Pirates GM Ben Cherington Press Conference Post Derek Shelton Firing

PITTSBURGH — Pittsburgh Pirates general manager Ben Cherington gave a press conference at PNC Park following the firing of Derek Shelton.

Cherington addressed a number of topics, including why he fired Shelton, what needs to change for things to get better, is he worried for his own job security and is he capable of doing the job of general manager for the Pirates.

On Firing Derek Shelton

“Let me first start saying, again, thank you to Shelty. He worked his tail off for five plus years here. Gave it everything he possibly had. I’m confident in saying that. Always available, year around, put his whole life into it and his family, certainly, Allie, and his kids became part of the organization. So we’re going to miss that.”

“There’s no one thing. We aren’t performing the way we need to. We’re not performing in a way that our fans deserve. We know we need to be better."

"I guess I looked at the end of last year, August September and how April and the first few days of May played out. It just became clear that a change was necessary and that we were not in a position to wait any longer."

Did Shelton Lose Players in the Clubhouse?

“I don’t have any evidence of that. I think we look at the total performance. We’re all responsible for that. This certainly isn’t all on Shelty. We’re all responsible. It all starts with me. I’m more responsible than anyone. We need to perform better and that’s the bottom line."

"This wasn’t about any single player, any single event, any single day. Cumulation over the last part of last year the early part of this year and it just became clear to me, in order to move forward, and get the Pirates back moving in the direction we need them to move, that a change was necessary to get the best chance to do that. "

Why was Don Kelly the Guy to Take Over?

“Let’s just start out with who he is as a person. This is someone who cares way more about the Pirates, the city, cares way more about the people in that clubhouse than he does himself. He’s just an elite human being and teammate. Comes to the ballpark every day focused on one thing, how to help this team get better."

"It’s truly not about him. It never has been. It will need to be a little more now as a manager, I think he understands that, but I have so much faith in the combination of the human he is and the skills he has and the reasons he does the job. He does it for only one reason to help the Pirates because he believes in the Pirates and wants to do good for Pittsburgh."

Is he the Permanent Manager?

“It’s permanent for 2025 and we’re focused on 2025 and not getting past 2025 and because it became clear it was permanent for 2025, we chose not to use any other words to describe it. I have a lot of confidence in him doing that job for 2025 and this just happened really quickly."

"My first conversation with Donnie about it was this morning and so we haven’t had time yet to get to all the other potential adjustments. I wouldn’t be surprised if we have some adjustments to make sure that we’re supporting him, Donnie and the entire time as best as we possibly can for the remainder of 2025."

"It’s very important to me and very important to Donnie that he’s in the best position to actually do the manager’s job and not do the job he was just doing. So we need to make sure that we’re reallocating all of the bench coach duties, somehow, in another direction. I expect we’ll have more clarity on that in the coming days. "

Turning Around the Onfield Product

“Again, it’s on all of us. It’s on every person in the organization, but certainly from a baseball perspective, it starts with me. Everybody in our clubhouse is responsible. I believe we all need to do our jobs better, can do our jobs better. I believe we will. I don’t think you have to squint too hard to see a stronger team on the field in 2025."

"I believe we have the players in the organization that will help us do that. I also believe we have players currently on the team who are capable of providing more. Also believe I certainly have to find ways to continue to make the roster better and support the team in different ways. It’s got to be all in, it’s not on one person, it’s on everybody, but it certainly starts with me.”

Who Made the Decision?

“Ultimately, I made a recommendation to Bob [Nutting] and Travis [Williams] that we make this change. Bob supported that recommendation and that all happened in the last, really over the course of yesterday and I met with Derek this morning.”

Why Bring Shelton Back in 2025?

“I think back to last year and as of the beginning of August we believed that we were headed in a positive direction. We believed that we were making progress. Not enough, not fast enough, but we believed that we were making progress and we thought there was evidence for that."

"Then we had a very difficult August and that led to a difficult end of the season last year, but as I looked back at that, I felt for most of 2024, we were seeing that progress and that we got punched in the face the past two months."

"We all were learning from that, we all learned from that and I believed at the time, we were capable of continuing the progress from July and that we could over time the difficult thing that happened in August and keep this thing going forward and I believed that Shelty had the will to do that and was going to continue to do all the work he needed to do to be a part of that and so that was the recommendation I made and what’s happened now is that we’ve now had a bit more than a month of difficult performance that adds on top of the difficult ending from 2024 and I think it’s the combination of those two things that brought us to today."

Are You Capable of Doing the Job?

