The Pittsburgh Pirates have hired former Rockies manager Clint Hurdle to lead a franchise that has not boasted a winning record in 18 seasons.
The Pirates currently have the league’s lowest payroll, but have promising young talent with outfielder Andrew McClutchen, third baseman Pedro Alvarez and second baseman Neil Walker.
The Pirates are coming off a 105-loss season, and have remained cellar dwellers, aging like fine wine.
But this is baseball, and the Pirates have learned that they can’t always rely on young talent to get better with age. Patience is a virtue for wine connoisseurs, but in baseball the matriculation needs to occur at a more faster rate.
So in comes Hurdle, who managed the Rockies for 8 seasons from 2002-09, leading the Rockies to the 2007 World Series.
That year, the Rockies won 14 out of the last 15 games to end the regular season to force a memorable one-game playoff, a game in which the Rockies came from behind to win the game and clinch their first playoff berth since the team’s inception in 1992.
The Rockies won seven straight games to reach the World Series, before being swept by the eventual champion Red Sox.
Although Cinderella was short lived, Hurdle has the capability of creating a group of pretenders into contenders. He was the hitting coach for the Texas Rangers in 2010, a team that made a surprising run to the World Series, and was one of the top offenses in the American League during the regular season.
Hurdle was also in the running for the Mets managing job, the only other team with a manager vacancy, but opted to accept an offer to manage the Pirates.
This is a great hire for the Pirates, who were last in earned run average and had the second lowest team batting average (.242) last season.
The offensive-oriented Hurdle is taking a different approach and becoming defensive-oriented, making pitching his number one priority this off-season.
For a low-market team that relies so heavily on young talent and a strong farm system, the Pirates are far from contenders. But Hurdle was hired into a similar position with the Rockies before eventually leading them to a World Series appearance.
So maybe there is no Willie Stargell or Roberto Clemente in the long-forgotten Pirates force during the late 70s, but an experienced manager is just what the Pirates may have needed.
Maybe the sixth time is the charm–the amount of managers the Pirates have gone through since they last had a winning season (1992).
Jim Tracy did not cut it and the irony of it all is that Tracy is now coaching the Rockies.
Hurdle said it best with a mentality that any coach should have when taking over a stagnant franchise: “I’m proud to be a Pirate and we are not going to back down from anyone.”
For Hurdle, you can knock the Pirates up but won’t knock them down. The team with the low payroll and the small market has chosen to micromanage its option for a new leader.
Hurdle is that void. The question is: many shoes have been tried on but none of them fit…is Hurdle the man who will finally find the shoe that fits?