Derek Shelton health condition is very critical and needs medical attention

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Not regarding the players. That occurs often enough.

I mean regarding the manager. Or the managing of a game, such as the Pirates’ exceptionally excruciating 6-5 loss to the Diamondbacks on this Sunday afternoon at PNC Park.

Or even just the managing of a specific situation within that game. And I’d allowed myself to process, however momentarily, what it’d be like to hear him pipe up at that press conference table about how he’d really blown this one.

Because, as I’m about to illustrate, he really did. Several times over.

But nope. He was angry over something else. Something, as I should’ve anticipated, that’d involve a pitch-clock dispute, the one thing I’ve seen that ticks him off to any significant degree.

And sure enough, it was: Arizona’s Lourdes Gurriel had taken long to get into the box, after which home plate Jonathan Parra ruled an automatic strike, after which Jalen Beeks threw a changeup up and away for ball one, after which Torey Lovullo emerged from the visiting dugout to argue that Gurriel should’ve been granted more time because he’s a pinch-hitter, after which the umpires conferred and, remarkably, removed the original strike from the count.

As if they’d engineered their own reverse time-travel, like the signature scene in the classic Christopher Reeve ‘Superman’ scene:

And pardon my use of the language on a family site, but I’d never seen the man like this in a half-decade around him and, if I’m telling the truth, I thought for at least the splittest of split-seconds that there might’ve been a moment of accountability forthcoming.

Not regarding the players. That occurs often enough.

I mean regarding the manager. Or the managing of a game, such as the Pirates’ exceptionally excruciating 6-5 loss to the Diamondbacks on this Sunday afternoon at PNC Park. Or even just the managing of a specific situation within that game. And I’d allowed myself to process, however momentarily, what it’d be like to hear him pipe up at that press conference table about how he’d really blown this one.

Because, as I’m about to illustrate, he really did. Several times over.

But nope. He was angry over something else. Something, as I should’ve anticipated, that’d involve a pitch-clock dispute, the one thing I’ve seen that ticks him off to any significant degree. And sure enough, it was: Arizona’s Lourdes Gurriel had taken long to get into the box, after which home plate Jonathan Parra ruled an automatic strike, after which Jalen Beeks threw a changeup up and away for ball one, after which Torey Lovullo emerged from the visiting dugout to argue that Gurriel should’ve been granted more time because he’s a pinch-hitter, after which the umpires conferred and, remarkably, removed the original strike from the count.