Pirates fire Derek Shelton, promote bench coach Don Kelly to manager for rest of 2025

Sitting in last place in the NL Central and with their season spiraling, the Pittsburgh Pirates fired manager Derek Shelton on Thursday and named bench coach Don Kelly his successor for the remainder of the 2025 season.

Shelton was relieved of his duties following a 5-0 loss to the St. Louis Cardinals on Wednesday, which dropped the Pirates to 12-26 (.316). It was their seventh consecutive defeat and 10th in 11 games, as well as their seventh shutout loss. Cherington said he recommended Shelton’s dismissal to Pirates chairman Bob Nutting and team president Travis Williams, then personally informed Shelton of the decision.

“There’s no one thing. We aren’t performing the way we need to. We’re not performing in a way that our fans deserve. We know we need to be better,” Cherington said Thursday afternoon in a news conference at PNC Park. “I guess I looked at the end of last year, August and September, and how April and the first few days of May played out. It just became clear that a change was necessary that we were not in a position to wait any longer.”

Pirates GM Ben Cherington on firing manager Derek Shelton. pic.twitter.com/jTBJXF78r4

— Kevin Gorman (@KevinGormanPGH) May 8, 2025

Cherington expressed confidence in Kelly, who played at Mt. Lebanon High School and Point Park University and was drafted by Detroit in 2001 and played 585 major league games with the Pirates, Detroit Tigers and Miami Marlins. He spent the 2019 season as the first-base coach for the Houston Astros before joining Shelton’s staff as bench coach. Cherington said he expects to have more clarity in the coming days on who will handle Kelly’s previous duties.

“It’s very important to me and very important to Donnie to make sure he’s in a position to do that manager’s job and not do the job he was just doing,” Cherington said. “So we need to make sure we’re reallocating all of the bench coach duties somehow in another direction.”

Pirates GM Ben Cherington on why Don Kelly was promoted from bench coach to replace Derek Shelton as manager. pic.twitter.com/6xyxDVl4XM

— Kevin Gorman (@KevinGormanPGH) May 8, 2025

Shelton, 54, had a 306-440 record in five-plus seasons for a .410 winning percentage, which ranks among the worst in MLB history for managers with more than 700 games on their resume. The Pirates weren’t much better at PNC Park, going 169-206 (.451) under Shelton.

The Pirates gave Shelton a contract extension in April 2023 amid a 14-7 start, their best since 1992, and on their way to posting a 20-9 record that was the best in the National League. After back-to-back 76-win seasons in 2023-24, the Pirates entered this season with expectations to snap their six-year losing streak and make a push for the playoffs. Shelton made it sound like a mandate in spring training, knowing he was on the hot seat and needed a turnaround.

“It’s time to win,” Shelton told TribLive in March. “That’s the only focus.”

Instead, the Pirates continued with the type of sloppy play and losing streaks that came to define Shelton’s tenure. After losing five of their first seven games, Shelton was booed when introduced before the home opener against the New York Yankees on April 4 at PNC Park. So, the Pirates stopped introducing him with the starting lineup.

“Derek is a good man who did a lot for the Pirates and Pittsburgh, but it was time for a change,” Pirates chairman Bob Nutting said in a statement. “The first quarter of the season has been frustrating and painful for all of us. We have to do better. I know that. Ben knows that. Our coaches know that. Our players know that.

“There is a lot of baseball left to be played. We need to act with a sense of urgency and take the steps necessary to fix this now to get back on track as a team and organization.”

The Pirates hired Shelton in November 2019 following the organizational housecleaning prompted by the 92-loss season in 2019 that included Clint Hurdle being fired before the finale. It was Shelton’s first managerial role, and it came with a major rebuilding task as the Pirates tore the team down to the studs by trading away their top players for prospects to reduce payroll and plan for the future.

All-Star outfielder Starling Marte was the first to go, and the Pirates produced the worst record in baseball (19-41) during the covid pandemic-shortened 2020 season. They were no-hit by Lucas Giolito in a 4-0 loss to the Chicago White Sox on Aug. 25, 2020.

The Pirates dealt All-Star first baseman Josh Bell and starting pitchers Joe Musgrove and Jameson Taillon that winter, then went 61-101 in Shelton’s first full campaign. That season saw a pair of rookie former first-round draft picks make Little League mistakes. First baseman Will Craig made an epic error when he chased Javier Baez down the first-base line toward home plate before making a last-second throw that allowed a run to score in a 5-3 loss to the Chicago Cubs that May. Third baseman Ke’Bryan Hayes had a home run erased when he failed to touch first base in a 5-3 loss to the Los Angeles Dodgers in June.

The Pirates produced another 100-loss season in 2022, which included more gaffes that went viral. Infielder Rodolfo Castro’s phone fell out of his pocket while sliding head-first into third base against Arizona that August, drawing a fine and one-game suspension for violating MLB policy regarding unapproved electronic devices. Hayes drew criticism for taking off his glove to pull sunflower seeds out of his back pocket while a runner rounded third base to score in a 4-3 loss at the New York Mets that September. The Pirates also won a game despite not getting a hit in eight innings against Hunter Greene and Art Warren in a 1-0 win over the Cincinnati Reds on May 15.

But the Pirates made a 14-win improvement in 2023, engineering the greatest comeback in franchise history under Shelton by rallying from a nine-run deficit for a 13-12 win over the Reds on Sept. 23, 2023. To Shelton, the win was emblematic of the team’s resiliency.

The Pirates won the inaugural MLB Draft lottery in the offseason and selected right-handed pitcher Paul Skenes, who became baseball’s biggest story on his way to starting for the National League in the All-Star Game and winning NL Rookie of the Year honors.

The Pirates were within 2 ½ games of wild-card contention heading into the trade deadline, which gave Shelton a glimpse of what it’s like to play meaningful games at PNC Park.

“There’s nothing more exciting, if you take from the end of the All-Star break to Aug. 1, the electricity in the city, the electricity in the ballpark,” Shelton said. “That’s what we’re striving for. That’s the energy we want every night, not only from our players but from our fans because there was so much energy at PNC.”

But the Pirates opened August by losing 11 of their first 12 games, including 10 consecutive, to drop into last place. It marked the third time in four years that they endured a 10-game losing streak. Shelton surmised that if the Pirates could have gone .500 during that stretch, they would have remained in the playoff picture heading into September. Then again, they were the victims of a combined no-hitter by Shota Imanaga, Nate Pearson and Porter Hodge in a 12-0 loss at the Chicago Cubs on Sept. 4.

“That’s the place where we need to get better. That’s the place where I need to get better,” Shelton said. “It’s like a lot of my reflection this winter has been on that 15-game stretch, what we should have done differently, what I could have done differently and how we could have handled it differently. If you take away 15 days last year, we’re in a pretty good spot. It’s just those 15 days were really bad. There’s no one that’s thought harder about those 15 days and the decisions that were made than I have.”

Despite getting “punched in the face” over the last two months of the 2024 season, Cherington recommended that Shelton return, going so far as to give him a public vote of confidence Sept. 11. Cherington said there was belief that the Pirates were headed in the right direction.

“We believed we were making progress,” Cherington said Thursday. “Not enough. Not fast enough. But we believed we were making progress, and we thought there was evidence for that. … I believed that Shelty had the will to do that and was going to continue to do all the work that he needed to do to be a part of that. So that was the recommendation I made. What’s happened now is we’ve now had a little bit more of a month of very difficult performance that adds on top of the difficult ending from 2024. I think it’s the combination of those two things that ultimately brought us to today.”