Pirates hoping to fill pitching coach position 'sooner rather than later'

The Pittsburgh Pirates are looking for a pitching coach for the first time since 2010.

Ray Searage was promoted from assistant coach in August that year to replace the fired Joe Kerrigan. Searage then spent the next nine seasons overseeing the pitching staff.

However, Searage was fired at the end of the last season, after the Pirates’ 5.18 ERA was next to last in the National League, by then-general manager Neal Huntington, who then got axed nearly a month later Oct. 28.

New GM Ben Cherington and manager Derek Shelton are interviewing candidates to be Searage’s successor.

Cherington said during the winter meetings last week in San Diego he would like to have someone in place “sooner rather than later.” Indications are a hire will be made sometime this week before front offices go into at least semi-hibernation for the holidays.

Shelton talked last week about what he is looking for in a pitching coach. His job description was quite detailed.

“First and foremost, he’s going to have to be player-centric,” Shelton said. “He’s going to have to be a relationship builder.

“He’s going to have to be someone who comes in with a group and establish not only a plan of what we’re going to do starting in the offseason but going into spring training and into the season, someone that has advanced knowledge of how the game is played, and that’s not just with data, but it’s with tech and being able to use those things because the way that we can measure how things are done or how pitches are thrown or how our body is going to recover is a big part of it, and I think we have to stay ahead of that.”

The trend in baseball this winter is for teams to hire tech-savvy pitching coaches. One such hot name around the game is University of Michigan pitching coach Chris Fetter, who interviewed for openings with both New York teams, though he ultimately lost out on both jobs.

The Minnesota Twins started the trend of hiring college pitching coaches last offseason with the University of Arkansas’ Wes Johnson. Shelton, of course, was the Twins’ bench coach.

The hiring seemed unconventional at the time, but the Twins went on to win 101 games and the American League Central title.

“I think it’s funny that a lot of that was made unconventional because of the fact that Wes had never coached professionally,” Shelton said. “The one thing about Wes is he had coached for 25 years, and if you spend 15 minutes with him, you realize this guy really knows how to coach, and it really didn’t matter the level.

“So I think the one thing we have to be very cognizant of is where guys played or where they coached anymore is not as important because players in today’s game, they want information. They want to get better. They want to know how they’re going to get better, so we have to have somebody who’s very well-versed in all of these things, but first and foremost, why Wes was so good is because he developed relationships.

“He’s really smart, and he knows probably biomechanics better than any human I’ve been around, but he developed relationships first and didn’t go right to it.”