Shelton saw team build identity
For the first time since the 2020 Pirates season ended, manager Derek Shelton staged a conference call Tuesday with reporters .
By any stretch of the imagination, Shelton’s first year as a manager didn’t go as planned. For one, his team finished 22 games under .500, 1941, the worst mark in Major League Baseball and 10 games behind the second-worst team in the National League Central Division. Plus, with a universal designated hitter, seven-inning doubleheaders, modified extra-inning rules and a 60-game season, 2020 really wasn’t what anyone had planned for.
Still, Shelton doesn’t see the year as lost time, necessarily. Despite the struggles and injuries that plagued the Pirates throughout the season, he feels they began to establish an identity.
“As we go into 2021, I think something that’s really important to me is to continue to talk about the culture that we created, the foundation of the culture that we created in 2020,” Shelton said. “That was something that, as we talked about at the end of the year, was extremely important to our group and to me. I think this offseason we’ve continued that.
“... One of the things that’s really stood out to me this offseason, and having conversations with different people throughout the game, were comments about our culture. And comments about how hard our guys played. I had one manager even tell me that he felt our guys were relentless at times. That means a lot to me when we’re trying to build what we’re building.”
These are things that are hard to put into context. Playing relentlessly doesn’t necessarily show up in a box score. So it also can be hard to refute what Shelton is saying, even if the overall record doesn’t match a team worthy of a lot of praise.
To his credit, Shelton would be quick to say that the Pirates, as currently constructed, are not near the level they would like to be.
But the evidence for the culture Shelton feels is being established comes with some anecdotal evidence. He feels that the players in the clubhouse grew closer together in the last season.
Shelton pointed to the Pirates’ Sept. 19 game against the St. Louis Cardinals as an example. In that game, righthander Mitch Keller pitched six no-hit innings. Since he recently had returned from a stint on the injured list, though, Keller was on a pitch limit. So after those six innings, with Keller at 84 pitches, Shelton took him out.
In the dugout, though, as Keller sat on the bench, the rest of the Pirates starting pitchers formed a barricade around Keller. As Shelton approached him, they tried to convince their manager to let the 24-year-old right-hander pitch the seventh inning. Their pleas were unsuccessful, but Shelton views it as a sign that the players are growing comfortable in the clubhouse with one another.
“The fact that that group of guys felt that comfortable to be like, Number 1, ‘We can do this with the manager.’ Number 2, they knew he was coming out but, Number 3, they were so engaged in that, that made me step away and be like, ‘We are developing the right culture, we are developing the right things here and it’s only going to continue to get better,’” Shelton said. “And more importantly, the players are involved in it. They have a say in it. And that’s kind of what we set out to do.”
Perhaps a small co-signing of this idea is that the Pirates are bringing back their major league coaching staff from last season. Of course, the reality of the situation is that this culture has to translate to tangible results. The anecdotal evidence has to become empirical. The Pirates know that, too. The solutions there aren’t obvious, and Shelton’s conference Tuesday didn’t surround specific, individual improvements.
“Well, we have to get better every day,” Shelton said. “And we have to isolate on the things we are not doing as well and basically focus on getting those things better.”
In 2020, the things the Pirates did not do well were plentiful. In that sense, Shelton and his staff have their hands full. Nonetheless, the manager believes in what his team is building, and he believes it’s started with a proper culture.