If he is not fired, I will leave the Pittsburgh Pirates head coach, as he has a misunderstanding with his star player.

If he is not fired, I will leave the Pittsburgh Pirates head coach, as he has a misunderstanding with his star player.

I will step down as head coach of the Pittsburgh Pirates if he is not sacked because of a disagreement with a key player.

I find it amusing how much baseball reflects real life. My children have likely been taught more life lessons via the lens of baseball than any encyclopedia.

Hey, buddy, don’t worry if the kid fails his driver’s license exam—even Ted Williams failed 60% of the time.

The majority of you have probably done the same, even if it was only accidentally, and reading this makes you reflect on the times when you’ve said any of these baseball truth bombs in the workplace.

I mean, that’s the whole beauty of baseball, isn’t there always something new to learn? Despite all the games that have been played throughout the years, there’s a decent chance that you’ll see something you’ve never seen before once a week.

But you’ve also seen this management tenure of Derek Shelton before. I was discussing Derek with Jim Stamm, my podcast partner for the Pirates Fan Forum, back when he was hired and the team was beginning their reconstruction. We were discussing whether Derek had a shot to lead Pittsburgh to baseball success.

We knew very little about him other than the usual stuff—that he was a former hitting coach, had directed an absurd hitting video, had collaborated with some of the best people in the business, and was well-liked and well-respected by all. Appears to be a suitable match for a youthful squad seeking a contemporary mentor to implement their analytics-driven approach.

We posed the issue because, regardless of his coaching caliber, we knew he would be in charge of a squad that would almost certainly lose for the next three or four seasons.

The problem is, it’s very difficult to move on from a record like that. It resembles how some fans regard Mitch Keller in certain ways. It was quite awful being a rookie pitcher in the major leagues, honing his skill on a bad team managed by a group of inexperienced managers, watching their first rosters.

Those who wish to convey the message that Mitch is awful will go over his career numbers to make sure you understand how awful he is. Fair-minded individuals often refer to the young player as of 2022; after all, the Pirates signed him as a player, not as a rookie.

It is rare for managers to be given that leeway. After Jim Tracy’s disastrous three years, John Russell was so awful in his three years as manager that it cleared the way for Clint Hurdle to take over with a more talented team than they had and completely change the culture.

Before some fans began to write him off and accept him as a “OK” manager, even he was well into 2015. After all, they had to pardon him for 2011 and 2012. Do you recall the “epic collapses” that he was both the manager and the cause of?

Some people never forget those years. Some people never let the stench of those two campaigns go away, and in 2016 they revived calls for Clint’s dismissal.

Win and have a team full of geniuses and legends. Go down with poor players, idiot, and the worst manager ever.

At the absolute least, it sets up a young coach like Derek Shelton to wear the stain of defeat when he asks him to endure four years of having virtually nothing to work with and intentionally uses players who most likely shouldn’t be in the league because the general manager wants to take a look at them.

Baseball is life, all the way to the top, and hate distorts our own judgment.

If you’ve said something like that, I don’t expect to change your mind. After all, it should take a lot for you to use that word in the first place. I won’t lecture you about how it shouldn’t be used in sports unless it’s to express a lighthearted “hatred” of rivalry.

Rather, the reason I bring this up is that, in the unlikely event that the reason you’re upset isn’t a management issue, I hope you will at least acknowledge the curtain that has been drawn over your eyes on this matter and attempt to at least glance behind it.

I will be the first to tell you that there is very little chance that Derek Shelton will manage this team for the next ten years. The stench is genuine, and every general manager will eventually have his “he who smelt it dealt it” moment.

Furthermore, I would add that Derek Shelton’s decisions haven’t really been the cause of most of the struggles this team has had since 2020. Furthermore, since this general manager has a vision for how he wants his team to operate and has, for the most part, witnessed it unfold, the next manager will likely follow in much of the same footsteps.

Yes, the general manager desired for Ka’ai Tom to participate on 117 plate appearances in 2021. The general manager assigned three starting pitchers to Derek Shelton during the final month of 2023.

To be clear, he had a bucket of stench dumped on his head. He might be too sick to recover.

Whether it’s fair or not, this is the first year he’s had enough skill to compete, and the first year I can honestly evaluate his acumen.