(Featured photo by Gene J. Puskar/AP)

The moment that many people have been wondering, speculating, maybe even begging the baseball gods to happen finally did earlier today.

The Pittsburgh Pirates officially announced that they have relieved manager Derek Shelton of his duties. In his absence, bench coach Don Kelly will take over.

Even with several injured players expected to return in the near or semi-near future, the season feels just about over here on May 8th. To kill a season that early is impressively bad. To kill a season that early when you have Paul Skenes on the roster is borderline impossible.

Yet, that’s exactly what the Pirates have done.

The team is 12-26. They have lost every game they have played in the month of May. They have lost ten of their last 11 games and are returning to Pittsburgh after back-to-back sweeps against them.

No matter what, the Pirates would have to win more games than they lost to accomplish literally anything this season. The Pirates would have to:

• Go 64-60 to match their 76-86 record in 2023 and 2024
• Go 70-54 to finish 82-80 and have their first winning season since 2018
• Go 77-47 to finish 89-73, matching the fifth and sixth seed NL playoff teams last year

Now, they will attempt that with a new man calling the shots.

Shelton leaves the Pirates carrying has one of the worst managerial records ever. Not just in franchise history, in baseball history. In his five plus years as Pirates manager, Shelton went 306-440, for a .411 winning percentage.

The first few years of his time here can’t really be held against him, as he was mostly a figurehead on a tanking team. Whoever the manager was in the dugout didn’t really matter then, because let’s be honest, the primary goal was not to win baseball games.

It was a pretty unfavorable position for any manager to be in, but for Shelton, it was the supposed growing pains of getting to work with a better roster down the line.

Shelton was probably a fine hire to lead them through the roughest years of the rebuild. But as that process went along and the Pirates tried to assemble some version of a winning core, Shelton needed to show he could keep up with a more competitive roster.

The front office thought he did that in 2023, when he helped lead the Pirates on that thrilling 20-8 run to open the year. It was during that run that Pirates general manager Ben Cherington gave Shelton a multi-year contract extension, with the length and money never revealed to the public.

But alas, here we are now, and the Pirates are in worse shape. Two seasons in the aftermath of thre 100-loss campaigns have seen the Pirates yield the same exact record: one that has them ten games under .500. This year, they might be lucky to hit 76 wins.

A great start to the season two years ago got him an extension, and now, a historically bad start to the year gets him the axe.

Make no mistake, his job was still not easy. Being asked to skipper this team into success with a roster that, right now, honestly looks like it could rival a 2021 or 2022 Pirates team in terms of poor performance, is an incredibly difficult task. But to say that Shelton didn’t have very obvious flaws as a manager would also be revisionist history.

His unwillingness to play the same lineup in back-to-back games and poor bullpen/pitching management has cost the team a considerable amount of games over his time here. You could argue that his lack of feel for his bullpen killed their season last year in August, after the Pirates bought at the trade deadline and still finished ten games under .500. A ten-game losing streak immediately plummeted them out of the playoff race just days after going all in.

In the grand scheme of things, does firing Shelton do much? Probably not.

We briefly saw how Don Kelly, the former bench coach that will now serve in Shelton’s former role, manages this team. It was a one-game trial, but it still ended in a loss.

There is also a much bigger issue of roster construction surrounding this team. In the sixth year of a rebuild, this should not be the product that a general manager puts on the field. Aside from the injured Nick Gonzales, Cherington has not proven capable of developing any major league hitters.

Their best batters have all come from other organizations, who at the very least pre-heated the oven for the Pirates, if not prepared the entire dish themselves.

But relieving Shelton, at the very least, shows that this organization, and owner Bob Nutting, does in fact believe that what is happening on the field is unacceptable.

It’s going to take a miracle to turn this season around. Moving on from Shelton was the first of many, many things that will have to change or turn around, but it’s probably one of the first dominos that needed to fall.