Fire Shelton
- Thread starter pittbb80
- Start date
Uh Cruz didn’t run Holderman out there to pitch to lefty who hit the home run when he had two lefties in the bull pen. One of them Chapman
Cruz didn’t fail to send Reynolds in the second inning when the Dbacks were giving him second. Had he taken second Cruz doesn’t hit into a double play and they score another run.
Shelton is clueless
Shelton will not be the manager next season if they truly want to win. Go get Joe Girardi FFS!
Yeah. How quickly we move on to next year. Things really have imploded.
Get yourself a pedigreed manager and spend an extra 20 million on payroll. If you do that in the off-season, you’ll make up for the spending at the gates.
Seriously, the way nutting spends every year, you’d think it’s to sand bag so that when they are close and can go for it in a given year, there’s some extra money to spend. And given next year is year 6, spending another 24 million in payroll is like $4 million more per year which is nothing.
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He has no feel for the game - he uses too many color by number metrics to manage.
This is probably where they are at if they want to contend. He has a .415 winning percentage and his team completely imploded when they needed to step up in the playoff race.
There doesn't actually seem to be any indication that that is true though. He seems to look at each year as it's own entity, and at the end of each one he puts that money in his pocket and does with it what he wants. And what he wants has nothing to do with increasing Pirate payroll.
pittdan77
Athletic Director
Does it really matter who manages the Pirates? It's not like this slump was avoidable. It's almost an annual August tradition.
Probably not a whole lot. I'm not a Shelton fan, but things just kick into another gear after the All-Star Break, and you kind of start to see how far away this team truly is. Guys can take turns getting hot for a month or two, but the more reps you have the more everyone kind of conforms to their averages... in addition to everyone now awakening from their inevitable early season slumbers that come with the season being 162 games long since the playoffs are actually in sight.
These other lineups are just SO much more loaded than ours. Like, it isn't even close. Reynolds made his Pirates debut in 2019. Cruz (I still consider him a plus, albeit certainly not great, hitter with hope for the future) made his in 2021. You're telling me we couldn't come up with a single "good" MLB-ready hitter since then? It's way too early to declare Bart that. Like, my goodness - it feels like we're legitimately three good (not just legitimate MLB starter) bats away. Brian Reynolds is probably the second or third best hitter on some of the better teams in the league, and then they'll have two or three more plus bats after that.
Feels like we needed Hayes to be a major hit, Cruz to be a freak, etc. Trying not to overreact to a losing streak, but this lineup just has me pretty discouraged right now about the Skenes/Keller/Jones tenures. It doesn't feel like this is coming together nearly as much as it did back in 2013.
my thoughts. not a shelton fan at all but is a new guy going to change things?
We have the league leading error maker at shortstop who turns routine plays into errors on a daily basis.
we have a 1/3 of our lineup batting under .200 and those are every day players.
we have 3 mlb starting pitchers and one of them hasnt pitched for a month because they want to keep his innings-count low.
bednar blows leads on a daily basis, holderman is a nightmare, all they have is chapman on the back end but for some reason, he cant pitch more than one inning..
oh and our GM, every trade he makes, we lose out on. every single one.
this lineup is so far from being a good one. a very mediocre division helped gloss that over for awhile..
pittdan77
Athletic Director
So far as hitting is concerned, it's going to be very rare that you can put together a major league lineup just from within your system or by brining in other team's cast offs. You need to actually invest in a hitter or two. Then some of your weakness goes away because guys that aren't as good start seeing better pitches because you can't just pitch around everyone. It's not so much that "slumps happen" as much as there just isn't anyone to fear in that lineup. Good teams have at least two guys you don't want to see at the plate with runners on base. Problem is that those kinds of guys ain't cheap.
seeing the padres and dodgers lineup, then ours, is frightening the difference. every damn player is batting .287 with 65 RBIs, and those are the guys 8th and 9th in the lineup..
pittdan77
Athletic Director
Yup. And I think a lot of what's made the Pirates look better is that their division is very mediocre. If they were in the west, they'd have 45 wins.
Agree with most of this, although I'd say you need more than 2 such hitters as well as very strong pitching to be a pennant contender. Offensively you need a top half that can all hit at a strong major league level, > .275, a couple guys that hit with high average AND power, and an opportunistic back half with some speed mixed in that can find ways to get on and run the bases.
But I agree 100% with your statement that a couple of formidable bats strategically placed in the middle of the lineup helps everyone else see better pitches.
Yeah, the margin of error just isn't there for teams like us. Whereas the Dodgers can just go buy that talent, we cannot. What's concerning, though, is that a lot of these big market teams also seem to have a hell of a lot more young homegrown talent in their lineups than we do.
But some of these "best of the best" guys who didn't even hit their primes until their rookie contracts expire - yeah, not even an option for us.
Even when small market teams such as the A's and Rays assembled these world-beater pitching staffs, the lineups seemed to be what held them back from winning championships. Probably just no substitute for guys who are ultra talented and experienced hitters. I know the Royals won one, but that just seemed like a weird time in baseball. But, of course, anything can happen once you get in the playoffs.
The Royals are also the one exception from the last 3 (maybe 4?) decades of a small market winning. They had a perfect storm of position player prospects coming up at the same time and found 3 elite relievers.
pittdan77
Athletic Director
I mean, if they're not going to spend money on actual talent, you sure can't expect them to lay down the cash to do any real scouting and development.
Well the Marlins have won a few (or at least one). I only remember Hosmer and Moustakas from the KC lineup, and it's possible both had career seasons. I just figured it was a weird time for baseball, cause the Indians were like an out away from winning it the following season also.
The Giants weren't a small market team, but they won at least one of their championships with a pretty damn lackluster lineup. And I'd have to look, but the Cardinals might have as well. Pitching is definitely more important, but you can't have a lineup that is anything close to as anemic as the Pirates' lineup is.
They spent a decade building that team from the draft and farm. After they had their 3 year run everyone took off for big contracts and the Royals went over the cliff. Now just 8-10 years later the sport has evolved such that they never would have been able to do it for even three years without losing the meat of their roster to bigger money teams. Just another sad example of how hopeless it really is for the small money teams.
I don't know that it's impossible. The Ind...ehh, Guardians seem to be contending for that division more often than they're not.
I wouldn't call them championship contenders most of these years, though. Still, I'd take just being relevant.
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The weirdest aspect of that KC World Series champ team was that the starting pitching was statistically no better than a bit above average. The bullpen, however, was phenomenal. That team lacked star power but was phenomenal defensively and had great chemistry.
The 97 Marlins WS champ team was very similar to the 2015 Royals, as was their rapid demise right after winning when they lost all their top guys to bigger payroll teams.
pittdan77
Athletic Director
The bar is low enough now that being relevant in September shouldn't be a monumental achievement anymore.
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