DK’S Daily Shot of Pirates: It’s over, at last

DK’S Daily Shot of Pirates: It’s over, at last

[Music] [Applause] As we part ways, figuratively speaking, with the 2025 edition of the Pittsburgh Baseball Club, a friendly reminder here. It’s not that they’re bad, it’s that they don’t care that they’re bad. Good morning to you. Good Monday morning from Dublin, Ireland. Dumb Kovacovic of DK Pittsburgh Sports and this is Daily Shot of Pirates comes your way bright and early every weekday if you’re into football andor hockey. I also offer daily shots of Steelers and Penguins. Braves for Pirates won yesterday in Atlanta. That concluded the baseball season in Pittsburgh with the team at a robust 71 and 91. That of course represents a fivegame drop off from the Pirates back-to- back 76 win seasons. Except in Ben Cherington math when it’s even more winning. They’ve now missed the playoffs 10 years in a row. If you want to pretend that there’s been progress of any kind over Cherington’s six full years now, you’d have to go back to the 14 wind jump from 2022 to 2023. But they stunk then, too. They just happened to stink less between those two summers. In this last stinkfest, they managed one run on six hits. Five of those six hits were a single. Brian Reynolds had the double. Pitching was okay, as is almost always the case. It’s either okay or it’s good or skins pitches and it’s otherworldly. But the alleged purpose of maintaining a sports franchise, whether that’s at the ownership level, management level, field level, is to win games. And this team doesn’t do that. But I’m not even stretching it when I say that they don’t care that they don’t win. Now, don’t confuse that with would they be happy if they won? Yes. Is it a priority? Sure. It’s somewhere on the list. Are they happy to lose? No, of course not. Do they try to win? Yeah, you know, you could you could say that. What you can’t say is that winning is the top priority or even really within the top five or 10 priorities. I think I could go that far. I I swear I’m not being like hot takeish here. I I I could list for you a lot of things that they would put ahead of winning baseball games in Pittsburgh at the top level. I could list certain goals and aspirations, especially within baseball ops, especially in Cherington’s area, because the stuff that he focuses on isn’t this. I’m looking right now on my screen here. By the way, I’m in Ireland for covering football for those of you who only listen to the Daily Shot of Pirates. I’m looking at the NL Central standings and I see that 71 and 91. I see the 438 winning percentage. I see that the Pirates finished 26 games out of first place. I see that they finished 12 back, the wild card. I also see that they had a minus 62 run differential. The team that finished at the top, the Brewers, based in a market that’s 2/3 the size of Pittsburgh, they went 97 and 65. They were the best team anywhere. No excuses, nothing but persistence, passion, and oh, by the way, a payroll that’s not all that much higher than the W Pirates just had. They just happen to have good people. So, do you blame all of this on the payroll the way the all the radio people do the whether it’s the hot takes hosts or the talk show callers or whatever who just repeat the same things again and again and again without ever actually acquiring real information. The payroll is not great. The payroll is not the problem. The payroll is a problem. The Brewers are around 20 or 25 million higher than the Pirates. That’s it. That’s not a lot. So, does it help the Brewers short? Is it the reason the Brewers are winning? God, no. Is it the reason the Brewers have the best team in baseball? No, not at all. They’re just smart. They know what they’re doing. The Mets have a unlimited payroll. Unlimited. And can’t win to save their lives. You got to be able to push pretty much all of the buttons to make the playoffs in baseball. Doubly so if you have a payroll in the vicinity or even the general vicinity of Milwaukee. Well, they do all that. So, as far as I’m concerned, payroll not a problem. Owner himself very much a problem. has zero sense of accountability until he hits whatever it is that passes for rock bottom in his world and then he’ll come out and sound. He might do it today. He he might go right ahead and fire Cherington and he’ll give a press conference that’ll be for the ages because he did this in 2019 and this is unacceptable and we have Paul Skins here and it’s time to win and be accountable and it won’t just be Cherington, it’ll be I don’t know Cherington and this guy and that guy and it’ll all come across very convincing. I’ve known the guy for a long time and when he gets into that mode, it becomes real for him. But my god, what it takes to get him there. And that’s what I mean when I say that they don’t care about the winning or the losing. They don’t care enough about it. They don’t say, “Hey, dude. I really don’t care about your processes. I really don’t care about these things