PITTSBURGH -- Gene Lamont still has his spade from the ceremonial groundbreaking of PNC Park. He was in the middle of his four-year run as the Pirates’ manager when the shovels hit the dirt in April of 1999, but he would end up being dismissed after the 2000 season, the last at Three Rivers Stadium.
Before Pittsburgh's 7-1 loss to Cincinnati on Monday night, Lamont finally found himself in PNC Park’s home dugout, about to start his third tour on the Pirates’ coaching staff. After serving as the team’s bench coach under Jim Leyland, first from 1986-91 and then again in ‘96, he’s back again on Pittsburgh’s bench, this time advising new skipper Don Kelly.
“It’s been 25 years. I guess I just wanted to get this black and gold on again,” Lamont said. “It’s good to come back to help Donnie, but I also wanted to come back for myself, too. I wanted to be here.”
Lamont decided to unretire and move back north from Sarasota, Fla., to join the Pirates’ coaching staff as a special advisor to Kelly. The news was part of a shakeup to the staff to fill Kelly’s old bench coach job, with Chris Truby being elevated from manager of Triple-A Indianapolis to a coach on the Major League staff and Mike Rabelo also taking over more bench coach duties.
At 78 years old, Lamont had been retired since the end of the 2017 campaign, but he immediately came to mind when Kelly started thinking up candidates. It didn’t take much convincing. Lamont still has that love of the game, and he wanted to be a part of Kelly’s staff.
“Why sit at home until 11 o’clock managing every game on TV when I could come here?” he joked.
"[His experience is] invaluable when you talk about Geno and how much time he's spent with Leyland,” Kelly said. “He's forgotten more baseball than we all know. Having him next to me and being able to talk things through -- and not just during the game; even the conversations we've had earlier about all kinds of things -- just his input in it is tremendous."
Kelly was on Leyland’s bench when the Hall of Fame skipper was managing the Tigers and Lamont was coaching. Lamont was struck by the questions Kelly would ask, trying to follow the game with Lamont and Leyland to figure out strategies and how he could be inserted into the action, whether it was as a defensive replacement, a pinch-runner or a pinch-hitter.
It’s a very Leyland mindset, and Lamont sees some of his old manager in the protégé.
“You're not gonna play for Jim Leyland and not have it rub off,” Lamont said. “He's got his own way, the way he gets along with people, but Jim understands the game. I think Donnie -- what it looks like to me and what I've seen so far -- it looks like he understands it, and I think he probably learned some of that from Jim.”
Kelly has also shown a bit of Leyland when talking to umpires too, being ejected twice in his first week and a half at the helm.
“I said, 'Donnie, I want to come back, but if I have to manage two out of every four games, I'm not coming,’” Lamont joked.
Kelly will learn how to talk to umpires more diplomatically eventually. There’s also the chance that Kelly and Lamont might not always see eye to eye on how to manage a game. Chalk that up to either generational differences -- old-school vs. new school -- or just two men having differing opinions.
That is part of the process of a new manager learning the job and why it helps to have a veteran bench coach to lean on.
“I have the answers, but they’re not always right,” Lamont said. “I’ll give Donnie my opinion. I just wanted to make sure that Donnie didn’t want -- and [general manager] Ben [Cherington] didn’t want -- a guy that’d give them the answers that maybe they thought you wanted to hear. I’m going to give my opinion, and hopefully, it’ll help.”
That’s just what Kelly wants.
“It's like in anything, we're never going to agree fully, but I hope that he's completely honest with me and tells me what I need to hear and not what I want to hear,” Kelly said. “That's what I need when we're going through a game, is trying to figure out what's the right move … and I know Geno is always going to shoot me straight.”