Skenes is a unicorn but Keller, Jones, Ortiz, and Falter have all had significant drop-offs in the "second half" split (not actually half). Overall our starting rotation has gone from ranking 8th in fWAR in the first half (which is somewhat remarkable given that we didn't have Skenes for that whole time) to 21st in the second half.
Brandan Bidois was added to the Indianapolis roster and he seems to be active, as he's a bullpen option on Gameday. I mentioned early this year if he stayed healthy that he would be a 40-man roster addition in the off-season. He did not stay healthy once again, but this is interesting to see. He is highly rated internally for the Pirates. I don't know if they would still add him as the risk of losing him seems almost non-existent due to throwing 58.1 innings total (he actually signed exactly five years ago today), but I wouldn't be shocked knowing what I do.
I've said it before. I'll say it again. I won't personally renew my MLB.tv or pay any attention to the Pittsburgh Pirates in 2025 if Ben Cherington and Derek Shelton are still employed by the club.
I’ll find it hard to quit totally, but these past couple of years have been really tough. I’ve gone to two games this year. Other than 2020, that’s by far the fewest games I’ve been to since the Littlefield era.
I’m hoping for changes, but there are quite a number of players worth paying money to see. Probably more than anytime since the playoff years of last decade. And more coming.
It _will_ be tough because I like the game of baseball a good bit more than I do any other sport. Used to be a huge Steelers fan but Tomlin ruined football for me. Walking away from the NFL was very easy. Surprisingly so.
I was patient during the latest “rebuild” and felt pretty good about the 76 wins last year, but this year I expected contending baseball. We got it-sort of- until August 1st and then we were revealed for the what we have seen the last 6-7 weeks. Putrid.
BC has managed to squander and ruin the great excitement around Skenes. A bolder GM would have allowed him to start the season in the Bigs. His complete and utter domination of AAA showed he was ready. He also called up Yorke and Cook weeks after he should have. He completely failed by acquiring BLDC. IKF is a good player and will shine brighter on a better team when smart baseball will be rewarded more, but he doesn’t do much for the offense. Just so much making it up on the fly. This season could have been a big step forward, but instead, we’re flat on our faces as team after team steps on us and walks away.
I was patient during the rebuild too. Now I’m wondering what the point of the rebuild even was. The team is substantially anchored by Huntington acquisitions still. Jones and Nick were selected via a draft slot earned from a poor finishing 2019 NH team. Skenes was via lotto. We could have won 80 games from 2021-2023 and fielded a team with a similar talent level to what we did this year. By my figuring you’d lose David Bednar, Jack Suwinski and Henry Davis if you don’t rebuild. But replacing those guys with even replacement level players this year leads to a team with 2 extra wins somehow. Just mind boggling.
One key to the failure is squandering the tradeable assets once they decided to rebuild. The sad fact is that they would have been better off keeping Marte, Taillon, Bell, and Musgrove. OK, none of these guys is Juan Soto, but what did they get back? Virtually nothing.
Yeah and for a little while it was possible to sell yourself on the fact that maybe Escotto or Head figures things out. After this year that’s a near impossible sell.
How the heck can Shelton write BDLC’s name in the lineup almost every day. 46 k’s, 2 walks since coming to the Pirates. If BC really wanted to keep his job he would have released Joe and BDLC and brought up Palacios, Gorski, Bae, or Suwinski to try and provide some vision of the future. This truly is as angry as I have been in years with this organization. This is fraudulent to put this crap out there. And the players are complicit. They have quit.
I am not going to blame the players. It's only human to not give 100% when you work in a highly dysfunctional organization. This is why I say that Reynolds is so exceptional. He has been here for years, doing his best, despite the constant dysfunction and demoralization. Not many people are wired like that: even highly competitive athletes, many of whom cannot stand to see managers running out subpar lineups and GMs doing little or nothing to improve the team year in and year out.
That’s a good point. This is one of the reasons I think BC is failing even this current team. If you release dead weight and prioritize some guys who could/should be here next year that can keep the veterans interested even late into the season, especially if you could start winning games! The losing grates on us, but I would think it is worse for them.
Ok... you are Paul Skenes or O'Neil Cruz. You have never played on a winning team.
You are 11 games below .500. You look at the lineup card, and BDLC is playing again, for the 7th day in row. There are 4,000 people in the stands. Rowdy Tellez is half-assing it on every play, joking around, and trying to tell you how to play your position. The manager just got done telling the media that so-and-so and so-and-so just didn't "execute" last night, while telling them that you are an "organizational success," taking all credit for your accomplishments. You have 16 guys who edit videos or manage the team Instagram account hanging out in the locker room and trying to play dominos with the players. At some point, you just check out... you can't help it. You try not to, but it is impossible.
