Morning Rundown: Pirates part ways with a pair of minor league coaches

Pirates start to make changes to the coaching ranks.

With the regular season ending on Sunday, the Pirates didn’t take long to start to shake things up from within the organization.

Jason Mackey tweeted after the game that the Pirates have dismissed ‘at least’ two coaches - Jon Nunnally and Ruben Gotay.

Changing things up in the minors isn’t really the surprising thing, it happens all the time, but to be this quick with it and one of the names involved definitely raised some eyebrows.

Nunnally just wrapped up his third season as the hitting coach for the Altoona Curve, and fifth overall in the Pirates season.

He was linked to Ke’Bryan Hayes earlier in the season, working with him before the tear he went on to close out the season. It seems the nature of involvement may have been exaggerated a bit, but regardless, a weird move considering.

Rubén Gotay was listed as the Greensboro Grasshoppers’ hitting coach at the beginning of the season, but finished the year (or was just always there?) as one of the bench coaches for the Indianapolis Indians.

He was the hitting coach in Greensboro for the 2022 season while Calix Crabbe was the manager, at least that’s what was written here.

Pirates finish with 76 wins

With their win on the last day of the season, the Pirates ended up with a record of 76-86, good for an improvement of 14 wins compared to a year ago.

Considering the craziness of the season, that seems like a very strong step in the right direction.

It also means I was one win off in my original prediction on P2 (75).

They got the win despite going with a very much ‘Sunday lineup’ feel despite it being the last day of the season.

Ke’Bryan Hayes, Bryan Reynolds and Endy Rodriguez all sat, and it took the Pirates till the eighth inning to finally get on the scoreboard.

Lucky for them five pitchers got together for a three-hit shutout, including David Bednar getting his 39th save of the season.