Five Pirates Thoughts at Five – Bookended in Brooms

4-22-24 – By Gary Morgan – @garymo2007 on X

The season started off with a sweep and it only feels right that they plummet back to .500 taking back to back sweeps on the chin on the cusp of their first NL Central matchup of the season.

Ahh baseball, you can go from walking around in flip flops drinking an Iron City with a little strut about your baseball team and the next week it’s hailing and you’re having a hard time peeking at the score.

If you love the game, you love the ride. The ups are everything and the downs are crushing. Can’t do or fix anything, can’t make a mistake. Win a bunch, the coach is pushing all the right buttons, lose a bunch the coach needs to flip over tables and hasn’t made a good call since the 6th grade picnic.

We’ve all been here before, you’re right when you say that, but to compare it directly to last year like it’s the exact same situation is also disingenuous.

Hey, let’s hit the hard ones today, someone has to!

1. Without Cruz…

There’s no getting around it, Oneil Cruz has looked awful at the plate. I could pretend to be a hitting coach and show you how he’s being pitched and how he could combat it, but 2 things prevent it. 1. I don’t trust that his hitting coach is doing the same. 2. He’s so out of whack you could not identify where to start. Cruz at the plate right now is like a game of pop the weasel.

A week ago, I might have suggested he start lowering his gaze, because everything he was seeing was down in the zone, but that’s not true anymore. He’s done the league a favor and shown them he also can’t catch up to heat up and in. He’s made sure they know he can’t lay off the breaking pitches. They now know even that up and away fastball he could on occasion poke out to left is even getting past him.

In other words, we’ve got a full blown all systems failure going on here and that requires a little break most of the time.

I mean a couple days on the bench, here in MLB not a demotion.

Here’s why. There are certain realities on a baseball team. One of those for this team is, they won’t win anything if Oneil Cruz doesn’t hit. Think about it.

If Oneil Cruz isn’t a guy who pops 25-30 homeruns and drives in 75+ runs, would you have this team in the conversation for anything? Even .500?

There isn’t a real replacement for that. Alika Williams certainly isn’t providing that, Liover Peguero or Nick Gonzales aren’t either. All three of those players could and will provide something of value as this year plays out, but none of them are equipped with what it would take to replace the production this team, and many of us, planned on getting from Cruz. Even if you think they could, they aren’t meant to replace his production, just augment it.

That’s point number 1 as to why Cruz for now stays right where he is.

The second, well, that’s probably the hardest thing to swallow the way he looks right now, but, he’ll wind up being ok. I know, I know, it doesn’t look like that at all, but listen, I didn’t just start watching Oneil Cruz play in 2022. Cruz has looked just like this in the minors from time to time, it’s part of why his journey to the Bigs wasn’t exactly quick. What is typically quick with him is when he snaps out of it, he snaps out of it and largely stays snapped.

Offensively speaking, if Cruz isn’t a dynamic offensive threat, this team isn’t going anywhere in 2024. I know it, you know it, the team knows it and it’s the main reason there is no purpose in doing anything other than try to get him going right here in MLB.

It’ll suck to watch, already has, but he’ll turn it around and when he does everything else will look better. I’m not going to list off his wall of excuses, you know them all, I’m just going to say be patient with him, because if he doesn’t produce for this team whether that be from demotion or utter failure, the result for this team will be the same.

There is no plan B for Cruz.

2. Fundamentals

When the Pirates were playing well at the beginning of the season racing out to that 9-2 start, some of us “negative nellies” were of course excited about the record, but we kept sounding the alarm about the baserunning issues and their defensive decision making.

It didn’t matter because again, they were 9-2. Shut up! Many of you exclaimed. They’ll be fine, they’ll clean it up, look they’re winning anyway!

Well, when things aren’t falling for you and the record starts slipping, I guess I’ll open the door and let you back on the boat for recognizing these things matter.

