Kevin Gorman: Derek Shelton's intentions get Pirates' attention for first full-squad workout
RADENTON, Fla.
Derek Shelton understood the magnitude of the moment for his speech before the first full-squad workout of his first spring training as manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates.
Now that he had their attention, he wanted their intentions.
Shelton is sending a new, player-centric message to the team: He wants every minute spent on the baseball field to be fun and purposeful, pushing positivity at Pirate City and giving players a sense of ownership in the team’s direction.
“If we’re not doing it with energy or we’re not having fun,” Shelton said, “there’s no reason to be out here.”
The Pirates are purposeful in putting Shelton as their front man to share that message. They want to shift the negative energy away from chairman Bob Nutting, who gave frustrated fans the front office and coaching staff housecleaning they wanted this offseason but slashed payroll and traded the team’s best player.
That didn’t stop Nutting from being a visible presence Monday at Pirate City for the first practice or later in the afternoon at the Miracle League of Manasota Field for a fantasy camp for children with special needs.
Nutting was impressed with Shelton’s first team speech.
“My sense was he did a fantastic job,” Nutting told the Tribune-Review. “He was authentic. He came across as sincerely caring about the players first, about the team first, about building a winning culture and a winning team and do everything we can to support this group of players. That’s a message they needed to hear. I think it resonated really well, and I know it’s true.”
Nutting wants the fans to hear that message as well, but until he starts spending to increase payroll from a projected $52 million, it mostly is going to fall on deaf ears. Instead, the Pirates are investing in improvements to analytics and technology. If they are going to win, it’s going to have to come from within.
New Pirates general manager Ben Cherington didn’t help the cause when he suggested payroll spending will increase when the team shows it is ready to win. That begs a chicken-or-egg question: How are the Pirates going to show they are ready to win if they won’t spend on payroll?
“I think you can look at a lot of teams and how teams move towards winning,” Cherington said. “It’s fairly consistent that there tends to be more investment over time. Sometimes, that investment precedes the more wins. Sometimes, it comes at the same time. So we’re not talking about a certain date or drawing a straight line to that. Investing in players will be an important part of building a winning team.”
That sounds suspiciously like the same message the previous Pirates general manager preached about patience with payroll, just repackaged and delivered by a new messenger.
No wonder the Pirates want Shelton to do the talking.
“Between the two of us, he’s the orator,” Cherington said of Shelton. “And I’m happily letting him have that moniker. He’s good. He’s comfortable in that sandbox.”
That’s an interesting analogy, given that the 49-year-old Shelton is overseeing a youth movement. These Pirates are young, with only a handful of veterans over 30, and believe they can build a winner around a core of cost-controlled players who are either early in the major-league careers or on the cusp of a call-up.
Shelton’s first speech got rave reviews from such Pirates.
“He got the message across,” shortstop Kevin Newman said. “He wants us to take care of our business, go out on the field and compete and give everything we’ve got and enjoy the game of baseball.”
Shelton is simply eliminating the busy work that made practices monotonous and mundane. Pitchers, for example, are spending the days they throw bullpens concentrating on that alone. Instead of going through the motions of throwing a certain number of pitches or taking a certain number of swings in batting practice, Shelton wants everything done with attention on intention. That has become the Bucs’ new buzzword.
“To get in a baseball setting and to actually work with him and see how he’s running camp, it’s incredible,” pitcher Joe Musgrove said. “It’s the first day, so there’s not a lot to go off of but the things ‘Sheltie’ talks about, like player importance and us being at the center of it, giving us the responsbility to take ownership of our own careers and run our schedules the way they feel they need to be run, is really important to the guys here.”
So is building a winning team, Shelton stresses. He waited two decades for his dream job, so he’s not here to be a playground director. But he wants baseball to become fun and purposeful for the Pirates, with the intention they will build a winner and the promise they will spend once they win.
“You hope the message is impactful and, more importantly, that the message is genuine and they know,” Shelton said. “It’s not only being able to speak it in there but to be able to get out here and live it.”
For the first day, Shelton’s intentions got the Pirates’ attention.
Kevin Gorman is a TribLive reporter covering the Pirates. A Baldwin native and Penn State graduate, he joined the Trib in 1999 and has covered high school sports, Pitt football and basketball and was a sports columnist for 10 years. He can be reached at kgorman@triblive.com.
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