PITTSBURGH -- The man who made Derek Shelton a professional baseball coach was also the first to tell him he’d be a Major League manager someday, a dream that became reality last week when the Pirates hired Shelton to lead their team.

An elbow injury ended Shelton’s Minor League playing career in 1993 after just two seasons in the Yankees' system. But only a few years later, Shelton began his coaching career in the Minors after receiving an offer from former Yankees executive Mark Newman. Shelton managed in the lower levels of the Yankees Minor League system from 2000-02, and his success in the Gulf Coast League and New York-Penn League sparked Newman’s vision of a big league future for the young Minor League manager.

“He took a chance on a 26-year-old, very poor Minor League catcher and made him a coach,” Shelton said after putting on his No. 17 Pirates jersey Wednesday at PNC Park. “He also was the first person who told me I was going to manage in the big leagues.”

In a coaching career that’s spanned more than two decades, Shelton has been influenced by a number of coaches, managers and executives from New York to Cleveland, from Tampa Bay to Toronto and most recently in Minnesota. Those people helped mold him into the manager Pittsburgh hired last week.

Newman gave Shelton his first chance. Rob Thomson, now the Phillies’ bench coach, was the Yankees’ director of player development when Shelton began managing in the Minors. Mark Shapiro, the Blue Jays’ president and CEO, was the Indians’ general manager who brought Shelton to the big leagues as Cleveland’s assistant hitting coach.

“I’ve been very fortunate,” Shelton said. “I’ve been around some very good managers, some very smart baseball people. … You can learn a lot from people and how they’re doing it.”

One of the most significant influences in Shelton’s career was the easy-going, outside-the-box-thinking Joe Maddon. (Maddon, a native of Hazleton, Pa., reached out after Shelton’s hiring and advised him to enjoy the pierogies in Pittsburgh.) When Maddon left to manage the Cubs, Shelton watched and learned as the Rays’ Kevin Cash navigated his first managerial experience.

Shelton served as the hitting coach for the 2010 Rays, an organization which produced six of the 30 current Major League managers. Despite one of the Majors’ lowest payrolls, the 2010 Rays relied on a homegrown core, creative strategy and a cohesive culture to win the American League East. The Pirates are in a similar situation, with president Travis Williams often saying they must “crack the code” of winning in a small market.

Count Maddon among those who believes Shelton was the right pick to figure it out in Pittsburgh.

“He will bring a real energy to the group,” Maddon said. “His gregarious personality always stood out. It is one of the reasons he is able to communicate so well with the rookie and seasoned veteran alike. … He’s a good combination of an energetic personality and an inquisitive, highly analytical mind.”

After being dismissed by the Rays in September 2016, the longtime hitting coach landed in a different role: quality control coach in Toronto. There, Shelton processed the front office’s scouting reports and analytics and relayed them to the players and coaches in the clubhouse. He had plenty of standard coaching duties before and during games, but he was primarily charged with translating advanced information into language players could easily digest and understand. That exposed Shelton to new ideas, too.

Shelton’s stint in Toronto also overlapped with that of Pirates general manager Ben Cherington, who was the Jays’ vice president of baseball operations at the time. Cherington said they had “a fair amount” of interaction, especially during Spring Training and at the end of the season, and Cherington kept an eye on Shelton as he moved on to his next job as the Twins’ bench coach.

In Minnesota, Shelton first worked alongside manager Paul Molitor before first-year skipper Rocco Baldelli took over last season. Baldelli and Shelton treated leadership as a cooperative effort, even sharing the same office, and that partnership extended into the front office with the baseball operations department led by Derek Falvey and Thad Levine.

Shelton said the Twins focused on developing relationships with players, establishing trust then “freeing them up to do their thing.” It worked. As the Twins captured the AL Central title, Baldelli established himself as the eventual AL Manager of the Year.

“I think we can all learn humility from him,” Shelton said of Baldelli. “The way that he embraced the job and embraced what he did and did not know, and was able to defer to his staff and defer to me at times on what we should do and how we should do it, his humility is second to none.”

Whether it’s natural or learned from Baldelli, Shelton has demonstrated his own humility in his early conversations as Pirates manager. During his introductory press conference, he was friendly and self-deprecating. Players who have spoken to Shelton rave about his self-effacing attitude, his straightforward talk and his ability to quickly relate to them on a personal level.

Having learned from his experiences along the way, Shelton has earned the opportunity Newman saw coming long ago.

“All of those experiences and all the knowledge and all of the things that he brings to the table are brought, really, to a point because of his ability to communicate and deal with people,” Baldelli said. “He, as much as anyone out there, knows that that’s really the most important thing. That’s how teams come together.”