PITTSBURGH (AP) — Derek Shelton was booed loudly when he was introduced ahead of his sixth home opener as the Pittsburgh Pirates manager last month. He shook it off in the aftermath, attributing the reaction to understandable frustration from a fan base weary of a franchise-wide reset that looks and feels stalled.

The man who arrived at spring training saying it was time to win pledged to get it cleaned up. A little over a month later, with the Pirates languishing in last place amid a flurry of missteps both on and off the field, Shelton was out of a job.

Pittsburgh fired Shelton on Thursday, a decision general manager Ben Cherington — who hired Shelton months after taking over the club’s baseball operations in 2019 — called difficult but necessary to salvage a season perilously close to essentially being over before Memorial Day.

“We aren’t performing the way we need to,” Cherington said a few hours after Shelton became the first major league manager jettisoned this year. “We’re not performing in a way that our fans deserve. We know we need to be better.”

The move came with Pittsburgh mired in a seven-game losing streak and languishing at 12-26 overall. Shelton went 306-440 in five-plus seasons with the Pirates. He navigated the ugly early days of Cherington’s rebuild with good humor and grace but struggled to find the right buttons to push on a small-market team that has little margin for error.

Longtime bench coach and former major leaguer, mostly with the Detroit Tigers, Don Kelly will take over for the remainder of the 2025 season, a full-circle moment for the Pittsburgh native. Cherington called Kelly “an elite human being and teammate” with a “teacher’s heart.”

St. Louis finished a three-game sweep on Wednesday in which the Pirates showed little life. That was enough for Cherington to recommend to owner Bob Nutting and team president Travis Williams that it was time for a change.

Nutting called Pittsburgh’s opening six weeks of the season “frustrating and painful.”