circle moment for the Pittsburgh native. Cherington called Kelly “an elite human being and teammate” with a “teacher’s heart.”
Those skills figure to be put to the test while overseeing a lineup that ranks among the worst in the majors in nearly every major offensive category.
Cherington was quick to not put the onus for the team’s failure entirely on Shelton. The GM who won a World Series with Boston a dozen years ago said multiple times that he was “more responsible than anyone.”
Maybe, but Cherington will report to work on Friday as usual when the Pirates open a three-game weekend series against Atlanta. Shelton, believed to be in the final season of a contract extension he signed in 2023 during a 20-8 start that turned out to be a mirage, will watch from afar, if he watches at all.
It’s not what either envisioned when the season began.
The Pirates, ranked 26th out of 30 MLB teams in opening-day payroll, hoped to take a step toward contention with National League Rookie of the Year Paul Skenes leading the way.
While the starting rotation in general has been steady, Pittsburgh’s largely inept offense has been an issue. A 2-1 loss to St. Louis on Tuesday encapsulated both Skenes’ and the Pirates’ season. One of the game’s bright young stars made a single mistake in six innings. It was all the Cardinals needed to win on a night Pittsburgh when managed just four hits.
St. Louis finished the three-game sweep less than 24 hours later in a 5-0 victory in which the Pirates showed little life. That was enough for Cherington to recommend to owner Bob Nutting and team president Travis Williams that it was time for a change.
Nutting called Pittsburgh’s opening six weeks of the season “frustrating and painful.”
What it shouldn’t have been, perhaps, is surprising.
The team did little in the offseason to address an offense that was the primary culprit in an August swoon that dropped the Pirates out of playoff contention.
Rather than finding a way to make a significant investment in proven major league talent, Cherington instead retooled parts of the coaching staff and scouting department, including firing hitting coach Andy Haines and replacing him with Matt Hague. The team’s modest personnel moves included bringing back franchise icon Andrew McCutchen, acquiring first baseman Spencer Horwitz and taking one-year flyers on veterans Tommy Pham and Adam Frazier on the eve of spring training.
McCutchen remains one of Pittsburgh’s more productive hitters, even at 38. Pham, meanwhile, is batting .183 and has already been suspended one game for making an obscene gesture toward fans while playing in left field. Frazier is at .229, and Horwitz is currently in the minors rehabbing a wrist injury he sustained not long after coming to the team.
Pittsburgh finds itself in the same position offensively it was a season ago. Cherington likened the team’s opening 38 games “a perfect storm” but tried to express optimism, both in its ability to rebound and his own long-term prospects.
“I don’t believe you have to squint too hard to see a better team in 2025, I really don’t,” he said. “I’m not blind to the fact that we’ve ourselves in a hole and we got to climb out of that. No way to do it but a pitch at the time. We all have that goal.”
Asked if he still considers himself the right person to lead the Pirates out of a wilderness they’ve been in for most of the last 30-plus years — save for a stretch from 2013-15 when McCutchen led a brief renaissance — Cherington nodded.
“I know that there’s frustration — and maybe anger — that it hasn’t happened yet,” he said. “I believe it’s going to happen. I believe strongly I’m going to be a part of making it happen. I have a lot of confidence in our baseball operations group. We have to get better. I know that. Period.”
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