The Pirates fired manager Derek Shelton yesterday, bringing his five-plus year tenure as the organization’s manager to an end. That tenure didn’t exactly have many highlights, as the Pirates never won more than 76 games in a season under his guidance and he leaves the manager’s chair with a 306-440 record overall. For a job as nebulous and difficult to evaluate from the outside as that of a big league manager, there are few options other than viewing a club’s record as a reflection of the manager’s job performance.
All of that is to say that replacing Shelton with Don Kelly in the dugout is not necessarily a shocking or controversial decision for the Pirates. After years of failure including a disappointing 2024 season where they finished with an identical record to 2023 despite adding Paul Skenes and Jared Jones to the rotation, Pittsburgh was surely hoping for a big year in 2025. It’s a long season, but things haven’t worked out that way so far: the club has gone 12-26 so far and is currently riding a seven-game losing streak with just three series wins total this year.
With that being said, it’s difficult to argue that even a Hall of Fame-caliber manager would be able to turn this club around. The Pirates had an extremely quiet offseason that saw them enter the season having spread just $22MM in spending across seven free agents this winter. Perhaps if Skenes was being complemented with above average regulars like Teoscar Hernandez and Gleyber Torres instead of role players Tommy Pham and Adam Frazier, the team would be in a better position and Shelton would still be employed.
Zooming out from Shelton’s specific situation, in-season firings for managers have become increasingly rare over the years. Rather famously, the 2022 season saw four managers get fired with more than a month of baseball left to play. The Rangers fired Chris Woodward in mid-August. The Blue Jays fired Charlie Montoyo in mid-July. The Phillies and Angels both fired their managers (Joe Girardi and Joe Maddon, respectively) by the end of the first week of June. Two of those four teams went on to make the postseason, although it should be noted that Toronto had a winning record and was in playoff position when Montoyo was dismissed.
For every firing like that of Girardi, which occurred when the Phils were just 10-18 before they eventually turned things around and made it to the World Series under Rob Thomson, there’s several that do not change the outcome of the season. Prior to the successes of Thomson and John Schneider in 2022, the last team to make the playoffs after firing their manager was the 2009 Rockies. On the other hand, the Orioles and Royals in 2010 both improved significantly after hiring Ned Yost and Buck Showalter midseason. Though neither of those teams made the playoffs, Showalter led Baltimore to the postseason in his second year as manager while Yost eventually led the Royals to back-to-back World Series appearances in 2014 and ’15. The Mariners’ season turned around last year following Scott Servais’ dismissal in favor of Dan Wilson, and Seattle currently holds the second-best record in the American League.
Perhaps, then, the argument for making an in-season managerial change is that it offers your new manager an opportunity to get comfortable in the role in a season that’s already had its expectations diminished by a poor start under the previous manager. There could certainly be value in that, as well as the opportunity to give an internal candidate a sort of trial run in the dugout before weighing external candidates during the offseason.
On the other hand, one could argue that if a club lacks the confidence in their manager to stick with them for more than a month of poor performance from the team, then that club should have simply made a managerial change the prior offseason so that the team would be led by the organization’s ideal person for the job from the very start of the season.
Where do MLBTR readers fall when it comes to this debate? Are in-season managerial changes a good practice that brings about positive change within the organization and can spur teams to success, or are they largely meaningless moves meant to demonstrate urgency that would have been better demonstrated during the previous offseason? Have your say in the poll below:
Being or having a lame duck in charge does nothing for no one. Might as well pull the rip cord when you feel you must.
FIRE SNITKER NOW!
Why??? He just got them back at .500 using Eli white and Alex verdugo???
.500…When…Last Year?
He started Stuart Fairchild batting .048..
after today .043 over Alex Verdugo.
Granted Alex is struggling but so was Harris.
Harris turned it around last few games.
Verdugo Can’t shake rough spot if not in lineup! Snit doesn’t know how to use the bullpen OR make out a lineup!
@mariners fan, just ignore AL. His opinions are the baseball equivalent of a teenager yelling CHICKEN JOKEY at the movie theater
Flint and steel!
The problem with this poll is that neither option applies to the pirates. They are not underperforming, they are performing exactly how we should expect them to based on everything ownership and the front office has done. Firing Shelton does nothing to change that. The next manager will be in the same situation in a few years
Thank you. This post belonged on a different firing, definitely not this particular one. This was a GM trying to save his house by burning down his hand picked employee’s.
Shelton should have never been hired in the first place, his teams lacked discipline, basic fundamentals and leadership
Same goes for the clown that picked those undisciplined, unskilled, followers. Or did the front office pick all winners and Shelton ruined them all? I guess your comment doesn’t fit all of reality.
Is Brandon Hyde next? I think the seat is getting warm.
orioles future look more like the white sox than the astros
I’m purposefully not googling this myself, for the sake of the discussion, but have there been teams under water who fired a manager early or mid season and then the replacement manager turned the team around to such a degree that a lost season turned into a playoff run?
I am also not googling but maybe the Mariners last year?
The Phillies fired Joe Girardi to great results.
2003 Marlins, classic example. Went from being 16-22 under Jeff Torborg, to 75-49 under Jack McKeon and winning the World Series.
Jack McKeon with the Marlins in 2003?
Morgan’s Magic.
If youre not going to give me a good team, give me an entertaining team. Ozzie Guillen for Bucs Manager.
Brandon Hyde next, please.
orioles are the new white sox
Maybe, but I strongly doubt it.
In Toronto it makes sense to Fire the Lousy GM shapiro and his lackie atkins…
Probably won’t help Pirates though. Their problem is ownership
It’s obviously more nuanced than these two poll options. In my view, the manager’s main job is to set the tone for the clubhouse culture. An in-season change is best for when the culture is in a rut with little hope of escaping. As an owner, the question of fire/stay the course often comes down to assessing if a new leader might improve the culture.
Managers have to be fired because ownership will never fire itself.
It worked for the Phillies in 2022. Rob Thompson has been able to take the Phillies to the playoffs since Joe Girardi got the boot early on in the 2022 season.
Nick Deeds tells us that without a doubt he doesn’t understand what it takes to be a good manager in MLB. I pay to read your opinion why? There are at least a dozen people that comment here regularly that know more about baseball and write succinctly with at least a basic understanding of journalism.
I think if you’re an a-hole manager or if you really dgaf, you should be fired midseason if the team is terrible. But, managers really don’t make that big of a difference. I mean, they can definitely cause wins and losses based on in game moves, but I think success and failure is 90% or more the result of the players performance.
My team (the Tigers) have been terrible at player development for 40 years (especially position player development). I watched scapegoat managers like Buddy Bell, Phil Garner, and many others go down for many years because they couldn’t win enough games with the players the organization provided for them.
The Pittsburgh problem seems very similar.
Shelton should have been gone 2 years ago. He allows laziness, has no idea how to make & stick to a line-up. Cutch as DH needs to rest every 3-4 games. Sitting in the dugout is very taxing on his 37 year old body. A .150 hitter gets an extra base hit, maybe even a HR & he hits clean-up next day; guaranteed! He can’t manage starting or relieving pitching. They lose due to walks by SP or RP & starters are at 100 pitches after 5-6 innings. Why? Because they’re told to pitch to the edges of the plate. Every team knows this & figured it out 3 years ago. Cherington gave him too many “versatile” players, just another way to “mix & match” his line-up daily. He might be the worst manager in baseball history.