Tim Benz: Despite Pirates' pop vs. Reds, Derek Shelton's defense of Andy Haines falls short

The Pittsburgh Pirates have posted 14 runs in their first two games at Cincinnati this week, but their season-long offensive woes are far from conquered.

During his weekly radio appearance on 93.7 The Fan, Derek Shelton acknowledged the Pirates’ offensive problems in 2024, but stopped short of endorsing the idea that the franchise needs to fire hitting coach Andy Haines.

“Our younger hitters have to progress. That’s true,” Shelton said Tuesday. “I think we’re seeing not only with the Pirates but throughout the game young players are struggling right now. We have to continue to figure out how that translates to being better. Our offense needs to be better. We’re working on it, but I don’t honestly think it’s fair to cast the blame on one single person for that.”

Agreed. It’s not all Haines’ fault.

It’s the fault of the players themselves as well. It’s Shelton’s fault. It’s the fault of owner Bob Nutting for not having a higher payroll. It’s general manager Ben Cherington’s fault for not finding better hitters with the money he is allowed to spend.

Honestly, I doubt firing the hitting coach is going to change much. But the more important point to advance is that keeping him is doing nothing at all to help.

So why not try somebody else?

“Some of it comes on the players,” Shelton continued. “We have to continue to make adjustments. We have to continue to work on things. Again, it’s not just the Pirates where we’re seeing young hitters struggle. I know it’s the conversation because we’re talking about the Pirates. But throughout the league, I think we’re trying to figure out why guys — when they come from triple-A to the big leagues — are having issues.”

Again, agreed, but it’s not just the Pirates’ young hitters in question. This team has nine batters who are between the ages of 27 (Ke’Bryan Hayes) and 37 (Andrew McCutchen), and eight of them entered Tuesday’s game in Cincinnati hitting under .245.

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To Shelton’s other point, there’s no doubt that hitting numbers are down in Major League Baseball this year. Jayson Stark of The Athletic highlighted the woes with some glaring stats.

• MLB, as a whole, is on pace for more than 1,400 fewer hits, 1,300 fewer runs and 800 fewer home runs than last year.

• The league is also on pace for the fewest doubles in a season since before the 1993 expansion, the fewest homers since 2015, the fewest hits per game (in a full season) since 1968 — the final year before the mound was lowered, and the lowest batting average on balls in play (.288) since 1992.

• At the time of Stark’s column on Friday, the average hitter was logging a .241 batting average and an OPS of .701. Only 25 hitters are on pace to hit 30 home runs. As recently as 2019, there were 58 of them.

• The average lineup now gets just 8.1 hits per game. That’s the sixth-worst ever and the worst overall since ‘68.

That’s just cherry-picking some of the many eye-popping stats Stark compiled. We all know the many reasons for the trends.

• More pitchers (starters and relievers) throw harder with a greater variety of break off their heavy array of pitches than ever before.

• Even with banning the shift, defensive positioning takes away a lot of hard-hit balls that used to fall for hits.

• Hitters have way too much of a “homer-or-nothing” mentality and have no fear of striking out, so the ball is in play less often.

• Runner movement, bunting and playing small ball in hopes of extending rallies is a dying philosophy.

Yet, for as much as offense has sunk across MLB, the Pirates have plummeted toward the bottom of the ocean faster than most. Given all those historically bad numbers, the Pirates are among the worst in all of them.

Entering their 9-5 win Tuesday over the Reds, the Pirates were 24th of 30 teams in runs scored (312), 24th in homers (72), 28th in OPS (.654), 27th in batting average (.228), and they had the fourth-most strikeouts at 737.

So if anyone associated with the Pirates — the players, coaches, owner, general manager — tries to downplay the team’s struggles at the plate by suggesting they are simply caught in the vortex of a league-wide trend, that’s not true.

They are helping to lead the league-wide trend.

Which, in a way, is interesting, because since 1992, how often could we ever point to the Pirates as leaders of the league in anything?