Pirates found the perfect fit in Shelton
the hitting side, and now he’s probably going to do that for all of his decisions.”
The Pirates didn’t set out to hire the best small-market manager they could find, but they might have found him anyway.
Besides Minnesota, where Shelton had been the Twins’ bench coach for the past two seasons, the 49year-old Illinois native has spent time with the Rays and Indians, two of the more successful small markets in baseball.
Before the Twins hired Shelton, he spent a year as quality control coach with the Toronto Blue Jays, where he also made a positive impression thanks to how much he wanted to learn.
“Sheltie is more than ready,” said Tony Lacava, who’s Toronto’s vice president of player personnel and also a Pittsburgh native. “He’s done everything he can possibly do to prepare for this kind of position.”
In Toronto, Shelton did a lot of stuff, but one of his most important responsibilities was serving as a liaison between the front office/analytics department and those charged with implementing their instructions.
Shelton has done that well because of his ability to communicate and balance traditional with new-age.
“He’s evolved as a baseball guy,” Lacava added. “He’s embraced different things, and he’s really good at traditional things.
“That’s the right guy. That’s what you’re looking for.”
When Cherington was introduced as GM, he talked about how much he valued knowledge. Cherington reads a lot and actually spent a semester teaching a class at Columbia University.
“I believe in learning,” Cherington said. ”I believe in a learning culture. We need to be learning every day. Learning will drive innovation. That will make us great at identification, acquisition, development and deployment, and that ultimately will lead to winning baseball games.”
It seems that Cherington found a perfect match in Shelton, who apparently thinks about things the same way.
In Minnesota, Shelton and Rocco Baldelli — the Twins manager — pushed the envelope and sucked more production out of their team as a result of some of this stuff.
A big part of that involved Shelton’s role as bench coach, talking to players individually while also helping to formulate attack plans and for the Twins to honestly self-evaluate at all times.
It wasn’t simply to buy their way out of problems, nor has it ever been that way for Shelton.
“He’s very processdriven,” Baldelli said. “A lot of the places that he has been, they’ve also been process-driven. It’s not looking at just the result. It’s how do we get there?
“He’s seen things done impressively in different places throughout his career. I think he’s learned different things from the different spots he’s been in. I think he’s ready to kind of put all of that together.”
The trick with this sort of thing will always be mixing a quest for knowledge with the baseball background to make it work. If something is impractical or doesn’t translate to the field, the right person will know when to go in a different direction.
Furthermore, you have to earn players’ trust. They must know you have their best interests at heart, and they have to trust that listening to whatever piece of advice or information will work out for them and the team.
“It’s not about the information, and Sheltie knows that,” Baldelli said. “It’s about how you use it. How do you communicate with people? How do you get players to be confident?
“It’s not always about what you’re saying. It’s about how you say it and how to combine those two things. Sheltie’s really good at that. It’s come from years of experience and applying that knowledge. He has really good ways of going about it all.”