The Pirates mercifully jettisoned long-time losing manager Lloyd McClendon and replaced him with one-time Phils' cup o' latté scrub Pete Mackanin.

McClendon lead, if that's the word for it, the inept Bucs to the worst record in the National League this season and has lead them to a woeful .429 winning percentage over the last five seasons. That translates into a 69.5 win season in a 162-game schedule.

So what does this mean for the Pirates in the long run? What has happened to a team historically after having a manager with a similarly bad run for as many as five years?

I took a look at all of the worst five consecutive seasons for a given manager on a given team. There were 30 worse than McClendon's tenure in Pittsburgh. Then I looked at what happened to those teams in the five subsequent seasons. Here's what I found:

On average guess what the average winning percentage was for those teams? .429, the same winning percentage McClendon had in Pittsburgh. Only three teams had a winning record in the subsequent five seasons.

So what does the future hold for the Pirates? It seems like history as well as the team's talent pool seem to be against them. But att least they've gotten rid of McClendon.