4-19-24 – By Gary Morgan – @garymo2007 on Twitter
The path for every prospect is different.
Quinn Priester was drafted 18th overall in the first round of the 2019 MLB entry draft out of high school and he was supposed to come up here and lead this staff that a completely new management group was taking over. It so rarely works how it’s “supposed” to.
We as a society are very quick to go from seeing something promising to pushing them off to the burn pile as soon as we see something shinier, but MLB franchises that don’t buy everything they need on the market, can’t afford to play that game.
You can’t waste talent, even if you’ve picked and produced more around it.
I say all this because there are very real reasons to think Paul Skenes would have made just as much sense to call up, but Quinn has put in a lot of work, for a long time too. Paul could get outs at this level, I think what we’re seeing early on is it’s going to take 80 pitches to get through 4 innings, but he can get outs. I’m not making this a Paul Skenes piece though, because again, Quinn Priester deserves his own flowers.
I’m not going to go into a wall of stats here to wow you into thinking Priester is going to come back up here and make you forget about Paul or Jared Jones. Frankly, those stats don’t exist. In fact, I’d have to talk about Spencer Strider to try to do that.
This is about Quinn.
When he was drafted, he was an interesting high school kid with a very developed pitch mix for his age, largely self taught. Big fastball with not a lot of movement. 4-5 other offerings that all had some character flaw, but promise.
As he progressed so did his expectations, but nothing raised those expectations more than being invited to the Altoona Training site during COVID. It rocketed him up prospect boards, if only because he was one of the very few on display in any way and even then scouts were dependent on the Pirates crowing about how good he looked.
50 innings in 2023 and a whole lot of fans were ready to end the experiment.
They were not good innings mind you, but he’s hardly the first kid to come up here and get taken to school. He’s a victim of having some much more dynamic options around him, and being a pitcher selected in the first round for the Pittsburgh Pirates.
Tonight, he’ll get his first chance at redemption and his shot at trying to create a foothold for himself as an MLB pitcher.
That’s step one. Proving you belong at this level. Believe it or not, long before it’s decided Quinn should be an MLB starting pitcher, he first has to show he can get outs more consistently.
Priester is a lot more like Mitch Keller than he is Jared Jones or Paul Skenes. Meaning, he throws a ton of different things. Any or all of his offerings could be really good on a given night, and if 3 or 4 of them are going he can be really effective. 1 or 2 working, he’s probably throwing batting practice if it’s the wrong 1 or 2.
Pitchers like that take time to develop, and honestly, the Pirates won’t have the same kind of time or patience they had with Mitch Keller. The team isn’t in a place where they can afford to work with a guy for 3-4 innings and keep giving opportunity. That’s to the team’s credit and it changes the path a successful Priester would have to take to make a go of it here as a starter.
Meaning, he has to be effective. He has a small window here and short of injury, it might be the best one he gets aside from next Spring, and even then, the likelihood the Pirates leave a spot for someone who hasn’t latched on in a couple cracks is pretty low.
This year, Quinn has done ok in AAA, it’s only been 3 starts and what we’ve seen is a guy who is determined to use his entire pitch mix. At that level, that’s really always going to be at least pretty good for him. At the next level, you probably want a couple of those pitches to start rising to the top of his mix.
Last year I told you to look for Quinn to establish his fastball, and the reason for that is that’s what the team wanted him to do. Well, it led to a 7.74 ERA in his 50 innings of MLB work. It was bad, and it smelled like a guy who just isn’t ripe yet.
This year at least in the minors, I haven’t seen an effort to set the fastball on a pedestal, and maybe that’s because it’s not likely one of Quinn’s best offerings. It could also be that when they start him tonight they’ll go right back to trying to have him establish it to work everything else off of. If so, We’ll have direct evidence that this AAA team coaching and MLB coaching isn’t communicating. At least not well.
One thing Quinn is that his counterparts aren’t, he’s a guy who is stretched out to go well beyond 160 innings this year. What you’re seeing with Jones and Skenes as the Pirates struggle to keep their innings counts where they want them, well it doesn’t exist with Quinn, and that has value, even if he isn’t in the same class as a prospect at this point.
Years ago, this would still be an exciting day. A former number 1 pick who got a cup of coffee and struggled, ready to make his return to the MLB mound and stake his claim right? Well, timing matters, and honestly, the drop in hooplah might actually benefit the kid.
He’s been here, gotten shelled, gotten outs too. He’s eaten innings while nothing was working, he’s looked like figuring it out was on the cusp as he worked 5 scoreless. He’s had a pitching coach tell him to focus on something and complied to his own detriment, and believe it or not this isn’t a slap at Marin, it’s part of the process.
Point is, I don’t see this Friday night start against the Red Sox feeling like too big of a moment to Quinn, and that’s a good thing. They owe it to him to let him try to be himself more this go around.
If he’s going to fail, he ought to fail doing things the way he thinks he needs to do it. If it doesn’t work, maybe he’ll finally embrace the things the team thinks they need to see. If it does, hey, maybe you have yourself another pitcher.
We’re far too quick to dismiss guys as busts by in large. As we go through this process you’re going to find that guys have less time than they used to, and more value than you believed.
Steel City Pirates 