Pirates dismiss GM Neal Huntington after third losing season in 4 years

Neal Huntington, Frank Coonelly and Clint Hurdle sparked a baseball renaissance in Pittsburgh.

The general manager, team president and charismatic manager helped a moribund franchise emerge from two decades of losing to briefly become a contender.

Beginning in 2016, however, the momentum stalled and the losses piled up. Now, the three men integral to reconnecting the city and the team are out of work, part of a "refresh" chairman Bob Nutting felt necessary following a last-place finish in the National League Central.

On Monday, Pittsburgh fired Huntington, who had two years remaining on the extension he signed in 2017. The move completed an overhaul that began with Hurdle's dismissal on the final day of the regular season and continued last week when Coonelly walked away after 12 years as president.

Former Pittsburgh Penguins chief operating officer Travis Williams will replace Coonelly, hoping to do for the Pirates what he did with the Penguins, who won three Stanley Cups with Williams' in the fold between 2009-17.

'Thorough review'

Williams, whose relationship with Nutting dates to his time as outside counsel for the Pirates, said the club will be on "a little bit of a journey" as it plots a way forward.

"This is not going to be where we flip the switch and the next day, all of a sudden, we're in the World Series," Williams said. "We're going to have to get a GM in place, put a plan in place that charts a path forward within the framework that we're operating that we can get back to being a very successful team."

Coonelly arrived in Pittsburgh in 2007 and promptly hired Huntington. Hurdle came on board in 2010 and together they helped the Pirates end a 20-year streak of futility. Pittsburgh reached the playoffs three straight years (2013-15) but began to slide out of contention in 2016.

The team has finished under .500 in three of the last four seasons, including a 69-93 record in 2019 following a second-half collapse in which Pittsburgh went 25-48 after the all-star break. The meltdown was marked by altercations involving players, coaches and support personnel, and the arrest of all-star closer Felipe Vazquez on felony charges tied to a sexual relationship with an underage girl.

Nutting appeared to give Huntington a vote of confidence when the team fired Hurdle, saying on Sept. 29 he strongly believed "Huntington and the leadership team that he has assembled are the right people to continue to lead our baseball operations department."

After what he called a "thorough review," Nutting changed course. Saying the team's issues were "deep," Nutting fired Huntington. He said he didn't want Huntington to feel like a "lame duck" while working for a new team president.

"It seems to me he was already so much on the hot seat that you can't have his job even more unstable than it became in the last month," Nutting said.

Nutting stressed the need for the Pirates to take a sharper approach.

"We need to get back into a dynamic, energetic, innovative, creative path forward because that's what it's going to take in a market the size of Pittsburgh to be successful," he said. "We can't do the same thing we did five years ago. We can't do the same thing any other market did three years ago. We need to be back out on the cutting edge."

Red Sox hire new baseball boss

New Boston Red Sox chief baseball officer Chaim Bloom says he wants to make the team a sustainable winner.

The Red Sox introduced Bloom as the head of their baseball operations department on Monday. He replaces Dave Dombrowski, who was let go less than a year after the team he built won the World Series. Before Dombrowski, Theo Epstein and Ben Cherington also won World Series titles and still fell out of favour.

The hiring was first reported Friday, but the announcement came Monday, an off-day during the World Series. Bloom's first move was to promote Brian O'Halloran to general manager.

Bloom is a 36-year-old Yale graduate who worked 15 years in the Rays organization, starting as an intern and spending the last three as a senior vice-president of baseball operations.