Amid the team’s best start in three decades, Pittsburgh Pirates have signed manager Derek Shelton to a contract extension, GM Ben Cherington confirmed Saturday. Contract terms have not been disclosed.
“I’m very excited to have the opportunity to continue working with him,” said Cherington (video). “I truly believe he is the right person for the job. He has been working tirelessly for over three years now to put us in a stronger position to win. All the work it takes to build our culture, the way the way we prepare for games, the way we relate to each other, the relationships we build, I think we’re starting to see the fruits of that work.”
Shelton, 52, is in his fourth season with the Pirates and 2023 was the last guaranteed year on his contract. Pittsburgh enters the game on Saturday with a five-game winning streak that has improved the club’s record to a 14-7 record with a plus-22 point difference. Here are the last five times the Pirates have won 14 of their first 21 games:
|
1992 |
15-6 |
96-66 (won NL East) |
|
1991 |
14-7 |
98-64 (won NL East) |
|
1990 |
14-7 |
95-67 (won NL East) |
|
1988 |
15-6 |
85-75 |
|
1980 |
14-7 |
83-79 |
The Pirates are in the early stages of transitioning from rebuilder to contender, and Shelton inherited a team that lost 93 games in 2019. Pittsburgh went 19-41 during the pandemic season in 2020, his first year as manager, and then lost 101 games in 2021 and 100 games in 2022. The club is 156-249 (.385) in the Shelton era.
Obviously, the Pirates weren’t expected to compete from 2020-22, so Shelton shouldn’t be to blame for the team’s poor record. He was hired to mentor and develop the team’s young players and with those young players starting to gain weight, the Pirates want to keep Shelton around to continue their development.
“We worked really hard for three years. We made some tough trades, we brought in some people, we took our chunk,” Shelton said Saturday (video). “So the fact that organizationally, the commitment to how we executed the plan that we laid out four years ago is working. We’ve worked really hard for three years. We have to keep focusing every day to get better.”
Prior to joining the Pirates, Shelton worked as a minor league manager with the New York Yankees in the early 2000s, where he became a coach at Cleveland (2005-09), became a coach at the Tampa Bay Rays (2010-16), coach of quality control with the Toronto Blue Jays (2017) and bench coach with the Minnesota Twins (2018-19).