4-27-24 – By Gary Morgan – @garymo2007 on Twitter
Many of us are in awe watching Jared Jones do what he’s doing.
The 100 MPH fastballs are impressive, but we’ve seen those get hit, hell we just watched Aroldis Chapman have a 102 MPH fastball off the plate taken deep.
The secondary stuff is impressive, but we’ve seen guys with 3 or 4 developed pitches struggle like hell to make them work.
No, Jared is impressive because as a complete rookie he’s thrown with incredible velocity, insane spin, advanced tunnelling, a willingness to stay in the zone with his stuff even when getting a chase could work. Jared is a freak, and I don’t mean because of the fastball.
He’s a big deal because rookies, especially rookie pitchers don’t come along and do this all the time, in fact that’s my larger point today, rookies or young players take time, patience, development and opportunity.
Today, let’s talk through some youngsters, what they were expected to be, where they are, what’s holding them back, what the path forward might look like.
Honestly, there is no path to winning in this market without some of them panning out.
Some players will never become anything. That’s part of the deal, you can’t just pretend every prospect is going to pan out and you can’t pretend any who don’t are on the system. Some guys aren’t helped in the right way and find it elsewhere like Connor Joe, some guys they try everything they can think of and so does the player, only to wind up like Cole Tucker, struggling to break out of the minors and married to a super hottie.
Let’s go and let’s start out hot.
Henry Davis
Henry Davis has a lot going on. First, he had a ton of injury issues on his way up through the system and it cost him both at the plate and behind the dish.
Last year the Pirates needed offense, gee I can’t imagine why, but that’s a story for another day. He hadn’t caught much, but the bat was undeniably killing it. He hit everything, everywhere and not just results, I’m talking rockets all around the field, especially the fastball.
This year, his catching partner in crime is lost for the year and he went from getting back into catching straight into being the starting catcher with a broken safety net.
Much like Endy the year before, he dove into defense head first and the bat suffered. Endy struggled to keep both sides of his switch hitting working and succeeded at neither. Henry struggles to hit fastballs, something he’s never struggled with in his life.
Don’t discount learning the defensive side of the game for a catcher. It saps the legs of power and can take a while to start to build up enough strength to succeed. Both of these guys tried to do it in an offseason.
Now, two big things are going on with Henry at the plate.
1 He first was taking too many strikes on down and away breaking pitches or changeups and coming up late on fastballs up in the zone. At least he was drawing some walks.
2 His adjustment has taken him to speeding up the bat to catch the heat and he’s overcompensated to the pull side to the point he’s pulling fastballs foul and way out in front of just about everything offspeed. In fact the hit he had the other night against the Brewers was a slider off the plate away he was so out in front of he rolled it over and somehow hit hard enough to squeak through a hole on the left side.
Henry still has work to do behind the plate, and he has work to do at the dish. He’s so off kilter right now though, I don’t think it should be out of bounds to suggest he should go back to AAA for a while. I wouldn’t have it last too long personally, at some point he will have to learn MLB lessons in MLB. But there’s no denying, 2 of the 5 starters don’t care for throwing to him and he is driving himself nuts at the plate, visibly.
He is starting to have the look of a kid that kinda hopes he does get sent down. He knows he isn’t doing what he needs to do and this is a kid that cares about winning way more than his stats.
Next Step: Demotion and recall at first sign of rediscovering his swing, he’s still very important to this team
Jared Triolo
Triolo is a brilliant fielder, and I don’t just mean his athletic ability, he’s one of the more intelligent fielders I’ve seen. Ke’Bryan Hayes, Jack Wilson, like in his on field ability to diagnose a play, make the right call and have it happen fast enough to still execute the play. It’s special, and thus far it’s THE thing that makes him special. Therein lies the problems.
Jared Triolo has the frame to hit for power, but he’s never in his career really done it. The team tried to work with his stance a bit hoping to help him create more leverage and launch angle. So far, it’s really only resulted in fewer of the BABIP darling hits he had become known for in his cup of coffee in 2023. Adjustments like this aren’t usually given up on quickly, we’re only at about 2 months of working with it in a professional manor at this point and that’s if you count Spring Training.
Here’s the poop, they think a DJ LeMahieu might be hiding in there and they’re going to give him more time to show them right or wrong before they adjust. If they choose to adjust that very well may be still in the Bigs, that glove is just hard to let go of especially with the versatility he brings with it.
What we’re watching right here is a guy trying to figure out what type of hitter he’s going to be. Until he decides and goes all the way into it we won’t know.