"Yeah. I feel just as much energy and commitment to this job as I have from the day I got it. I do this job only to serve the Pirates. Only because I wanna be part of delivering a team that our fans our proud of. That’s it. Period. That’s the reason to get up. That’s the reason to come in here, do the work to do that. I believe that’s going to happen. I know that there’s frustration and maybe anger that it hasn’t happened yet. I believe it’s going to happen. I believe strongly I am going to be a part of making it happen. I have a lot of confidence in our baseball operations group. We’ve got to get better. Period."

Are You Both Accountable Together?

“We’re both accountable and I’m still accountable right now and we were in this together up until this morning and it makes it a very difficult conversation. It makes it a very difficult choice, it makes it a very difficult conversation. "

"Certainly not lost on me that my part of the accountability that if I had done my job perfectly for five years, might not be meeting with you today. That’s certainly possible. So I own that completely. This is not all on Shelty and I believe that it became clear to me that this was a choice, no matter how difficult, that this was a choice we needed to make and I certainly feel accountable going forward."

Conversation with Shelton on Firing

“As you’d expect from Shelty, he’s a pro. Obviously we’ve got to know each other really well. It was a somber moment. He handled it like a pro. I don’t think he was completely shocked. He’s a grown up, he’s been in the game a long time. He knows what can happen when the performances the way it has been recently. It was a relatively short conversation. I’m sure I’ll follow up again at some point."

Why Haven’t you won on the Margins?

“It’s an interesting question because I do believe that’s part of what has to happen in Pittsburgh. It’s not the only thing, but it’s certainly part of what has to happen. When I think about that statement, where I first go is, “Are we playing defense”, “Are we playing defense really well?”, “Are we running the bases?” By and large we have done those things. Our team defense has been good, as far as our team measurements are concerned, our defense has been good this year. Our base running largely has been good."

"We haven’t executed in every situation. We’ve had some, combination of some difficult bullpen moments or bad luck bullpen moments or maybe occasions where we didn’t have a our best guys out there or our best guys weren’t available for whatever reason and that cost us. So that could be winning on the margins I suppose, but the biggest thing is just run scoring. We got to score more runs and some of that’s winning on the margins, some of that’s executing certain offensive situations and I agree with that, but some of that is players getting to career norms and some of that’s young players leveling up, finding another level. Some of that is the roster getting stronger and that’s on me. So I agree that we need to win on the margins, but I don’t certainly believe that that’s the reason we are where we are. I think we have been doing some of winning on the margins, probably not enough, and there’s other reasons why we’re losing games."

"The big question is we’re just not scoring enough runs and I understand you can say if you don’t get a runner in from third base with less than two outs, I suppose you can call that a fundamental or a situation to execute on and maybe that’s winning on the margins, but it’s also the overall offense. It’s just been a bit of a perfect storm. We’ve had some players who are not performing to their standard. We also have a number of players, at least based on our measurements, are hitting into a lot of bad luck and are hitting below where they are expected to be. We’ve had injuries, no doubt, that have made it harder to keep a full complement of players and put the deepest lineups out there and there’s still opportunity over time, and this is on me, to just make the roster better, period. The combination of all those things adds up to not scoring enough runs and that’s been the biggest culprit. It’s not a lack of effort. It’s not a lack of effort from the hitting group or the individual players. We just got to get some better run scoring."

Did you Talk to Players About Making a Managerial Decision?

"Look, in this position you get all kinds of feedback from all types of people. Some of that’s direct, some of that’s indirect. It’s my job to process all of that the best I can and put it into context and make the recommendations that are best for the Pirates. Feedback comes from a lot of places, including players. That comes over time. I haven’t had any individual conversations with players recently about that. We’re observing. We’re observing the team and how they’re performing. The player group from everything that I can see and tell is really trying, together, to stay together, stay in it and be accountable and that gives me some confidence that we can get, that we will get to a better team in 2025. "

How can Don Kelly get the Best out of this Team?

“I think he’s certainly got a calm about him. He’s played, he’s played in Pittsburgh, he’s certainly of Pittsburgh. He understands the uniqueness of the places and cares about it a lot and he’s got a teacher’s heart. I think he wakes up thinking about how he can help someone else. That does not mean it’s going to miraculously turn into massively different results right away. That’s not how the game works, we know that, but overtime, I believe that his approach and personality and style can have a positive effect on our players, but just as importantly we’ve got to support him and I’ve got to do my job better, we’ve all got to do our jobs better so that he can do his as well.”

Not Upgrading Roster? Have you Done Enough?