This stuff is all coaching. I’ll stop you right there before you utter your infantile “they teach this in Little League” crap, because no, they don’t. You can’t watch the MLB product all around this league and believe Little League is the answer, it’s just a lazy and dismissive thing to say primarily by people who never played beyond the level they call back on.

Derek Shelton on 4 occasions already on this young season has uttered the words “We have to tighten it up”. I’d simply say, yes Derek, YOU do need to tighten it up. You need to no longer accept the mental lapses, the poor running decisions, the wrong throw decisions, and you need to either coach them into being minimized or hire people to help you coach them up.

This team doesn’t have the type of talent gap you have to have to get away with playing poor fundamentally.

The reason this stuff is seen as fundamental or foundational is because when everything else is going poorly, you’re supposed to be able to fall back on these and build back up on that standing. If you do those things right, it’s only going to look so wrong feel me?

Instead, we have frustrated players like Hayes and Suwinski trying to get an extra base on a rare hit and running themselves into even more frustration. We have one bad play in the outfield turn into 2 or 3 more bad plays in the same inning as they panic to try to do something special to erase a routine mistake.

Everyone is pressing, everyone is out of sorts and largely it looks like they have nothing to fall back on.

This is on coaching. If you want the outfield communication to improve, maybe play the same three guys for a minute, let them develop a bit of a relationship out there. Then add in alternates. It may not give you the matchups you want in the lineup, but geez you have to do something to give this team some things that seem familiar, second nature.

They scored a run in the first inning of yesterday’s game. A Connor Joe double, a groundout to the right side and a sac fly, I honestly couldn’t believe it. Where was the walk to put runners at 1st and 2nd? Then the strikeout and double play to end the inning. Where was the 3rd walk to load the bases sandwiched around 3 strikeouts?

That first run, that type of run should be routine on this team, instead, it takes a role player hitting the double and two core players to finally do the little things and knock the run home.

Coaching.

Derek Shelton has lived in the shadows of not having talent on his team, and now he has it. You can pretend they don’t have any because they’ve played awful baseball, but a stretch of 10 games is never going to shake me off of where I think they are, where I think they’ll go or the types of players I think they have. I still believe there are capable hitters here.

I don’t however feel they are coached to do the little things, instead I just think they like to mention it as opposed to coach it.

3. They Aren’t This Bad…

Well, right now they are, you can’t deny what is actually playing out, but like I told you when they started hot, they weren’t that good either.

They’ll get more offensive production and it’ll come from many of the guys you thought it would come from. The trick is not having a 20 game drop in the middle.

If they come out and beat the hell out of Joe Ross (who Andy Haines system actually should match up against rather well by the way) you won’t feel better. If they do it again tomorrow, you might start to think it’s maybe trending up. A week, some of you will be right back to sending me the Vegas odds of making the playoffs.

I’m here to tell you there will be weeks like that. Maybe even this one. There will be weeks like last week too, maybe even this one.

This is a .500-ish team. And some of you struggle to wrap your head around how bad that sounds next to say 90 wins.

90 wins is 9 more than .500. It’s one fewer bad week, or one more hot one. It’s one blown save you wind up pulling out in extras, a come from 5 runs down victory and a couple lucky bounces away from happening.

That’s why this season is worthy of excitement, more than it is expectation.

We should expect them to be .500. That makes sense based on the roster we saw on paper and the expected performances from guys with track records. The excitement for me is that once you feel you have that kind of team, it really isn’t moving heaven and Earth to reach higher. Could stumble too of course, but when you have a .500 team you are going to feel all year like they’re way better than people thought or way worse than people thought, and you could experience both in one calendar week. Now, keep in mind, I’m talking expectation based on the roster they put together. You’re of course free to have expected them to have brought in more. I’d just ask, are you not still going to have to deal with Cruz? Davis? Jack? I kinda think you are.

