by Don Laible

The 2025 baseball season is one Chris Truby won’t forget.
As the plan was, once spring training camp broke, Truby was heading home.  As manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates’ Triple-A affiliate in Indianapolis, Truby was one of the lucky ones in baseball. He would be working the season in the same neck of the woods where he lived full-time. Fishers, Indiana, is a small city located northeast of Victory Field in downtown Indianapolis.
For all the hours at the ballpark and on the road, Truby would be rewarded, during homestands, by being able to sleep in his own bed. A 30-minute drive from home to work is as good as it gets during a 150-game schedule. Then, the phone call came. Plans would need to be changed.
Thirty-three games into the International League schedule, while the Indians were in the middle of a homestand with the Columbus Clippers (Cleveland’s affiliate), after returning from a road trip in Omaha, the Pirates made a change in managers. On May 8, Derek Shelton was out in Pittsburgh, and Truby was packing his bags to “the Steel City.”
“That was wild”, Truby said in a phone conversation with The Bradenton Times earlier this week.  “It (going to Pittsburgh to join the Pirates’ new manager, Don Kelly’s staff) was very unexpected.  As a coach, you don’t expect a big move in-season.”
Truby, who joined the Pirates in 2022 and 2023 as a minor league infield coordinator after a dozen years sprinkled across the Philadelphia Phillies minor league system in managerial or coaching roles, has been in professional baseball for more than 30 years.  He is prepared for the unpredictable. But when unpredictability does rear its ugly head, it’s still shocking.
While the Pirates were on the road, still with a series with the Atlanta Braves and New York Mets to play before returning to PNC Park, and Kelly made his home debut as skipper, Truby was tying up loose ends in Indianapolis.
“It didn’t even register at first,” explains Truby, who played 263 MLB games for four different clubs. “There was an assistant GM here and someone from the farm director’s office. Then, that’s when I received the news that I was going to Pittsburgh. I was stuck (in Indianapolis) for three more games. Fortunately, I wasn’t like a player where I was on the next flight out.”
For Truby, joining the Pirates meant temporarily forfeiting the roughly 30-minute drive from home to Victory Field. Last year, serving as Indianapolis manager Miquel Perez’s bench coach and, in 2025, being promoted to the role Perez previously occupied as the Pirates’ bullpen coach, was, as Truby puts it, “a cool setup”.
The mid-season move aside, Truby is happy to be in Pittsburgh and back in the big leagues.
No stranger to the Pirates’ coaching staff or the club’s rookie skipper, Truby’s transition with the big club went well.  Some roles that Kelly oversaw as Shelton’s bench coach since Truby absorbed the 2020 season.
“Donnie was in charge of the infield, scheduling, communication with the staff, he worked with the grounds crew, and the players. I remember my first day in Philly. The place was sold out. I walk out onto the field and think – this is pretty neat. It had been a long time since I was in the big leagues.”
May 7, 2003, at Tropicana Field in a game against the Minnesota Twins, Truby’s 13th game of the season with the Tampa Bay Devil Rays to be precise, was his last appearance as a member of an MLB roster.
Once again, Truby was wowed by baseball. He had always hoped to be back wearing a big-league uniform, but just as with players, coaches, too, can only control so much of their careers. As in Indianapolis the past two seasons and going way back to when he first broke into coaching and managing in the Pirates’ system in 2007 and 2008 in Single-A ball, Truby took care of his responsibilities as best he could.
“You always try your best, and hopefully you get lucky, but you’re always grateful, Truby tells.  “When I was with the Phillies, the organization made changes on top, and I ended up being one of the guys who they changed.  I was talking then with John Baker (at the time the Pirates’ director of coaching and player development), and he said that he had an opening for an infield coordinator.”
The rest, as they say is baseball history, as Truby has been in Pittsburgh’s fold now for the past four seasons.  When arriving in Philly to start his 2025 journey with the Pirates, Truby was happy to see Perez’s familiar face.  Spending time with the rookie bullpen coach made the transition from Triple-A to “The Show” for Truby that much more comforting.  Having spent the past four spring trainings, and 2024 with the Indians together with Perez, Truby was ready to blend in with Kelly’s staff.
“I didn’t go into it blindly,” Truby said.  “My relationship with the players through the minors was a plus for me. My arrival wasn’t as uncomfortable as it could have been.”
With the MLB regular season long over, and spring training for the Pirates more than four months away, Truby, a self-proclaimed “baseball junkie” is enjoying watching the World Series.  He has no definite plans for the off-season. As for what’s on the horizon come the 2026 season, Truby isn’t sure of where he will be. There is no indication from Pittsburgh if he will return to the big club.