Pictured: Iron Maiden’s “Somewhere in Time” album, from which the song “Wasted Years” hails. 

After the 2019 season, Pirates’ general manager Neal Huntington and skipper Clint Hurdle were fired. The team had gone 69-93, their worst finish since 2010. Team president Frank Coonelly also departed the organization, and his replacement—Travis Williams—would be tasked with hiring replacements for the two men who helped break the Bucs’ two-decade playoff drought. 

For manager, Williams’ finalists were Matt Quatraro and Derek Shelton. Quatraro was the Rays bench coach at the time, while Shelton held the same position with the Twins. Williams opted to hire Shelton. Quatraro would remain with the Rays until 2022, when the Royals would hire him as their manager. After a dismal year as a rookie manager, they made the postseason last year, going 86-76 in Quatraro’s sophomore. To contrast that, Derek Shelton has never won more than 76 games in a season as a manager in his five-plus years in Pittsburgh. 

When the general manager search drew to a close, two names emerged: Matt Arnold and Ben Cherington. Arnold, an assistant general manager with the Brewers in 2019, was promoted to GM the following year, and last season was the recipient of the Major League Baseball Executive of the Year Award after leading the Brew Crew to a 93-69 record and an NL Central crown. Cherington was the vice president of baseball operations in his previous role, and a one-time general manager of the Red Sox from 2011-2015, a period during which he won a World Series and the same award as Arnold. However, that acknowledgment occurred 12 years ago, and he has yet to accomplish anything close to that in his tenure in Pittsburgh. 

It would not be fair to place the entirety of the failures of the past five-plus seasons on the shoulders of Cherington and Shelton—nor would it be fair to solely blame Travis Williams. They are all complicit, but the ringleader is the owner. Bob Nutting has owned the Pittsburgh Pirates since 2007, and the team has made the playoffs a mere three times in the 17 seasons he has been at the helm, only getting past the wild card round once. 

Nutting is renowned for being cheap, with his front offices not having signed an external free agent to a multi-year contract since 2016, and the largest value contract being $10.5 million, which is peanuts in Major League Baseball. Despite saying otherwise, he does not care at all about winning, and his only priority is finance. 

I say all of this to give the front office and coaching some leeway, as they do not have the resources at their disposal that perennial winners like the Dodgers, Yankees, and Phillies have. 

Be that as it may, though, there are plenty of teams that have found ways to win ballgames while existing in small-to-mid-sized markets and/or having underwhelming payrolls. That necessitates good drafting, player development, and trading, none of which has happened since Hurdle and crew were axed. 

Since 2020, the Pirates have scored the fewest runs in baseball, per Jason Mackey of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. He also states that they are second-to-last in run-differential over those five seasons at -729. 

Let us look at more recent numbers. This season, the Pirates’ hitting ranks are as follows:

• Last in batting average (.184)
• Tied-27th in on-base % (.273)
• Last in slugging % (.290)
• Last in on-base plus slugging (.563)
• Tied-26th in home runs hit (10)
• Tied-27th in runs scored (50, or 3.125 per game)
• 3rd-most batting strikeouts (151, or 9.43 per game, or more than one per inning)
• Last in weighted runs created plus (61, league average for a hitter is 100)

The last metric, wRC+, is an advanced statistic that measures offensive production independent of the ballpark and era. 

Bearing in mind that this is the sixth year of the Cherington-Shelton partnership, and the team has failed to put together a lineup that can produce at a major league level—this in spite of the fact that they employ a generational pitcher in Paul Skenes—it is fair to say that the experiment has failed. While Bob Nutting has not done the organization any favors by letting his wallet collect dust, a savvy general manager would acquire a positive-WAR player using the prospects at his disposal, and an MLB manager would make smarter lineup and bullpen decisions. 

Cherington and Shelton—enabled by Nutting—have wasted five-plus years of the Pirates’ organization, a franchise that has not won a true playoff series (a one-off wild card game notwithstanding) since 1979. It is time to clean house, much like they did in 2019. Ideally, Nutting would sell the team, too. However, that is too far-fetched. I will settle for every front office member and coach being handed his walking papers at a minimum.