Andy Haines isn't good at his job. So much evidence has amassed to support that stance that it scarcely qualifies as opinion.
Oh, there can be discussions and debates about the value and impact of a hitting coach on any offense, as compared to other factors in the equation, but there can be none about his own performance in isolation. There's precedent in Milwaukee, where the Brewers made him the only coach they fired from their staff following a 2021 playoff season. And there are now 300 strikeouts in 32 games of additional precedent in Pittsburgh this season alone.
So, why haven't the Pirates fired him?
More relevant to how this 2024 season's unraveling in a 5-16 nosedive but also somehow still salvageable with the overall record at 14-18 and the rancid Rockies at PNC Park this weekend, why is he not about to be fired, either?
I'll try to lay this out within the prism of each of the four people who could, theoretically, make that happen:
BEN CHERINGTON
He's the obvious one. He's also the most beholden one, having hired Haines right after the Brewers fired him.
But also in another far more important way: This offensive approach, this awful, pathetic, passive trash that our city's watching now for a third year, is Cherington's baby. He believes in it. He'd have brought in someone in the Haines mold as soon as he took over if players that included Josh Bell, Adam Frazier and others hadn't lobbied hard to keep Rick Eckstein (the players told me that themselves) and, even then, he fired Eckstein before their first full season together had expired. As in, by the end of August in 2021.
Eckstein never had a chance. His emphasis, as Bell, Frazier and many other hitters told me at the time, was to shrink their own strike zone to a specific quadrant, then swing like hell. They glowed about the guy. Just glowed.
If Cherington fires Haines, what he believes about hitting doesn't change. He can promote from within, putting forth the same mandate. He can do likewise with someone from the outside. But once either would occur and the Pirates would still be standing in the box with their bats on their shoulders, that'd be obvious to all ... and then Cherington would bear the brunt of the public ire, not his new hitting coach.
This won't happen.
DEREK SHELTON
Shelton doesn't hire or fire his coaches, but he's always had a voice. And it sure wouldn't help Haines' case if Shelton ever used that voice, even just internally, to pipe up about Haines.
This won't happen, either.
For one, Shelton's a former big-league hitting coach himself and, as he's told me multiple times when I've brought up Haines' work, he empathizes with the challenge of the job. He and Cherington share the viewpoint that it's a convenient target when things aren't going well, and both respect the hours that Haines invests.
For another, the next peep I'd ever pick up from Shelton about disagreeing with any facet of this hitting approach will be the first. There's no reason, outwardly or inwardly, to think he's any different in this regard. His lineup strikes out 9.3 times times a game, and neither his demeanor nor his stance ever changes. He'll blame something as silly as a lack of clutch-iness -- which all of these people know is a luck thing -- but he'll seldom suggest the approach could be flawed.
This won't happen.
TRAVIS WILLIAMS
Not sure how commonly known this is, but Williams ranks above Cherington in the Pirates' hierarchy, as I've had confirmed at the highest levels. One runs the business, and one runs the baseball, but the former outweighs the latter the way Bob Nutting arranged it when both were hired in late 2019.
As such, very obviously, Williams could effect any change he'd like to baseball ops. And nothing and no one, including Nutting, would stop him from, say, summoning Cherington to a meeting and asking a stream of questions about the state of this team, headlined by the headline issue itself. Nor would anything stop Williams from suggesting that a change might be for the best. Nor even ordering it.
But this won't happen, either, my friends. At least I don't think so.
Why?
Plain and simple, there's no precedent for it. I've come to know Williams over the years. Good man. Good company leader. But he's stayed in his lane for as long as he's held this position, he never had any wish to be a Frank Coonelly type -- my phrasing, not his -- where he'd fancy himself as having a fraction of the knowledge of anyone on the baseball side and, in turn, over-stepping. And maybe most important, his respect for Cherington's always felt real.
BOB NUTTING
It's silly to even bring him up, but since everyone else seems to ... wow, no. Owners don't hire hitting coaches, and they don't fire them.
Nutting's always been the delegating sort. He's around the team all the time, but other than the macro of decisions -- payroll 'n' at, of course -- he lets the people he hired run the business and the baseball. And, as he once shared with me, he has to have faith in those people, or he shouldn't employ them at all. Which is why, in 2019, when he lost faith in both the business/baseball ends, he completely cleaned house of Coonelly, Neal Huntington, Kyle Stark and Clint Hurdle, eating $17.2 million of guaranteed money for those four in the process.
