Paul Zeise: Don Kelly needs to keep the Pirates from totally tanking the rest of the season

Paul Zeise, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on Jul 16, 2025

Published in Baseball

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PITTSBURGH — Don Kelly has managed the Pirates to a 27-32 record since he took over, and that is a significant improvement for the team. Derek Shelton was 12-26 to start the season, and that is one of the reasons that he is no longer the manager.

I am not smart enough to suggest that Kelly has found some magical formula to make the Pirates play better.

There is actually an honest discussion to be had about whether or not a manager has that big of an impact on a baseball team. I don't know which side of that discussion I am on, other than to say a manager's impact is something more than negligible and something less than overwhelming.

Kelly has the team playing a little bit better brand of baseball, but I think they seem to be more engaged and playing with a lot more energy than before. Shelton seemed beaten down by all the losing over the last few years, and I think the team was flat and fed off of that lack of energy.

It was a natural jolt with the change of managers, and Kelly's enthusiasm and fire certainly seemed to jump start the team. And for a while, it looked like the team was headed back to respectability, as it was 26-24 through his first 50 games at the helm.

Baseball is a long-haul sport, though, and the grind is hard. At the end of it all, your record shows who you really are. You can only trick it up for small sample sizes, you can only use "intangibles" to hide flaws in the roster for so long, and over the course of a long 162 games, your talent — or lack of talent — will show up in the standings.

That's why I think now it is critical for Kelly to make sure the Pirates don't go into the tank like so many teams do when a season goes sideways. This part of the season is when the dog days of the summer start to add up and teams that are out of it often lose interest.

I think Kelly is at the point of the season where he can earn the job full-time for 2026 and beyond if he shows he can guide the Pirates through this last portion of the season.

If I were Bob Nutting, I would be watching this all very closely, as it should be his goal to promote Kelly at the end of the season. Kelly is a natural fit as the manager; he has local ties, he understands the market as well as anyone, and he is a former player who seems to relate to his guys.

Kelly is everything Nutting should want in a manager for the Pirates and then some, but he still has to earn the job. He still has to show that he can take a flawed roster that will be likely trending younger after the trade deadline and guide it to competitive baseball day after day. He has to help guide the team through the grind of the end of a losing season.

I am not sure what the right number is in terms of wins and losses, and he should probably be graded on a curve in that regard, but I don't think his record should be completely overlooked or irrelevant. If the Pirates completely tank and finish with a sub-70 win season, that has to be something that is taken into account when evaluating Kelly.

Clearly the last 10 days or so of the first half of the Pirates' season doesn't necessarily give you reason to have a lot of confidence that it will turn around. The Pirates lost eight of nine games to end the first half and played some ugly baseball.

But just like the six-game winning streak that preceded it wasn't all about the manager, the last stretch of losing isn't, either. The Pirates didn't pitch very well in that stretch (though they lost three games 1-0, 1-0 and 2-1) and only scored 15 runs in 10 games. That hitting has been bad all season, and no amount of rah-rah from the manager is going to change that dramatically.

There won't be a bunch of good hitters that suddenly show up in Pirates uniforms, and there won't be some sudden transformation of the current hitters into something they aren't.

But Kelly needs to find a way to push the right buttons to get the team to play hard and compete every day. He needs to find ways to turn those 1-0 losses into 2-1 wins and find a way to continue to develop and mentor some of the young players through slumps and bad stretches.

I am of the belief that Kelly is the right man for the job, and if he is given the chance for next year and beyond, he will do a great job for a long time. But Kelly now has to go out and prove he is capable of keeping the Pirates as competitive as they can be.

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