“Well there’s certainly more that we wanted to do. There’s always more in an offseason that you want to do and for whatever reason, can’t get to, can’t execute on. There’s reasons for that. I think we came off of last year, yes, certainly knowing, that offensive production was going to be important and that we were going to need to take a step forward. We wanted to add to the offensive group, add meaningfully if we could. There were a few spots on the roster that it made sense to do that in."

"We re-signed Cutch as a first step and that was probably somewhat expected and then once Cutch is in place then you sort of look at the rest of the team, what your resources are and what can the targets be and you go after those targets the best you can. At that point, we look at okay, we know Cruz has moved to center field and we know that Reynolds is going to play in one of the corner spots, if we look back to last offseason. Alright then we want to add to those other corner spots. We know we’ve got guys like Suwinski who are capable of stepping up and producing in those spots, but we want to add to the corner spots. We pursued a number of things on that front and ultimately signed Tommy. We felt like the track record of his performance and the mentality and toughness he would bring to our team made sense. It’s a rough start. He’s working his tail off and doing everything he can to get on track. He hasn’t gotten to the level he expects of himself yet."

"Elsewhere, look around the infield, obviously we knew Ke coming back was going to be important. There was a ton of effort by him in the offseason and by our staff to make sure he’s coming into Spring Training in a good spot physically. That’s mostly held up. We know the defense is going to be there. We’re hoping for him to be physically in a spot where he can take another step offensively. And he’s had his moments. Still see his potential offensively. We haven’t seen that next level out of him yet. It could still be there."

"We traded for [Isiah Kiner-Falefa] to solidify the shortstop position. Feel like he mostly has done that. Second base, we come into Spring Training feeling like between the two Nicks and Tree and Frazier, we have enough quality and competition there we can have a good second base solution. Lot of those guys have been hurt or held up by something and yeah, we traded for Spencer knowing that first base was a hole last year and wanted to upgrade. Unfortunately we had a tough setback in January with the injury. He’s on his way back now. We’ve tried to supplement that with Endy playing there and then he got hurt and [Valdez] playing there and he’s battling through something now."

"So that’s why I mentioned. A lot of things happening that have made it hard to get to that deepest roster, that deepest lineup and at the catching position, we feel like between Bart, Endy and Henry that we have three really talented guys there and there’s going to be a really good solution out of that group. Still feel that there can be."

"That’s a long winded explanation of why we felt some optimism that we would have a stronger group. Some things have gotten in the way of that. Injuries, under performance. It’s also early May. We still may have a much stronger group, a much stronger position group in 2025. I think we can."

What More did you Want to do?

"That would be true of every offseason. There’s always more things you chase down than you actually do and specifically on the offensive side, there were corner targets that we chased down and we didn't get and that kind of thing is going to happen in every off season."

Off the Field Events Negatively Affect the Clubhouse?

“I don’t know. I think the losing is what people care about inside the clubhouse. I think the results on the field are generally what most people care about in the clubhouse. I believe there’s a high level of accountability for that. That’s what’s weighing on people more than anything else and I believe that we just want to win, all of us, we’re competitive and it’s not happening as much as we need it to and want to. I do believe, I speak for myself, I believe this group wants to do it. We’re Pittsburgh. I believe that. I believe that we want to deliver to our fans what they want. I understand there’s a lot of frustration and anger about that right now.”

Message to Fans

“Just that I believe we have the will to make this better and I believe we will. I don’t believe you have to squint too hard to see a better team in 2025. I really don’t. I’m not blind to the fact that we’ve dug ourselves a hole and we got to climb out of that. No way to do it but a pitch at a time. We all have a role in that.”

What Does a Successful Season Look Like?

"I’m just focused on right now and tomorrow. I think that will become clear the deeper we get into the season. I think the focus right now is, I want to support Donnie in any way we can, I want to support the team in any way we can, I want to hunt the things that will make us incrementally better, certainly do anything we can there. I want to help our injured players come back, I want to help, I want to do everything we can to give us a better chance to play better on the field and let’s focus on that for a while and we’ll get back to the season question later."

Job Security Following Shelton’s Firing?

“Yeah I think I sort of referenced it before, but I understand it. It’s part of the deal right. If you accept this job and you’re in it for this long and the results aren’t there yet, that’s going to be there. Simple terms, it’s just about winning more games, we’ve got to find a way to win more games. You can do the forensic thing on every front office in baseball and find things that go well and find things that don’t go well. We got to improve. We’ve got to improve our results. I do this job because I love the work and I love the opportunity to help the Pirates in a way that serves our fans and delivers to our fans. I don’t do it for any other reason."

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