Perrotto: At Least The Losing Gets Old for Ben Cherington, Derek Shelton (+)
One of the knocks on the Pittsburgh Pirates is the perception ownership and management are unfazed by all the losing and more motivated by turning a sizable profit.
Whether that is true in Bob Nutting’s case, I cannot say. The Pirates owner availed himself to the media only once this past season and he declined to answer questions about his team’s performance.
That’s certainly not the hallmark of a good leader, to run away when times are bad. It is his prerogative, though, I suppose.
General manager Ben Cherington does meet with the media. So, I asked him if all the losing ever gets to him during his season-ending news conference Friday.
And there has been much losing since Cherington replaced Neal Huntington following the 2019 season. The Pirates were 19-41 during the pandemic-altered 2020 season then 61-101 last year and 60-102 this year.
That would seem hard to take for the man who was the Boston Red Sox’s GM in 2013 when they won the World Series.
While Cherington comes across as mild-mannered and a bit introverted in public, he admits he can be tough to deal with in the aftermath of a loss.
“It’s very difficult. The first loss of the season is difficult. The last one is difficult,” Cherington said. “Every one in between is difficult. I don’t handle them well. I’m not that pleasant to be around during the game if things are not going well.
“We’re human beings that care about the team. Care about performance. Take it personally. I can just tell you how we feel. I’m not saying that to try to prove anything or asking for anything. We’re not looking for anything from that, but to answer the question, yeah, it feels terrible. Part of that is because we are human. We care about the team.”
I posed the same question to manager Derek Shelton prior to the final game of the season last week.
Throughout the three years he has been on the job, Shelton has been relentlessly positive about his team and the direction the organization is taking.
That he doesn’t criticize his players publicly makes Shelton a popular figure in the clubhouse. Yet that causes frustrated fans to wonder how much he really cares about winning because he rarely shows any angst.
Shelton admitted the losses get to him at times. He has 242 of them on his managerial record as opposed to 140 wins.
Some defeats are particularly galling. Take for example the Pirates’ 8-7 loss to the St. Louis Cardinals in 10 innings in the penultimate game of the season after the Bucs failed to hold a 7-3 lead.
“That loss stuck with me a little bit,” Shelton said. “That was a frustrating loss. It’s a game we should have won. We were ahead. We battled back, we did some things well. So, to say that it doesn’t get to me, yeah, it gets to me. I want to win every night. I’m a competitor. And our coaches are, too, and our players are the same way.”
So now we know the two most visible people in charge of the Pirates don’t like losing.
As far as the guy who owns the team? Your guess is as good as mine.