that seem to excite you. I have a copy in front of me of the National League Central Division standings.” And our team, us, the Pittsburgh Pirates, we’re at 71 and 91. This was year six. You just took a fivegame backwards step in the only database decimal point that anybody should be caring about in year six. You didn’t even have some excuse to hide behind. Sometimes teams will take big steps backward like this, including in rebuilds and buildups because of injuries, specifically pitching injuries. They’re just devastating. Now, the Pirates lost Jared Jones early on, and of course, they’ve had a couple other injuries, but nothing that would floor you, nothing that would make you think, “Wow, that was just a total season changer. Spencer Horow was missing, whatever that was a month and change. Nick Gonzalez is a little bit more than that coming back.” It’s not like they turned the Pirates into Boppers when they came back. Similarly, it’s not as if losing Jones made the Pirates pitching staff horrible. If you want to blame Derek Shelton for the poor start, I’m sure he had his role in it based on the players that I’ve talked to about that very specific thing. But the Pirates went 59 and 65 under Don Kelly. And by season’s end, and I’m going to reiterate that I’m very much in favor of Kelly staying and believe that he will stay, but he was saying stuff like this after the game yesterday in Atlanta to the reporters there, including our beat writer for DK Pittsburgh Sports, Jose Negron. Yeah, keep getting better every single day. I think we’ve shown signs of that, especially here in the second half. I know, you know, 500 isn’t the goal, but we were right there. And I think that as we continue to get better, continue to work, continue to stress that uh every single day, having that winning attitude, showing up to win the baseball game and work towards that to earn that respect. Um I thought we showed signs of it. Not there yet, but um you know, on the right track. Yeah, we need to keep getting better. He spent way too much time around the current GM. Who anywhere talks like that? Who originates such talk? Get better. Keep getting better. When we come back, J1Q. [Music] If you’re looking for a great dining experience, look no further than Northshore Tavern. Located directly across Federal Street from PNC Park, next door to Mike’s Beer Bar, Northshore Tavern is Pittsburgh’s home for Steak on a stone. Enjoy your steak finished on a hot lava stone in front of you, where you ensure each piece is cooked to exactly your liking. or try their rotating selection of entre, hot sandwiches, salads, and burgers, all while enjoying the ambiance dedicated to the great players and history of the Pittsburgh Pirates all around you. Come see why everyone’s talking about Northshore Tavern and Steak on a Stone. It’s Gun Storage Check Week. Help prevent unwanted access to your firearms. No one wants their unsecured gun to be used in an accident, a suicide, or a crime. Use lock boxes, safes, and locks to secure your firearms. Learn more at gunstorage check.org. That’s gunstoch check.org. Brought to you by NSSF, the Firearm Industry Trade Association. Hey guys, if you’re planning to see a Pirates game, use the Game Time app to get your tickets. You can snag new ticket deals before anyone if you set it into app alerts. The app is easy to use. No surprise fees at checkout. You can see your seat view before buying. And you’re getting legit tickets delivered on time. Now, if you’re not much of a planner, you can get lastminute deals on tickets right up to the start of the event. Lowest price guarantee or game time will credit you 110% of the difference. Download the Game Time app and enter the code DK Pirates in your app profile for $20 off your first purchase. [Music] Today’s J1Q comes from Trevor, who says, “DK, the Pirates have lost 35 games by one run this season. If you flip 12 of those, the Pirates are fighting for a wildcard spot. Flip 20 of those and they’re the top wild card team. What would it take for this group to average one more run per game? That’s a solo shot or two or three more hits per game. Trevor, this sort of thing comes up a lot among losing teams. the one run thing, the we’re this close thing. And it’s not true. It’s not remotely true. What gets me though about this is that the pirates themselves have been putting this message out institutionally. And the way that I know that is because well, I’ve covered them for a long time and I’m aware of their internal mechanisms and there are certain long-standing patterns to what it is that they do and why when they’re trying to get a certain theme out to the public. They’ll put it, for example, in their daily media notes that are handed out to all media attending any of the games, home and road. They’re also emailed out. They’re actually available in the public. If you ever want to see them yourself, you just go to the Pirates website and find game notes and there they are. Well, that’s not the decision