DK’s Daily Shot of Pirates: No hitting changes?

DK’s Daily Shot of Pirates: No hitting changes?

[Music] [Applause] The baseball team’s final game of the 2025 season was September 28th. A dozen days have passed since then and the only change, repeating this for dramatic emphasis, the only change that’s been made was the combined firing of the pitching coach and the third base coach. Good morning to you. Good Friday morning. I’m Dan Kvachovic of DK Pittsburgh Sports. This is Daily Shot of Pirates presented by Mike’s Beerbar. comes your way bright and early every weekday if you’re into football andor hockey. I also offer daily shots of Steelers and Penguins that I hope you’ll additionally check out. Oscar Marine was fired, of course, almost immediately after the season ended. Mike Rebella was fired. Brent Strom, the older assistant pitching coach, had informed the team a month before seasons end that he’d be retiring. And otherwise, here we are. Here we are. because everything was just fine. Now, if you say, and they kind of hinted at this themselves, meaning Ben Sherington and Don Kelly, that more changes might be on the way. I’ll remind that it is considered to be beyond common courtesy for teams to let their assistant coaches know their status as soon as possible after game number 162. The reason for that, I should think, would be obvious. Most of them, in fact, almost all of them are on one-year contracts. That’s just the way the business works. So they tend to lead pretty nomadic existences, but they’ve got to pick up families and move them and, you know, they’ve got to make sure they have a job to wherever it is that they’re moving. So if you were going to see some sort of change to, let’s say, for example, the hitting program, the hitting instruction, the personnel behind the hitting in general, you really should have seen it already. Now, this is not me calling for Matt Hey to be replaced. I don’t know if I’ve ever done something like that after somebody’s first year on the job. Hey, struck me as somebody who was working really, really hard to get his things done his way, but he might not always have had his things his way match up with Charington’s things Cherington’s way. And when you’re seating that ground, as you of course would in this structure, you’re seating it to someone who doesn’t have a solitary clue about hitting. Would you still like to see results out of Hey and the hitting staff? Sure. Would you like to see every once in a blue moon a hitter get better with the Pirates as opposed to either staying the same or regressing? Mostly regressing. Yes, also obviously. But I’m going to keep pounding this just in case anybody thinks or holds out any hope that 2026 is just the year where all of their brilliance and wisdom are going to shine through the clouds and make us see what we hadn’t been able to see before. It’s not going to happen. It’s not gonna happen because for all the money that Cherington takes from payroll and he’s done this and pours into advanced analytics, none of that translates to the field level if it can’t be sufficiently communicated and applied by the people who are in that dugout. And with these nonm moves, what we’re theoretically expected to buy is that there are no problems anywhere. None. Not with the analytics, not with acquisition, not with free agency, not with trades, not with the draft, not with Latin America, and not at field level. Now, you can offer these guys all of the grace that you’ve got. You can defer to them. You can say, “Well, they know more than I do.” But at the same time, from the broadest possible view of this scene, still ask yourself, how did the 2025 Pirates finish dead last in OPS at 655 in all of Major League Baseball? How did the Pirates finish with the lowest batting average, 231? How did they finish with the fewest home runs by a gazillion miles at 117? The next lowest, by the way, was the Cardinals at 148. And this in an era of three outcomes, you know, home runs, strikeouts, walks. But there’s nothing nothing wrong above the player level. There’s nothing wrong other than Brian Reynolds having a down year, O’Neal Cruz going backward, and it’s on them, squarely on them, Joey Bart going backward, Jack Suinsky perpetually going backward, Jared Triolo going backward, and then there’s there’s there’s poor Henry Davis who’s just going nowhere. He hit 167 and that’s just pretty much what he does. This is a number one overall pick. But nothing, nothing, nothing nothing has gone wrong above the player level. That’s what this tells you. If you knew, if you’d never heard of baseball before this episode of Daily Shot of Pirates and you just happened to press play by accident cuz you thought you were hitting, I don’t know, knitting sweaters are us, you would know that something and probably many many somethings went really wrong here. You would also know that if you took any or all of the names that I just mentioned, but notably those of Reynolds, Cruz, and yes, Davis, because he was a one- one, you parachuted any one of those three into some other organization with another set of eyes, another set of instructors. Come on. You know how that’s turning out, right? You know how that’s turning out. 