This will sound nuts, but at least hear it out.
So, Bob Nutting fired Clint Hurdle this past Sunday. Or, as the press release disingenuously worded it, the Pirates and their manager "parted ways." And minutes after that release came another, this one attributed to Nutting, making clear his front office would remain intact by saying, "I strongly believe that Neal Huntington and the leadership team that he has assembled are the right people to continue to lead our baseball operations department."
This was, of course, was enthusiastically received by the public at large. And by the Mayor of Pittsburgh, who wrote to this site that he was "not happy" with the Pirates but that they "have the right to fail" if they so choose.
Ow.
Now, after all that, what if I told you that all of this -- I mean absolutely all of it -- remains in a state of flux and that, in fact, Nutting's nowhere near done?
That's been the unmistakable drumbeat from within 115 Federal over the past few days, that Nutting acted on Hurdle when he did out of respect to giving the manager a chance to bid his players farewell. (Which he did, by the way, with an emotional clubhouse meeting that morning.) And further, there remain major changes to be made. Meaning well above the obvious firings of Ray Searage, Tom Prince and potentially others on the coaching staff. Meaning no one's off limits.
I know, right?
On one hand, it makes zero sense. On more careful reflection, it makes some.
For one, my goodness, a change is needed. If Nutting hadn't realized that previously, he certainly does after all that went so terribly awry in 2019.
For another, as I've been writing for months, Nutting is beyond-belief patient with such matters. He'd take a month to determine what he should do the next day.
I don't know more than that. I don't know who's involved. I don't know how they'd leave, whether by being fired or resigning or accepting other posts elsewhere. But I do know that it's not done. Not yet.
• I can't imagine how much more obvious it can be that Jeff Banister will be the manager. I've been writing it for months here in Insider, and I wrote it in the column immediately after Hurdle was fired. There's no suspense here.
• Of the rest of the coaches, now in flux, those with the best chance to stay on a new staff are hitting coaches Rick Eckstein and Jacob Cruz. The players swear by them, and their voices will be heard on this.
• How did Searage fall from the pitching-whisperer grace of 2013-15 to what happened over the past four years? All I hear consistently, with all due respect to Searage and his own contributions, is that Jim Benedict had an awful lot to do with those teams and how they were coached up at all levels of the organization. Including Pittsburgh. He was a trusted second set of eyes.