By it’s very definition, they aren’t great, and they aren’t awful. If your team right now is sitting on a ton of expiring contracts a bankrupt minor league system and you think you have this type of team, you as a fan should probably expect a sell off at the deadline, a window closing, another chance missed or never realized.

Instead, your team has pitching coming in spades. In fact a couple of them look like trump cards. This core is all going to be here, and they’ll hold for a few more years while the youngsters find their way and they improve as an internally developed team. If anything, it’s time to start looking at that minor league system differently. Now you start looking for what it’s not poised to provide. Where is the power hitting? Plenty of pitching, some interesting bats, nothing transformative, yet. May have to look to deal something to get something you can’t fix on your own.

That’s all going to happen, and work without a single further investment from Bob Nutting, and that’s why I’m able to remain positive, in general, the arrow remains firmly pointed up. I do think they’ll add next year from outside, if only because when you get Jared Jones and Paul Skenes with a locked up Keller all stretched out, hopefully healthy and ready to be the three best heads of your rotation in 2025, you have a mandate to not waste it. It’d be like having someone buy you an Aston Martin and you refuse to take it because you don’t want to buy tires. Even for this owner, I don’t see it, especially since this GM has gotten them here with very little, point being, there’s room, even to still be cheap AF and still get what he’s left needed.

This year matters. No matter how it goes, it matters. Important players are going to learn how to be MLB players this year, and at times, it’s going to suck to watch. Sometimes it’s going to look like Jones and Skenes. Some guys we’re going to ultimately learn simply aren’t going to help, at least not here.

Yin and Yang, push and pull, a .500 team is frustrating, but only because you’re starting to see the pieces fall into place and fan expectation rises faster than a thermometer at the equator.

The truth is, the guys who should rightfully be expected to perform, need to perform. 20 games don’t even get GMs sitting up straight, the farther up you go on the corporate ladder the longer the section of calendar you look at and measure your performance by.

4. Rowdy Tellez hmm

I don’t know what to do about Rowdy Tellez. Lets talk this out, I really don’t know where I’ll land.

Defensively, he’s been better than I observably could have expected. He’s simply better than he’s been, that’s ok, they’re allowed to improve at things, that’s good, at least he’s not a liability in the field. I even like some of the leadership stuff he’s done out there with Cruz. Since he made a playful but educational situation out of Cruz’ erratic throws in a game, Cruz has really reeled it in. Making much more comfortable throws, looking more in rhythm and still using the velocity when it is warranted. That’s all been positive.

At the plate though, man, it’s not working.

Nothing Rowdy does is good enough to get away with a .548 OPS and a .258 SLG.

Look, if it’s early for all the guys I expected to deliver, it’s early for a guy I didn’t too, and to be clear, this is much less than I expected from him, this is alarming.

Rowdy has a very typical damage zone for a power hitting lefty, the problem for him is everyone knows it’s about all he does. He’s seen a total of 3 pitches all year in his perceived damage zone. That’s on him, in this league you either learn how to add a trick or you never get an opportunity to perform the one you’re good at.

Like I said, it’s early and when Rowdy had it going in 2022 he had a much wider damage zone, actually got to balls down and away as long as they were on the plate, with that kind of coverage they’d have to start trying to pitch in more and that would increase the number of pitches he sees in there. That’s the hope if you want to have one.

At some point, they may need to consider giving Connor Joe more starts over there. It sure would be nice if someone like Olivares or Suwinski would step up and force the Pirates to find a way to get Joe’s bat worked back in.

Going to have to watch this position play out, I’m not sure I see Joe as a solution there either really. All I do know is, Rowdy isn’t making the kind of money that means he has a job regardless, he makes lots less than Yoshi did for perspective.

Need something from first base production wise, it’s too valuable an offensive position to just not get anything. And as of yet, you can’t say it doesn’t matter because you’re getting it from a freak at short stop.

