After starting his pro sports career as outside counsel to the Pirates and working through the team’s ownership transition, Travis Williams got to know Bob Nutting and his family pretty well.
So, when Nutting called to discuss a role as Pirates team president, he didn’t need to think about it too hard.
“When he called me to offer this opportunity, I jumped at the chance,” Williams said.
Williams enters this new job with his eyes wide open. He knows that the Pirates have several challenges facing them that he’s ready to attack.
“I’m going to bring in great baseball minds around the table,” Williams said. “We’re going to build on the great infrastructure that’s already in place, and we’re going to let baseball people make day-to-day baseball decisions, but they’re going to have, much like what we did at the Penguins, the benefit of my non-baseball specific knowledge and more business/professional sports knowledge providing some oversight and some checks and balances, if you will, to make sure that we’re making good sound decision for the overall organization, maybe not emotionally around certain decisions that would be made.”
Williams’ first order of business will be hiring a new general manager to replace Neal Huntington. This move will put a pause on the search to replace Clint Hurdle as manager, but Williams has already started the process.
“We’re going to do all the little things really well all the time, and we’re going to hold ourselves accountable, including myself,” Williams said. “And we’re going to get better step-by-step, day-by-day, season-by-season until we get this thing back on track and we have a winning tradition. That’s my commitment to Bob.”
Williams used a word that fans might not want to hear: patience.
“We’re not going to accept anything less. It’s not going to happen overnight. Please be patient,” he said. “It’s going to be a journey. But we want all of you — the media, most importantly our fans — to join us because it’s going to be fun and exciting over the coming years.”
Fans might be asking why Nuttting waited so long to move on from former president Frank Coonelly and Huntington, but Nutting said the answer was simple: stability.
“The decision with Neal and the announcement last week with Frank really needed to wait until I was confident that we had the right leader in driving us forward,” Nutting said. “Didn’t see any reason to have a gap in coverage, a gap in a time of transition. Didn’t want to have Neal sitting here as a lame duck.
“He was obviously on a hot seat, but it was important to support him as long as he was here. I think it was important for Frank to stay in place until Travis and his family were ready to come back and we were ready to move forward in a clear and strong direction.”
Williams wouldn’t reveal what the Pirates were looking for in a general manager. He did say, however, that he wants it to be a smooth process.
“That’s going to be a clear priority that’s going to take place over the coming weeks,” Williams said. “Our hope is to be as efficient and effective and quick as possible while making sure that we don’t sacrifice getting the right person in place. That would be, on the baseball side, priority No. 1. At the same time, with the able assistance of Kevan Graves as interim GM, making sure that we’re still continuing to move forward on things that we need to move forward on to put the right team in place on the field until we get the new GM in place. That will be critical on the baseball side.”
In fact, Monday’s meeting between the media and Williams and Nutting started late because Williams was on the phone talking to managerial candidates.
“We’ve started the communications with them. All of them remain very interested in the opportunity,” Williams said about the managerial search. “They all certainly understand transition; in their baseball lives and sports lives, they’ve all gone through a transition. They’ve all expressed an understanding that we’re hitting the pause button and waiting until the new general manager is in place who will be key to making that decision.”
Williams had a mix of reality and optimism that could be refreshing for beleaguered Pirates fans.
“The challenge we’re all up to and the reason that Bob has brought me here, and we’ve talked a lot about this, is there are other marketplaces, other teams in other marketplaces like Pittsburgh, that are able to do it successfully on a sustained basis,” Williams said. “We will look at them, we will model ourselves after them, the good parts of what they were doing, whether that be through drafting, development — not only development through the system but at the major league level, as well. We’re not going to leave any stone unturned.
“We’re going to look at what they do, we’re going to look at what we’re doing. We’re going to find a way to make sure that we can do that here. It can be done. It’s just a matter of what resources you put in place, where you put them in place and how you execute on that. We’ll develop a plan, a vision, with the new leader of baseball operations. Looking forward to the challenge, and we will, at the end of the day, come out of this successful.”
Nubyjas Wilborn: nwilborn@post-gazette.com and Twitter @nwilborn19.
First Published: October 28, 2019, 9:12 p.m.
