Welcome to Rates and barrels. It's Thursday, May 8th. Derek Ben Ryper, Enoceris, Trevor May here with you on this episode. We got some breaking news. The Pirates are making a change in the manager role.

We'll talk about the team's decision to dismiss Derek Shelton as we get into some baseball news here in just a few minutes.

We're going to check in on Roki Sasaki. Seven starts into his big league career.

It hasn't gone quite the way way some of the more optimistic folks out

there like me had hoped it would go so far we'll talk about what changes roki could make on

the fly and what we expect for the rest of the season we've cooked up a small draft on this

thursday looking at some starting pitchers who have struggled up to this point so we'll have

that later on in the show as well.

And we saw a great piece from Alex Chamberlain over at Fangraphs examining Andres Munoz

and the unique characteristics of Andres Munoz that make him so effective.

So we'll dig into that as well.

Gentlemen, let's start with the Pirates decision to fire Derek Shelton.

How on earth can you be a person with a brain in a decision-making capacity

thinking that firing your manager in this instance will actually change anything?

And this is not a specific critique of the Pirates' Front Office.

This is a critique of Bob Nutting and ownership and just taking people and just throwing

them out of a role, putting someone else in the role, and expecting everything to change

when you don't do enough to actually improve your organization, right?

Like, what is this going to accomplish?

Is this going to motivate the 2025 pirates?

Because by all accounts, Derek Shelton is a popular manager, well-liked guy around the game.

And this is not going to change the quality of the cast for whoever steps into this role to take over.

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