If the season was a chess game, I'd tip over my king and go get a burger. Jones, Keller, endy all having grueling ends to a meaningless season....are these guys familiar with the Hippocratic oath?
Im so upset how they handled Jared Jones at the end there. Velo was way don’t, he was grunting (I don’t think I’ve ever heard him do that) on change ups and you can visibly see something wrong in his facial expressions
Went straight to the locker room.
That’s inexcusable to let him keep pitching in a meaningless game.
I don't think Jones was ready to come back from that lat strain. Those can be tricky, I guess, with a guy missing anywhere from a couple weeks to a couple months. He must have been more in the couple months category.
It's classic Shelton. His top priority at all times is to "manage the bullpen," translate, make his own job easier. If it means jeopardizing the health of the team's most valuable players, no problem. Two days in a row now.
This management team is so wrong-headed, lost, and confused. They don’t know which way is up anymore. I know Nutting is the ultimate problem, BUT NH was able to put it together for awhile. Short of Nutting selling the team, I say just clean house. Perhaps promote Don Kelly to manager, for a bit of continuity but still a new voice and try to get a GM in here who knows how to build something.
Why are BDLC and Joe in the lineup against a RHP? Not that I’m a Tellez fan, but a major league team would nontender both those guys in the offseason, so there’s no more point to playing them than him.
Funny you mention these two- both Joe and BDLC with absolutely embarrassing AB’s with runners on in the 4th. BDLC with a 3 pitch K and Joe goes from 3-0 to a swinging K 2 feet off the plate.
Really need to find a couple legit LH bats for next season. I did notice that Jack has been hitting well at Indy lately but still unsure if he is an answer going forward. Way too many similar replacement level RH bats on this roster. Really hoping Endy can be healthy and possibly fill one of those needs.
They need bats, full stop! And, those bats need to be equal to or better than Reynolds/Cruz. Not sure how or where they will find them, but their stated objective of clustering some good at bats together to score runs, fully relying on their pitching and bullpen to keep games close, has been a colossal disaster.
This is bad a team, but they are something else in addition to that: boring. It’s bad enough that we have to watch them give ~600 PA’s to OF’s who are a cumulative -3.1 WAR (-2.7 if you include Joe’s .4 WAR!), but watching them double down on these guys because they have nothing else beyond AAAA waiver wire fodder in Indianapolis is beyond tedious.
Twenty (now 21) comments on a game thread is all we need to know about what they've done to dampen enthusiasm. Sure, much of that is the losing, but like you've said they've put together a boring team and it's not clear that the players are really playing for Shelton. (Obviously, Cruz and Skenes are exempt from the characterization of boring.) It feels a lot like September 2019 when there were multiple stories about Hurdle having lost the clubhouse.
In a weird way, Skenes and Cruz make it all the more frustrating. It’s boring in a sense of “oh, grandma’s taking the Lamborghini out to Giant Eagle to get more Werther’s Original!” Yeah it’s a Lamborghini. But we are going to Giant Eagle. It’s a waste. We have these two dynamic talents but we aren’t doing anything with them. It’s a shame, these guys deserve to see a deep playoff run. Can you imagine Skenes starting 3 times in a 7 game series?
That's one of the reasons I always talk about Cook and Yorke playing. I'm not worried about their 2024 results, I want to see them get experience in the majors. I also want some excitement when I watch games. When it's legit prospects you anticipate their at-bats. That doesn't wear off during a September trial. I'd rather watch them go 0-for-4 than see them out of the lineup.
That's all because you want to see them find a way to get better. Idiot Ben and Idiot Derek have zero interest in doing that. They're still trying to justify the decisions that led to this failed season.
I don't mind it too much. No need to push Cruz's ankle this much late in the season and we get a look at how well Cook can handle center. Find out if he becomes the actual backup to Cruz in off-season or if they want to get another true CF to play behind him
BTW what is with Shelton always posting lineups at the last minute. It seems to me I go to MLB to see the lineup and the opposition has their’s up and ours is no where to be found.
Skenes is a unicorn but Keller, Jones, Ortiz, and Falter have all had significant drop-offs in the "second half" split (not actually half). Overall our starting rotation has gone from ranking 8th in fWAR in the first half (which is somewhat remarkable given that we didn't have Skenes for that whole time) to 21st in the second half.
Jun Seok Shim going to the AFL
Kinda worried about this one really blowing up in their faces, especially given how totally horrible De La Cruz has been.
Maybe BDLC should go, too, get some remedial hitting instruction.
Brandan Bidois was added to the Indianapolis roster and he seems to be active, as he's a bullpen option on Gameday. I mentioned early this year if he stayed healthy that he would be a 40-man roster addition in the off-season. He did not stay healthy once again, but this is interesting to see. He is highly rated internally for the Pirates. I don't know if they would still add him as the risk of losing him seems almost non-existent due to throwing 58.1 innings total (he actually signed exactly five years ago today), but I wouldn't be shocked knowing what I do.