of the PR people. The PR people aren’t in the business, not in this company, of trying to send out happy vibes related to a really bad team. But it does come from baseball ops and specifically the top of baseball ops. That’s why when you listen to Ben Cherington in an interview setting, including the one that the the team generates on his weekly radio show, he’ll bring this up and he’ll bring it up all the time. Don Kelly brought it up again yesterday. Why? Because as we’re speaking, he still answers to Cherington. Going way back here when Jim Tracy was the manager, this was 15 years ago, more than that, actually, closer to 20 years ago, he would obsess over these one-run games. It’s all he would talk about because he felt that as a manager he could make the biggest difference by just squeezing out that extra run or we’re going to try just a little bit harder. We’re the little things away from being where we want to be and it’s all nonsense. And do you know who knows it’s nonsense? Cherington knows. Every person in his employee who’s involved even peripherilally in baseball data knows that one-run games tend to be a fairly even split. Whether they’re good teams or bad teams or bad teams versus bad teams, good teams versus good teams, it doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter. these teams end up with basically 500 records in these situations. So the number that they give you, and this was in yesterday’s media notes that were distributed in Atlanta before the game, the number that they’ll give you is the number of losses. They want you to hear that. They want you to hear that they’ve lost 33 one-run games so you can say, “Oh man, yeah, just that one. Somebody just swings and puts one over the fence and we’re just a totally different franchise.” And it’s not true to repeat myself. The Pirates played 60 one-run games this season that just ended. 60 of them out of 162. That was more than anybody in Major League Baseball. And before I go ahead and explain why that happened, I’d prefer to give you a second or two to try to figure it out yourself because there is a really logical mathematical explanation for it. And it’s this. It’s nothing that’s going to surprise you. Hint, they can’t hit. And because they can’t hit, they’re going to play in low-scoring games. Because they could pitch, they stayed in an inordinate number of games relative to their offense, but there were very few blowouts. When there were blowouts, they would favor the opponent way more often than it would favor the Pirates. Hence the discrepancy. The 25 and 35. That’s what they were. 25 and 35 in these 61 run games. It pretends nothing. And I can tell you this, the first time maybe that this came up on the Cherington radio show, and you can tell I’m an avid listener of this thing, he actually acknowledged this. This was before it became a a PR rallying cry of his to try to suggest to people or really calling it like it is to gaslight people into thinking that what happened at Pittsburgh this year was some sort of sign of improvement as opposed to just insulting everybody’s intelligence and saying that 76 is more than 76 or now that 71 is more than 76. He acknowledged right then and there that the reason that they were in a lot of one-run games was that they don’t score much. Well, now, isn’t that the feather to be looking for? I want to get real about this. The Pirates had two hitters have better seasons in 2025 than 2024. Two of them. They were Jared Triolo and Henry Davis, both of whom had terrible seasons in 2025. And they wouldn’t argue that the players who were in the lineup yesterday against the Braves, who actually made it into the box score, Triola was at 227. Nick Gonzalez is one of the better guys, the 260 with a 661 OPS. Tommy Fam had the strong second half. Still finished at 245 with a 700 OPS. Jack Sinsky 147. Cut with a 239. Brian Reynolds at 245. Spencer Horwitz at 272. He also hit well in the second half. Not at all in the first. Joey Bart 249. Lost all his power. Alexander Canario, who they acted like they didn’t even want at 218. O’Neal Cruz batted once as a pinch hitter in a game yesterday, struck out and finished his season at exactly 200. Your big hope for the big bat for the 25 team ended up at 200. Can’t make this stuff up. Those are the numbers that matter because those are the reasons that they have all these one-run losses. That reason isn’t about to reverse itself. Even when the new general manager comes along, not going to be quick. There’s no way that it can be. I appreciate everybody who listens to Daily Shot of Pirates. Appreciate everybody who’s put up with this nonsense all summer long. And no, the show does not go away. It’s like the cockroach in Nuclear Winter. It’s going to be here whether you like it or not. That said, I sure hope you give the other two a try because they’re a lot more upbeat than this thing is. See you tomorrow. [Music]

It’s over, at long last.

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