The Pirates have fired manager Derek Shelton. Let the puns begin.
Shelton walks the plank.
Shelton sent to Davey Jones’s locker.
Shelton set adrift.
Bottom line, Shelton is the latest scapegoat for a franchise that just won’t/can’t compete until someone spends serious money on player payroll.
Want a catchy nautical-themed phrase to sum up all this? Try this one: Pirates changing managers is like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
Managers make the difference of a few games during the season and just might swing a close playoff series. Beyond that, they are at the mercy of the rosters they are given.
Ownership provides the money and general managers are supposed to spend it wisely to build winning rosters. Only then can a manager produce. You need all the ingredients to be successful.
This is a recurring story for the Pirates. Back in November 1985, the Pirates hired Syd Thrift as general manager, taking over a team that had lost 104 games that season.
Three seasons later, the Pirates won 85 games. Some see Thrift as setting the foundation for three consecutive division titles from 1990 through 1992. But it wasn’t enough back then for Pirates ownership and Thrift was fired.
Thrift left with a quote that rings true today: “It ain’t easy resurrecting the dead.”
The Pirates field manager during Thrift’s tenure, Jim Leyland, is the quintessential example that even Hall of Fame managers need talent to win.
When Leyland had such top-line talent, people like Bonds, Drabek, Bonilla, Van Slyke, Smiley, Walk, they won. When those players left because the Pirates couldn’t or wouldn’t pay them, the winning stopped.
Leyland saw a similar fate after his Pirates tenure, winning a World Series title with Florida in 1997, then seeing his team dismantled and lose 108 games the next season. Did Leyland get incredibly stupid during the course of one offseason, or did Florida simply lose its talent base?
Bottom line, it really doesn’t matter who the Pirates settle on as the replacement for Shelton, unless ownership decides to spend money.
According to the ESPN story on Shelton’s firing, the Pirates began the season with the 26th lowest payroll of 30 Major League teams.
Check the standings and the Pirates have the 28th worst record. Cheapskate owner Bob Nutting really can’t complain much about what he’s getting for his money – or lack thereof.
PNC Park, which opened in 2001, was proclaimed to be the cure for what ailed the Pirates. The new playpen would attract fans, provide more money and help the team become competitive again.
At the time PNC was being built, I worked for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and wrote a series looking ahead. The Cleveland (then Indians) were a supposed model of how a new ballpark brought a franchise back — to use the Thrift reference – from the dead.
Here’s the dirty little secret I exposed way back then. Even with the new stadium, the Pirates were looking to spend less on payroll than any competitive team of the time. Fast-forward to today and nothing has changed.
Barring a minor miracle, the Pirates were relegated to being irrelevant. Oh, they might slip into the postseason as a wild-card on occasion, perhaps even win the division if a lot of bad things happened to other teams. But they were no threats ever again to make, or win, the World Series.
All these decades later, that has been proven correct. Shelton is just the latest guy to get slapped in the face by the reality.
Sam Ross Jr's site 