5. Where Are We With Roansy?

Roansy Contreras has been pitching out of the Pirates bullpen since the season began. Make no mistake, he’s in the bullpen because he has no options, and the team couldn’t afford to let him try to figure things out in the rotation, especially since they had another guy like that in Bailey Falter, and hey, kudos, it looks like they chose correctly at least early on.

OK, that’s how he got there and where he is.

He’s seen action in 7 games totaling 8 innings of work. He’s faced 35 batters. In that time he’s put together an ERA at 5.63 an FIP (Fielding Independent Pitching) of 5.96 with a couple dingers helping to fill out the frame.

He’s not been good.

I’m not here to tell you they must pull the trigger and DFA him, I mean, again, the bullpen is hardly the problem until this team starts losing games 6-5 instead of 6-1. The team rightfully wants to be entirely sure the pitcher they thought they had is completely dead and buried before they make a call, and I get it.

But I’d tell you to officially start thinking about it.

There comes a time with everyone, MLB’s system is set up to give players every chance to find a new situation and get the help they need or at least a different set of eyes.

I’m going to be completely transparent here, if this fails, I won’t entirely blame the Pirates. They’ve thrown the kitchen sink at figuring out what happened to him, both from a health and instruction/training standpoint. I don’t really blame Roansy, I know he’s tried hard. I watched him on a side field in Bradenton this year visibly struggling to get a pitch to do what he wanted. We’ve seen him on the field look like a beaten puppy.

What can I say? Some people only get a moment in the sun, remember James McDonald? In 2011 and 2012 when he threw 342 innings with a 4.21 ERA and won 21 ballgames did you think for one minute he’d get 6 starts in 2013 and that’d be that?

I mean let’s not act like Roansy has a track record that touches that.

If at some point they make the call, it’ll be sad because he was off to such a promising start, but it’ll hardly be something we’ve never seen before, and him ever figuring it out anywhere is anything but a guarantee. James never did.

Anyway, I’m probably jumping the gun, but at some point it might be nice to not have guys we’re looking to avoid in the pen, especially guys we’re only allowing one inning at a time. That’s the price of an improving roster, you don’t have time for projects anymore. Not when you have so many other options.

I’m not rooting for it, I like the kid, and I’ve rarely seen the confused emotion on a player’s face I saw in his last year, I can’t help but feel for him. Just sayin’, there will come a time….

6. Bonus: The Cavalry is Here

This is the poop. Paul Skenes will come up, he will help, but he can’t hit. They have more pitchers who also could come up and help.

Offensively, we have Ji Hwan Bae, Liover Peguero, Nick Gonzales, maybe you can count Palacios if you like, and Yasmani Grandal.

Someone could always decide to take off and get a look, but it would catch me off guard.

Just calling it like I see it. Not trying to be dooms day, it’s not like that, it’s just a fact, most of the Pirates top prospects, especially those close to MLB are pitchers. Hey, we should be so lucky, if you’re going to be short one, I’ll take it this way 10 times out of 10.

I’m not even telling you those names I mentioned won’t help, or can’t, I’m just saying, it’s a light group ranging from over the hill to inexperienced and untested.

This bonus section is sure to have people screaming trade Gonzales for Zach Wheeler, I get it, but my real point here is for the most part, the players that are here have to hit. There simply isn’t a changing of the guard coming in mass.

They have “tinker with things” depth offensively they don’t have “bring up the secret weapon” depth offensively. They might next year have a couple shots at that, but short of a late bloomer like Matt Gorski or Matt Fraiser taking off and forcing the issue by in large until the trade deadline these are the parts your working with.

We’ll see them shuffle the deck if it stays this cold, but they only have a couple cards to play. Especially if Triolo and Williams aren’t being directly replaced. If they both stay, it limits who gets called up.

This team is also very right handed as we sit here, so don’t be shocked if Bae might get a call before the hot hitting Gonzales. Again, don’t shoot the messenger here, it’s just what I think you have to consider. There just aren’t any offensive saviors coming this year.