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. [Music] Today’s J1Q comes from Neil and it’s in response to multiple references that I’ve made this week to the Pirates being number three in Pittsburgh. Neil says, “DK, the reason why the Pirates are third in the city is because they’ve sucked and been a terrible organization for quite a long time. Do you remember that 2013 Johnny Quto game, though? That’s all the proof that you need that Pittsburgh is and can be a baseball town. If the Pirates actually fielded a good team, they’ll show up. Neil, I’d never dispute this, but I think that you, and you’re not the only one that did this, might have taken offense to my referencing the Pirates as third in the city as if it were an insult as opposed to just, you know, a documented and easily supported fact. My feeling on that front is that the Pirates are third in large part because the Steelers are so overwhelmingly popular and the Penguins long ago laid a very hard claim to the region’s younger generation. That’s that’s to their credit. That’s not necessarily something related to the pirates and their failures and shame and and all that other stuff. You referenced the 2013 Johnny Quato game. I could take that into 2013, 2014, 2015, even to an extent to 2016 because season ticket sales were up after the Pirates in 2015 won 98 games and got hosed by a trash playoff system that’s since been scrapped. All through that time, attendance at PNC Park was strong. The local TV ratings were very strong, top five in the majors. But on top of that, we’re talking about 144 years of franchise history. The Pirates run through our veins, my man. They’re part of who we are as Pittsburgers. And it goes back for some of our older fans to real success that they experienced, not just the 2013 to 15, but 90 through 92 and of course way back to the last World Series in 1979. We do still have thankfully a good number of folks from all three of those phases and some that yeah, you know who you are. You can picture Maz running the bases, right? But I’m here to tell you, and again, I don’t mean this as a shot at the Pirates or the institution or anything, but in 2013, the Johnny Quato game, and he drops the ball and Russell Martin hits that home run, the Pirates were still number three here, and they were number three for the couple years after that. That didn’t change. And it’s not as dependent, I think, on team success as you’re suggesting. The Pirates have their base. Steelers and Penguins, of course, have theirs. The Steelers base, and what makes theirs different is that it’s spread worldwide. Locally, there isn’t all that much daylight between the Steelers and Penguins. There is some, but it’s nowhere near that size of a gap. But then from 2 to three, yeah, it’s it’s a drop. And between that being in place and then factoring in the massive explosive really growth of hockey as a participatory sport in Western Pennsylvania, I don’t know that you’re ever going to see that reversed. But yeah, to your last point, Neil, if the Pirates actually fielded a good team, they’ll show up. Yeah. Yeah. I’ve shared this with listeners before the conversation that I had with Neil Huntington a couple of years before the Pirates made the playoffs in his tenure. And he would ask like, “Do you think that they’ll actually come? There’s not really much of a history to this.” And I said, “Neil, this is a sleeping giant here, man. It’s the biggest latent fan base in Major League Baseball. If and when you guys do make it, you’re going to see something that’s going to blow your mind. Do you want to know something? Even I never anticipated it would look like the blackout game. I appreciate hearing from you, Neil. I appreciate everybody who listens to Daily Shot of Pirates. We’ll be back with another one of these on Monday. [Music]

No hitting changes? At all? Yep, par for the course.

#Pittsburgh #Pirates #LetsGoBucs #MLB #DKPS

Hear award-winning columnist Dejan Kovacevic’s Daily Shot of Pirates every weekday morning!

SUBSCRIBE TO CHANNEL ► https://www.youtube.com/@DKPS_Pirates?sub_confirmation=1

MEMBERSHIP TO CHANNEL ► https://www.youtube.com/@DKPS_Pirates/join

OUR APPS ► https://DKPS.net/apple | https://DKPS.net/android

OUR WEBSITE ► http://www.DKPittsburghSports.com

ABOUT US ► DK Pittsburgh Sports is the proud, pioneering, fully independent venture begun in 2014 by award-winning reporter Dejan Kovacevic and featuring a professional staff covering the Pirates year-round and everywhere they go! This is where it all started!