'We better grow': Pirates, Paul Skenes react to manager Derek Shelton's firing

Colin Beazley / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Paul Skenes said he wasn’t shocked manager Derek Shelton was fired. The Pirates are 12-26, on a seven-game losing streak and heading in a direction they don’t want to be heading. 

But he also knows that decision won’t change everything for the Pirates.

“I don’t know that it fixes the root of the issue,” Skenes said, “which is we need to play better.”

Skenes wasn’t the only Pirate to say something similar. There seemed to be an understanding Shelton was let go because the team hasn’t had success. To turn the season around, the responsibility falls on the players.

Skenes was asked if the season was salvageable. He said the team needs to discuss that as a group and find out what their goals are for the remaining 124 games.

“We better grow because if we don’t grow, then it’s a completely lost season,” Skenes said. “Just gotta keep going and understand the urgency of where we’re at right now.”

That doesn’t mean he’s given up hope for this season.

“Every time you go out there, you're learning,” Skenes said. “Basically what I'm saying is whatever team is going to win the World Series — maybe it's us — they're growing right now, too. We gotta do that. We gotta know the urgency of it.”

The decision Thursday to fire Shelton wasn’t necessarily a surprise, but it’s also not an entirely common scenario. Shelton was the first manager to be fired in the 2025 season, and his firing after 38 games was tied for the fourth-earliest firing into a season in the last 15 years.

The Pirates fired former manager Clint Hurdle after the penultimate game of the season in 2019. Before that, the last Pirates manager to be fired in the middle of the season was Lloyd McClendon in September 2005. Few current Pirates, if any, know what it’s like to come to the ballpark on the same team with a different manager than the day before.

“In the time that I've played the game, I've never had to deal with a manager being fired midseason,” Andrew McCutchen said. “So it's something new to me that I haven't really processed. I still have a job to do.”

McCutchen repeatedly stressed that aspect — each Pirates player and new manager Don Kelly all have a job to do. In that vein, little has changed.

But firing the manager is a change and one that does, in some ways, send a message.

“The only thing I can focus on is myself, doing my job and doing what I can so something like that doesn't ever happen again,” McCutchen said. “That's all I'm trying to focus on. Hopefully the guys in the clubhouse are doing the same thing so collectively we can change things for ourselves so we're not having to go through this again.”

The decision also makes players reflect on how they’ve gotten to this point.

“This season has been what it's been so far,” McCutchen said. “Obviously it hasn't gone the way we wanted it to go, so if we want to change that, we have to go out, do our job and try to win the game we're playing each day.”

Skenes agreed, which is why he wasn’t shocked by Thursday’s news. It’s an opportunity for a turning point.

“We haven't gone out there and tried to lose any of the games that we've lost,” Skenes said. “We still have to go out there and try to win and do the things necessary to win. That's probably the more important piece is doing the things necessary to win every single day for the rest of the season. Positive, negative, whatever objective. ... If we're not there now, we gotta get there.”

No one truly knew how to feel about having a manager fired midseason. Jared Triolo called it “interesting,” especially because Shelton is the only major league manager he’s had.

“I think there's a lot of emotions, a bunch of different feelings,” Triolo said. “But we'll see how it works going forward.”

That part — moving forward — was something the Pirates were all ready for. They’re familiar with Kelly, as he’s been the bench coach for five-plus seasons. He’s well liked in the clubhouse, with Triolo calling him a “really good dude.”

But just as they know firing Shelton won’t solve everything, they know promoting Kelly won’t solve everything, either.

“He's gonna do his job,” McCutchen said. “But at the end of the day, he's not on the field playing the game. We — the team out there — have to do our job. At the end of the day, it's the team on the field who ultimately wins."