AFL candidate.
If they are activating him for a single game, I have to believe that’s the route they are taking.
Hey, Indianapolis scored five runs in the first inning! It's not all bad.
It’s been all bad since August.
On the plus side, David "Wet the" Bednar didn't give up any runs.
I've said it before. I'll say it again. I won't personally renew my MLB.tv or pay any attention to the Pittsburgh Pirates in 2025 if Ben Cherington and Derek Shelton are still employed by the club.
‘Personally renew’
Sounds like a Tmobile customer who gets MLB TV for free! (Like me)
I’ll find it hard to quit totally, but these past couple of years have been really tough. I’ve gone to two games this year. Other than 2020, that’s by far the fewest games I’ve been to since the Littlefield era.
I’m hoping for changes, but there are quite a number of players worth paying money to see. Probably more than anytime since the playoff years of last decade. And more coming.
It _will_ be tough because I like the game of baseball a good bit more than I do any other sport. Used to be a huge Steelers fan but Tomlin ruined football for me. Walking away from the NFL was very easy. Surprisingly so.
I was patient during the latest “rebuild” and felt pretty good about the 76 wins last year, but this year I expected contending baseball. We got it-sort of- until August 1st and then we were revealed for the what we have seen the last 6-7 weeks. Putrid.
BC has managed to squander and ruin the great excitement around Skenes. A bolder GM would have allowed him to start the season in the Bigs. His complete and utter domination of AAA showed he was ready. He also called up Yorke and Cook weeks after he should have. He completely failed by acquiring BLDC. IKF is a good player and will shine brighter on a better team when smart baseball will be rewarded more, but he doesn’t do much for the offense. Just so much making it up on the fly. This season could have been a big step forward, but instead, we’re flat on our faces as team after team steps on us and walks away.
I was patient during the rebuild too. Now I’m wondering what the point of the rebuild even was. The team is substantially anchored by Huntington acquisitions still. Jones and Nick were selected via a draft slot earned from a poor finishing 2019 NH team. Skenes was via lotto. We could have won 80 games from 2021-2023 and fielded a team with a similar talent level to what we did this year. By my figuring you’d lose David Bednar, Jack Suwinski and Henry Davis if you don’t rebuild. But replacing those guys with even replacement level players this year leads to a team with 2 extra wins somehow. Just mind boggling.
One key to the failure is squandering the tradeable assets once they decided to rebuild. The sad fact is that they would have been better off keeping Marte, Taillon, Bell, and Musgrove. OK, none of these guys is Juan Soto, but what did they get back? Virtually nothing.
Yeah and for a little while it was possible to sell yourself on the fact that maybe Escotto or Head figures things out. After this year that’s a near impossible sell.
How the heck can Shelton write BDLC’s name in the lineup almost every day. 46 k’s, 2 walks since coming to the Pirates. If BC really wanted to keep his job he would have released Joe and BDLC and brought up Palacios, Gorski, Bae, or Suwinski to try and provide some vision of the future. This truly is as angry as I have been in years with this organization. This is fraudulent to put this crap out there. And the players are complicit. They have quit.
I am not going to blame the players. It's only human to not give 100% when you work in a highly dysfunctional organization. This is why I say that Reynolds is so exceptional. He has been here for years, doing his best, despite the constant dysfunction and demoralization. Not many people are wired like that: even highly competitive athletes, many of whom cannot stand to see managers running out subpar lineups and GMs doing little or nothing to improve the team year in and year out.
Reynolds is a real pro. He really stands out amid this total dumpster fire.
And I'm at a loss at how he even figured out how to become one given he only spent 700ish PAs in another org prior to coming to this joke of a team.
That’s a good point. This is one of the reasons I think BC is failing even this current team. If you release dead weight and prioritize some guys who could/should be here next year that can keep the veterans interested even late into the season, especially if you could start winning games! The losing grates on us, but I would think it is worse for them.
Ok... you are Paul Skenes or O'Neil Cruz. You have never played on a winning team.
You are 11 games below .500. You look at the lineup card, and BDLC is playing again, for the 7th day in row. There are 4,000 people in the stands. Rowdy Tellez is half-assing it on every play, joking around, and trying to tell you how to play your position. The manager just got done telling the media that so-and-so and so-and-so just didn't "execute" last night, while telling them that you are an "organizational success," taking all credit for your accomplishments. You have 16 guys who edit videos or manage the team Instagram account hanging out in the locker room and trying to play dominos with the players. At some point, you just check out... you can't help it. You try not to, but it is impossible.
If the season was a chess game, I'd tip over my king and go get a burger. Jones, Keller, endy all having grueling ends to a meaningless season....are these guys familiar with the Hippocratic oath?
