FROM LEFT, BOB NUTTING AND BEN CHERINGTON | PHOTO COURTESY PITTSBURGH PIRATES

The announcement made late last week was brief but all-encompassing.

And no, I’m not talking about the firing of Derek Shelton. The one that really betrayed the wretched state of Pirates baseball in 2025 was issued a day after the Pirates had announced Shelton had been “relieved of his duties” as manager.

It wasn’t a press release on official Pirates letterhead, just an email fired off last Friday detailing yet another in a seemingly endless succession of meaningless transactions: “The Pittsburgh Pirates today placed infielder Enmanuel Valdez on the 10-day injured list with left shoulder inflammation. Infielder/outfielder Ji Hwan Bae has been recalled from Triple-A Indianapolis.”

Shelton exited with a record of 306-440 in five-plus seasons, a ledger of ineptitude that speaks for itself.

But a major factor in Shelton amassing a woeful winning percentage of .410 through his tenure was players such as Valdez being perceived as options at the outset of a season and the likes of Bae comprising the cast of viable alternatives.

The Pirates had been drafting and developing for five seasons in the era of Shelton and General Manager Ben Cherington entering this one, and this is what they have available in terms of injury replacements and/or complementary players.

The lack of quality Major League talent at the big league level is on owner Bob Nutting for declining — again — to spend to a level commensurate with what it would take to at least give the Pirates a fighting chance.

And the lack of knocking-at-the-door, promising prospects in the minor leagues ready to come up and potentially contribute in lieu of productive big leaguers with competitive Major League salaries is on Cherington.

In this instance, two strikes are enough to doom the Bucs.

And whoever happens to be the manager.

Enter Don Kelly, the Mt. Lebanon High School and Point Park University product who has been assigned to pick up where Shelton left off.

By most if not all accounts, Kelly is a likable guy. And because of his ties to the region and the team (Kelly is also a Butler native who played 25 games for the Pirates in 2007 and had been serving as the team’s bench coach since 2020) he’s also a great story.

But Kelly couldn’t hit when he played (.230 in nine Major League seasons) and he can’t hit for a collection of players who can’t hit now.

So what’s really changed?

Nutting and Cherington continue to publicly maintain the problem isn’t that the Pirates stink, it’s that they’re underachieving.

“I’m not willing to give up on what we expected, which involves a significantly better performance than you’ve seen,” Nutting told the Post-Gazette’s Jason Mackey last week.

Apparently, the thinking was and remains that Tommy Pham is still a usable player. And Adam Frazier. And that Henry Davis can someday become one. And that Ke’Bryan Hayes should be something more than the huge disappointment he’s clearly become.

It remains to be seen if Spencer Horowitz, Nick Gonzales and Endy Rodriguez can recover from injury and eventually inject some life into this moribund lineup.

But how much of a difference can they really make?

The same can be said for pitching phenom Bubba Chandler, who is currently tearing up Triple A to the degree that he appears poised to join the rotation sooner rather than later.

Chandler may turn out to be the next Paul Skenes when he eventually gets here.

But the Pirates have found a way to lose six of nine games so far in 2025 when the original Skenes has been given the ball, and very little of that has been Skenes’ fault.

That’s a stat that’s almost inconceivable given that the Bucs won 15 of Skenes’ 23 starts on the way to a second consecutive 76-86 finish last season.

So is this one: The Pirates averted being swept on Wednesday night when they found a way to beat the Mets 4-0. But the Bucs still managed to extend their streak of having scored four or fewer runs to 20 consecutive games, a franchise record for that specific brand of futility dating back to 1901.

The last time the Pirates had approached being so inept with the bats with such regularity was in August 1908, when they had a run of 17 straight such games.

So this hasn’t just been “incredibly frustrating, incredibly difficult, incredibly painful to watch,” as Nutting acknowledged to Mackey.

It’s been historically so.

And, as it turns out, impossible to manage.

Mike Prisuta is the sports anchor/reporter for Randy Baumann and the DVE Morning Show. He’s also the host of the Steelers Radio Network Pregame Show and the color analyst for Robert Morris University men’s hockey broadcasts.