He's nowhere near such a stage right now. Just isn't. And he isn't about to reach several levels down in the structure to fire a hitting coach.
So, yeah ... anyone still having fun?
• The Rockies arrive into town with a 7-24 record and a 5.92 ERA that's not even a Coors Field thing. Their pitching is just the worst. At everything. And that'll be the next step in all of this. Cherington often talks about the internal projections produced by his analytics people, and one common subject is the caliber of opponents. They'll see something going awry for a while, look ahead on the schedule, and take solace that things might soon get better without taking any kind of action at all. At which point the outside noise will all subside.
You know, kinda like having three games in Oakland.
• Mason Miller, the Bethel Park kid who's now wowing all of Major League Baseball as the Athletics' flame-throwing closer? I was told this week they once worked him out privately at Waynesburg College before his draft. Obviously weren't impressed. Oh, well.
• To the above point regarding Shelton and others within the organization citing the Pirates' lack of production with runners on base: In these past 21 games, the team's combined batting average is .199. That's not failing in the clutch. It's just failing. And again, they know that.
• If Paul Skenes doesn't make his big-league debut next weekend against the Cubs, he won't make it until month's end, since a seven-game road trip follows. I'm told there's exactly a 0.00% chance Skenes would make his debut anywhere other than PNC Park.
• Never underestimate the extreme to which the Steelers, and Mike Tomlin in particular, love Najee Harris. They're not going to be moved in one direction or the other by the fifth-year option. They're going for an extension. I can't say the same about Justin Fields yet, but I sure can about Harris.
• Not that this situation merited a fraction of the attention it received, but the Steelers sure sound eager to upgrade Acrisure Stadium's amenities for the players' families attending games. The footprint of the place makes that a challenge, but there are ways to address that in both the short and long terms, I'm told.
• No one will know this for certain, but my understanding is that, even if Jackson Powers-Johnson hadn't been picked at No. 44 by the Raiders, the Steelers' selection of centers at No. 51 would've been Zach Frazier. Now, it's convenient -- smart, actually -- to take that route after the fact, but I'm passing it along. Regardless, they love Frazier.
• Don't rule out a Cam Sutton return, and not just because he met with Tomlin and Omar Khan last week. His bond with the Steelers was an intense one and, as I reported in a Friday Insider last year, the only reason he left for Detroit was to be closer to his children. Now, there'd be a lot of heavy investigative lifting that'd precede any reunion, obviously, and I'll stress that has to come first.
• Heard from Mason Rudolph the other day. Doing awesome in Nashville, legit looking forward to the opportunity he'll have with the Titans, zero hard feelings ... but he'll be eager, as all professional athletes are after a move, to show everyone in the previous place of employment what they're worth. Very eager.
• Hell no, Mike Sullivan's not leaving, and it's absurd that Kyle Dubas felt compelled to respond to a rumor out of -- where else? -- Toronto to share that there's been no permission granted to any team to talk to him. Sullivan's under contract for three more years, for crying out loud, and at $5.5 million. That should speak for itself in any setting.
• If the city of Toronto were somehow jettisoned to the far end of the galaxy, hockey fans would be subjected to about 1,967% less reckless speculation over the course of a given summer. It's a literal mill for this crap, endlessly churning.
• The longer Todd Reirden stays with the Penguins this summer, the greater the chance he returns. It's seen as robustly disrespectful throughout professional sports to string along assistant coaches deep into an offseason and, thus, limiting their prospects for landing a new job.
• The firing of 25-30 people on the business end included people who were both high-ranking and important within the structure. A lot of them will be replaced, I'm told, but not all. This is very much part of the Fenway Sports Group playbook, I'm told. And depending on how it turns out, meaning if jobs were eliminated here because they've already got people doing them in their headquarters, we could be seeing the further Boston-ization of the franchise.
• Related to what's above, don't waste a millisecond worrying about the financial state of the franchise. The Penguins have one of the sweetheart-iest deals in all of major-league sports by controlling all concert revenue, the real estate across Centre Avenue and more. They're doing awesome even just in the hockey context: They had some of their biggest individual gates ever this season, thanks to the introduction of dynamic pricing.
• I'm going to the ballpark tonight to cover all of Colorado's pitchers suddenly morphing into Cy Young candidates.
• Thanks for reading Friday Insider.
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