PITTSBURGH — Derek Shelton was booed loudly last month when he was introduced ahead of his sixth home opener as manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates. He shook it off in the aftermath, attributing the reaction to understandable frustration from a fan base weary of a franchise-wide reset that looks and feels stalled.
The man who arrived at spring training saying it was time to win also pledged to get it cleaned up. A little more than a month later, with the team languishing in last place in the National League Central Division amid a flurry of missteps both on and off the field, Shelton was out of a job.
The Pirates fired Shelton on Thursday, a decision that general manager Ben Cherington — who hired Shelton months after taking over the club’s baseball operations in 2019 — called difficult but necessary to salvage a season perilously close to essentially being over before Memorial Day.
“We aren’t performing the way we need to,” Cherington said a few hours after Shelton became the first MLB manager jettisoned this year. “We’re not performing in a way that our fans deserve. We know we need to be better.”
The move came with Pittsburgh mired in a seven-game losing streak and languishing at 12-26 overall. Shelton went 306-440 in five-plus seasons with the Pirates. He navigated the ugly early days of Cherington’s rebuild with good humor and grace but struggled to find the right buttons to push on a small-market team that has little margin for error.