The Pirates Start Fueled by Unexpected Sources

4-16-24 – By Gary Morgan – @garymo2007 on Twitter

When the Pirates lose, the message boards almost always look post apocalyptic, and when they win, they often look like Championship parade planning sessions. This is as old as time.

The day to day nature of baseball creates a roller coaster of emotions for all but the very few teams who win 100 plus games, and even those fan bases have had 55-60 horrible, earth shattering, season ending losses.

The thing is, with 11 wins vs only 6 losses, this team has had some performances we need to not just brush under the rug. Truth be told, many of the best have come from players that weren’t expected to deliver them and that’s why in my mind, so many fans still feel this whole thing is tenuous at best.

Like, I could make a pretty strong argument that Connor Joe has been the best player on this team in 2024. And yes, I did see that throw yesterday!

For real though, he’s been incredible. He leads the team in AVG, OPS, SLG for qualified (enough at bats) players. Ke’Bryan isn’t far behind him, but Ke’ is the only “star” player, or “core” player, however you want to refer to them, who’s really been leading the charge.

Michael Taylor has hit like never before in his long career. Edward Olivares is tied for the team lead for homeruns (3) with Oneil Cruz, in roughly half the at bats.

These are unfamiliar names, or at least guys that most fans weren’t expecting to win a bunch of games for this team.

You can look at this as an indication many of those performances will come back to Earth, and it probably will for most of them, or, you could look at it as evidence that they can win with role players while the stars or core players find their swings.

Either way, when you enter a series with a team like the Mets, you’d feel much better if you could say, Cruz and Reynolds are going to take this series over, than you do saying Conner and Triolo are gonna walk twice each and one of them will come up with a key hit.

Both are wins, one makes you feel great, one makes you feel lucky.

The truth is, all of the most maligned parts of this pre-season roster are the parts delivering and the sure fire stars or guys we’d at least get X amount of homeruns from are really struggling to get their footing. Again, with the exception of Ke’Bryan Hayes.

I hope this doesn’t come across as a complaint. I’m really enjoying the season and I am one of those fools who think when the role players fade the stars will heat up, in fact I bet we’ll see them overlap a bit first.

But even I predicted 84 wins, that’s not ever going to look like a put your feet up and coast into the post season come August club. This is going to be a dogfight. This division is going to be a dogfight.

We’ve forgotten, Oneil Cruz has still not become more than a promising kid. We got a nice taste in 2022, he was robbed of almost all of 2023 and the lessons he was supposed to learn last year, he’s learning now. He’s paying for it in strikeouts and poor pitch selection and he will until he adjusts. Think back to 2022, he didn’t forget, he just needs to recapture it.

Bryan Reynolds is a natural right handed hitter but he takes far more at bats left handed. He’s started the season completely on fire from the right side. It’s going to take work to get his left handed swing back where he wants it. We’ve seen him struggle to balance his sides in the past, he will.

Henry Davis is a virtual rookie, learning to catch and hit at the MLB level. He’s largely done well behind the plate, but he has a tendency to make some poor decisions in the moment. Baseball always punishes a rookie who thinks he can make an impossible play or worse improvisation in the heat of the moment. At the plate, he’s frustrated, visibly, audibly and what he’s always done best, hitting the fastball, is not his friend early on. There’s work to do here, and odds are, he’s only going to come so far this year. Frankly, he’s already come quite a long way as a backstop.

See those underperforming “star” things are much more to dig into than, gee, I hope Connor keeps swinging a hot bat.

They’re also hard to write about. Take a guy like Michael Taylor, should I ignore his decade plus career and tell you this hitting .300 thing is the new him? Hey, if he’s doing it in July I might try! But here in April, it’s a hot start, and because with him his stats are so damn consistent with the exception of last year’s homerun total, it’s very hard for me to believe. In fact, when they signed him I told you there’d be times you can’t imagine him sitting, and times where you can’t imagine playing him.

Connor started hotter than hell last year too, honestly, look back he was the straw that stirred the early drink along with Reynolds.

The starting rotation is no different. Many analysts and “experts” there are no such thing by the way, preached all off season that they were woefully short in the rotation and they’ve largely been excellent. Even Bailey Falter! How many people are out there crowing that Bailey Falter is untouchable?

Mitch Keller had a couple nice starts in a row, and you can feel the sigh of relief there, but that’s because he was supposed to be good. Jared Jones was supposed to be good too, because you wanted him to be, because he throws 100 MPH, but he is a rookie too. For now, he’s our Spencer Strider and people are more than happy to say so.

When we get into June, all of this stuff will even out. Most of the guys we thought would lead the way will probably lead the way, and most of the role players will probably settle back in to their roles.

Until then though, let’s stop putting brakes on every conversation by saying it’s too early. It’s too early for a lot of long range predictive stuff, but it’s not too early to be excited about someone or worried about another.

The truth is players will swap most of the year on and off those lists. The ones that stay in the excited category all year, probably had a really good time on the All Star Red Carpet.