Im so upset how they handled Jared Jones at the end there. Velo was way don’t, he was grunting (I don’t think I’ve ever heard him do that) on change ups and you can visibly see something wrong in his facial expressions
Went straight to the locker room.
That’s inexcusable to let him keep pitching in a meaningless game.
I quit watching at that point, if Cherington had any stones that would be a reason for immediate termination.
I don't think Jones was ready to come back from that lat strain. Those can be tricky, I guess, with a guy missing anywhere from a couple weeks to a couple months. He must have been more in the couple months category.
It's classic Shelton. His top priority at all times is to "manage the bullpen," translate, make his own job easier. If it means jeopardizing the health of the team's most valuable players, no problem. Two days in a row now.
This management team is so wrong-headed, lost, and confused. They don’t know which way is up anymore. I know Nutting is the ultimate problem, BUT NH was able to put it together for awhile. Short of Nutting selling the team, I say just clean house. Perhaps promote Don Kelly to manager, for a bit of continuity but still a new voice and try to get a GM in here who knows how to build something.
I say hire Skip Shumaker, or someone with no ties to the organization. This team needs a new voice, not an old voice in a new role.
This team is so ready to pack things up for the off-season. They have no life.
What’s it like watching a -1.4 WAR player? BDLC giving is a full experience of just what that is like.
. And right on schedule….so much would rather have Palacios in the OF and taking that at-bat.
Time for another BDLC disappointment.
Why are BDLC and Joe in the lineup against a RHP? Not that I’m a Tellez fan, but a major league team would nontender both those guys in the offseason, so there’s no more point to playing them than him.
BLDC is BC's prize deadline pickup to help the offense. Scary part is that he has 4 years of control left.
They have to release him, but they won’t.
Funny you mention these two- both Joe and BDLC with absolutely embarrassing AB’s with runners on in the 4th. BDLC with a 3 pitch K and Joe goes from 3-0 to a swinging K 2 feet off the plate.
Really need to find a couple legit LH bats for next season. I did notice that Jack has been hitting well at Indy lately but still unsure if he is an answer going forward. Way too many similar replacement level RH bats on this roster. Really hoping Endy can be healthy and possibly fill one of those needs.
They need bats, full stop! And, those bats need to be equal to or better than Reynolds/Cruz. Not sure how or where they will find them, but their stated objective of clustering some good at bats together to score runs, fully relying on their pitching and bullpen to keep games close, has been a colossal disaster.
This is bad a team, but they are something else in addition to that: boring. It’s bad enough that we have to watch them give ~600 PA’s to OF’s who are a cumulative -3.1 WAR (-2.7 if you include Joe’s .4 WAR!), but watching them double down on these guys because they have nothing else beyond AAAA waiver wire fodder in Indianapolis is beyond tedious.
Twenty (now 21) comments on a game thread is all we need to know about what they've done to dampen enthusiasm. Sure, much of that is the losing, but like you've said they've put together a boring team and it's not clear that the players are really playing for Shelton. (Obviously, Cruz and Skenes are exempt from the characterization of boring.) It feels a lot like September 2019 when there were multiple stories about Hurdle having lost the clubhouse.
In a weird way, Skenes and Cruz make it all the more frustrating. It’s boring in a sense of “oh, grandma’s taking the Lamborghini out to Giant Eagle to get more Werther’s Original!” Yeah it’s a Lamborghini. But we are going to Giant Eagle. It’s a waste. We have these two dynamic talents but we aren’t doing anything with them. It’s a shame, these guys deserve to see a deep playoff run. Can you imagine Skenes starting 3 times in a 7 game series?
That's one of the reasons I always talk about Cook and Yorke playing. I'm not worried about their 2024 results, I want to see them get experience in the majors. I also want some excitement when I watch games. When it's legit prospects you anticipate their at-bats. That doesn't wear off during a September trial. I'd rather watch them go 0-for-4 than see them out of the lineup.
That's all because you want to see them find a way to get better. Idiot Ben and Idiot Derek have zero interest in doing that. They're still trying to justify the decisions that led to this failed season.
Do we ever score in the 1st?
Also when was Nick G.’s last homer?
June 15th was his most “recent” homer.
He doesn’t need to hit HRs, but last year he had 60 XBHs between AAA and MLB. We need the XBHs.
Yorke and Cook in the same lineup! Am I dreaming? No, because Cruz is the DH and not in CF, but I'll take what I can get
I don't mind it too much. No need to push Cruz's ankle this much late in the season and we get a look at how well Cook can handle center. Find out if he becomes the actual backup to Cruz in off-season or if they want to get another true CF to play behind him
Shelton just can’t get all the way there…
BTW what is with Shelton always posting lineups at the last minute. It seems to me I go to MLB to see the lineup and the opposition has their’s up and ours is no where to be found.