DK’s Daily Shot of Pirates: Today’s Insider feature

DK’s Daily Shot of Pirates: Today’s Insider feature

[Music] For anyone who isn’t yet on the DK Pittsburgh Sports app, we’ve had a longstanding feature, and by that I mean going all the way back to our 11-year existence called Friday Insider. Now, I would read the one that I wrote today. Good morning to you. Good Friday morning. I’m Dan Kawatu of DK Pittsburgh Sports. This is Daily Shot of Pirates. It comes your way bright and early every weekday. If you’re into the two teams that care in town, I also offer daily shots of Steelers and Penguins that I hope you’ll check out, if only for your own sanity. What I attempted to do with today’s insider was to revisit my original May 9 session and resulting report from meeting Bob Nutting at his invitation at PNC Park following the firing of Derek Shelton. because I have a really strong feeling that what happened in the weeks and months that followed was that a giant misperception grew from I don’t know where that nutting had told me that he was going to fire Ben Cherington even though I’d made it really clear at that time that no such thing was stated. I’d also shared with both readers and listeners of this program repeatedly that I had no new information since then. So, what did happen that day is what’s the subject of this insider. And what did happen that day was that it became painfully clear to me that this owner had no use whatsoever for this GM. Not in some uh picking apart, splicing through the quotes kind of way either. And it’s not as if Nutting was alone in this regard. I’ve heard from several others who would qualify as being over Cherington’s head, and that includes minority owners, who had no respect, not only for how Cherrington does his job, but also for how condescending he came across in meetings with those minority owners. And there were others, people directly around him, over him, under him, players, the coaching staff about how they were doing things to circumvent him, to work around edicts that would come from the GM or his staff. So, you take all of these things, you put a special emphasis on the ones that come from the very top, and you’d better believe I felt very, very comfortable describing Terington as dead man walking. In fact, I don’t know that I’d covered anybody in my career, including people who worked for Nutting and were fired by Nutting as more of a dead man walking than what Cherington was all through this summer. Now, what’s left to be answered or not is why? Why wasn’t he fired? Never mind what I think about his job performance. Never mind what you think about his job performance. The people who employ him thought next to nothing about his job performance and they retained him. Well, I should say nothing retained him. Was it the money 2 years of a contract? I’m sorry, that’s not something that’s all that big a deal. Nutting ate the 17.2 2 million to fire four people in 2019. Does he find a way to get it back? Can he find a way to get it back? Sure. Take it out of payroll or whatever. 2 years of a GM contract isn’t all that significant a thing to eat. Does it have something to do maybe with the collective bargaining agreement expiring after next season and thinking that the Pirates should really have their clean fresh start in the event that a salary cap system is put in? I mean, that seems like a a lot of layers to looking through into the future. Is it possible that Nutting was swayed by Connor Griffin’s rise? I wouldn’t think so because Griffin was showing some pretty good signs even back in early May, but who knows? I’m probably going too far here and assigning any sort of baseball rationale to this cuz it’s not what they’re about. It’s not their top priority. It’s not his top priority. It’s not Nutting’s top priority. The business is the business is always the top priority. as well as within that all of the ways in which he benefits from the business short-term andor long-term. But when Nutting sits there with me on that day, again, back to May 9 and insists that one of the reasons that he’s keeping Cherington is quote, “we have to fix this in 2025,” end quote. and Cherington proceeds to mouth various versions of that same quote on his weekly radio show. But then a couple of months later, the team’s still going nowhere. Nothing’s happened. And magically on one Sunday morning, the calendar flipped because Cherington started talking about 2026 instead of 2025. And that’s where all of this is now. That’s where all of it is. So, no, I can’t explain that part. I’m certainly not going to pretend to explain it, but I sure as heck can and just did explain all over again what happened back in early May. My goodness. How do you do this? You, I’m talking to you. How do you do this? We have two teams in town that don’t have any of this nonsense going on. They care about winning. They care about the city. They conduct themselves like Pittsburgers, like Pittsburgh companies. The Steelers and Penguins aren’t perfect. They really aren’t. They haven’t had their own playoff success in some time. But you won’t hear the worst cynic about either of those teams even come close to suggesting that they don’t care. That’s what you’re following. You’re following a franchise that doesn’t care. It doesn’t care about winning. It doesn’t care about you. You better believe they don’t care about me when we come back. J1Q. 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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 Nick Kamoso who says, “DK, I’ve listened to the Daily Shots this week and audibly said why probably a dozen times. Do you have any theories on what changed?” if Bob seemed dead set on making big changes not too long ago. Nick, the first thing I’ll say in response is that when you make a change at general manager, you’re making those big changes plural. Changing the GM is changing everything, as I’m sure you know, from top to bottom in the organization. Everything gets studied, everything gets picked apart. And in the case of something that’s failed as spectacularly as the Pirates have over these past six years, it’s going to be more that goes out than what stays. Here is as close as I’ll come to offering a theory, as you put it, and it’s based at least in part on what I was told that day by Nutting himself. His stated concern that day about a change at GM was that if he made that change, he was going to need to bring in obviously somebody new. And in his mind, I don’t happen to agree with this, but in his mind, the new GM, whoever it is, was going to want to come in and just start all over. And as we spoke that day, he had just emerged from a one-on-one meeting with Paul Skins. Now, there was nothing unusual about that. I reported this at the time as well. He’s going to the franchise’s most important player and talking about the change that had just been made at manager. But nothing was of the mind and again said so that with skins in house with skins right here in Pittsburgh his goal again I’m attributing all of this to him was to build up the pirates around him not in a rebuild context but to try to improve them or bolster them right away again go ahead and take all the shots I can hear everybody as I’m saying this I’m only relaying in this scenario Right. So, if he thinks it’s going to be a pain to go find a GM who’s going to want to work with what’s here and graft on top of that and maybe he didn’t say this, but I’m saying it, not have much of a payroll to work with, then why would someone of quality accept that position? Now, regular listeners and readers will know that anytime somebody brings up, who would ever take this job? Why would anyone want to be the GM under nutting? I’m quick to reject that by saying there’s only 30 of these jobs on the planet and only a couple come available every fall, so they’re precious and beggars can’t be choosers. I’ve also shared that I’ve heard directly from some of these potential candidates and they would be willing to do anything to take this job. But what counts here and what you asked about, Nick, is what was in Bob’s head. What was he thinking? That absolutely was part of it. He claims to not have an appetite for a rebuild, but in the same symbolic breath, he’d be quite comfortable saying he’s not about to spend a gazillion dollars to make that happen. So, he sees the GM that he’s got. Yeah, you get it from here. So, it’s a theory, Nick. It’s It’s probably more of an educated theory because as you heard, I’m backing it up with stuff that I actually heard from him trying to put two and two together and whatever. I would hope we’ve all had enough of this subject for one week. I appreciate everybody who listens to Daily Shot of Pirates and we will be back with another one of these shows on Monday. [Music]

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