Next Step: Just keep playing and working. I sincerely doubt a demotion is even a thought in their head. Calm down, that doesn’t mean a starting role is a guarantee either.
Jack Suwinski
This isn’t just about Rookies, it’s about young players. Jack is as we speak sitting right at 1000 plate appearances for his MLB career. that my friends is a decent sample. It’s not fair to pretend we don’t have a good idea of what Jack is, and that’s why his .181 average doesn’t have me freaking out. He had an ok rookie season, showed some power. Improved in his second season with a dramatic uptick in walks and strikeouts. That increase in those categories also came with an almost .100 point jump in his OPS.
This year, they’re trying to get him to cut down on strikeouts and he certainly has, in fact right now he has 10 walks and 16 K’s, pretty remarkable actually, but he’s sacrificing power swings to do it. It’s also helped him see and hit lefties like he never has in his career.
47 homeruns in 1000 plate appearances in the Bigs isn’t getting cut, benched, sat, DFA’d, waived, it’s getting played my friends.
Next Step: I’d suggest Jack take the approach he’s using and apply it to when he faces left handed pitching. And, revert to his normal approach against right handed pitching. If he can meld these two worlds, he may not be the platoon player many decided he was 2 years ago.
The Coaching
Did you hear anything about an overriding philosophy when talking through any of what the team is doing with any of these players?
Right.
Every player has something they’re working on. Ke’Bryan Hayes needs to feel really good, meaning his back, to get the bat head out and pull the baseball. Watch him swing on the first day after an off day, then after 3-4 days in a row. You’ll see what I’m talking about.
Bryan Reynolds is absolutely locked in from the right side of the plate and inconsistent from the left. When you’re a switch hitter, you’re almost always off on something.
Now where the coaching really hurts is that some players can’t handle the deep counts. You see some guys don’t do it as much, like Connor Joe, he likes jumping on the first pitch, especially off the bench, Polanco did that too, Cutch has done it in the leadoff spot, you know, the spot you expect a guy to take a bunch of pitches.
They all have the same coach and the same overriding ethos.
See pitches, don’t swing at borderline early, wait for your pitch. That quite literally is what many have made out to be the equivalent of Mein Kampf. The ethos is fine, almost everyone does it almost just the same all over the league.
The difference as always with this team and this hitting coach has been the application of it. The unwillingness to accept that some guys can’t thrive looking at pitches or even having it in their heads.
Take Bryan Reynolds, for Bryan, this structure is fine, he probably would gravitate to this anyway, he’s a balanced hitter with an eye he probably trusts a bit too much and despite last night’s performance, he’s not afraid to see 2 strikes.
A guy like Oneil Cruz, well, like many Dominican players, he came up a bad ball hitter, umpires can’t seem to figure out what his strike zone should be game to game so half the time he’s having his knees chopped out from under him in an at bat.
The reason Andy Haines in my mind isn’t a good hitting coach is because he needs to adapt to the talent he has. Oneil Cruz is a guy you want to help learn not to chase trash of course, help him understand he’s probably going to see a ton of trash because nobody wants to face that bat if they don’t have to, and more than anything, you want him feeling as long as it’s a good swing it’s a good thing. You don’t want him trying to suck an extra 2 pitches out of a starter, you want him seeing a rare fastball and putting his best swing on it.
I’m not pompous enough to believe Haines hasn’t mentioned this to him, or even that another coach hasn’t told him to be more aggressive, but it’s hard to lose habits in baseball, in fact, almost as hard as it is to install them.
After all, Haines has been his hitting coach for his entire MLB career.
Look, I want this guy terminated. I can’t be more clear than that. But not for his organizational approach, just for it’s rigid application.
This system and the way they run it helps some guys, it just doesn’t help them enough to make them really transformative players and early on at least it has kept transformative players from reaching their potential. In my opinion anyway.
For the thousandth time, I’d bring in another hitting coach or two who can more directly work with players to help come out of slumps or maintain hot streaks more efficiently.
Be patient with the kids, you have no choice for one, and there is no path to winning that doesn’t roll through this system providing. More than that, it’s going to happen with Priester, and Chandler and Solometo and Gonzales and Peguero and Johnson and on and on for years and years. Thing is, it gets harder to square when you’re supposed to be trying to win. Psst, that’s why most of us only picked them to finish around .500. You simply have no choice but to do it though. Well, unless you want to be the Padres, they just trade all their prospects for MLB players, I think Bob Nutting might object.
So deal with it, understand it and above all, be patient. If you’re ready to flush Henry Davis or Quinn Priester, well, thank god you aren’t a GM, you certainly wouldn’t be one for long.
Steel City Pirates 