4-29-24 – By Michael Castrignano – @412DoublePlay on X
This team stinks! The “shutdown bullpen” can’t hold leads, the defense keeps making mistakes and worst of all, the team can’t hit! I understand the fan rage right now. For the most part, I feel it too. David Bednar and Aroldis Chapman have a combined 19 earned runs surrendered in 19 innings (a 9.00 ERA for reference) allowing 4 home runs and compiling a 1-4 record. Meanwhile, there are countless defensive metrics which put the Pirates at or near the bottom of baseball in multiple positions. Those both are areas in need of improvement but not what I want to discuss today as, if you can’t tell from the title, we have to talk about this team’s offense (again).
If you look at the first month of the Pirates 2024 season at face value, you’ll see two exact opposite ends of the spectrum from the offense. Through the team’s first 16 games, they averaged nearly 5.5 runs per game from their offense. Alika Williams was hitting for average, Michael A. Taylor had a surprisingly strong start with the bat and Joey Bart was proving to be a steal from the Giants as he had a .400/.538/1.100 slash line with 2 home runs in his first 3 games with the Bucs. While it’s great that some players were doing well, it wasn’t great that they were all externally developed and not in a position where the success looked to be sustained long-term. And, in GM Ben Cherington’s own words, some of these players have been performing better than even he expected.
Since the April 14th win over Philadelphia, the Pirates have lost 10 of 14 games and averaged a lowly 2 runs per game – by FAR the worst in MLB over that stretch. What is going wrong, why is it happening and how can the team fix it? Well, that’s a complicated answer. So, let’s start by looking at the obvious culprits and what is going wrong with them first:
Henry Davis
Davis has become a bit of a punching bag for fans this season as the former first overall pick was supposed to FINALLY solidify the catcher position for the team with a plus bat and at least serviceable defense. He looked excellent on both ends in Spring Training, posting a 1.067 OPS while clubbing 4 home runs in 42 at-bats. Since breaking camp, he hasn’t been able to replicate this level of success with just 11 hits over his first 79 plate appearances, a 34.2% strikeout rate and .497 OPS. He’s also had some hiccups defensively but he’s here for his bat and his bat, well…it’s not here.
This level of offensive deficiency has become even more pronounced during this team-wide cold streak as he is batting .136 over the past two weeks with zero extra base hits and a strikeout rate of 42.3%.
He’s been bumped to 9th in the batting order but his offense has been outright unplayable right now. The kid needs a mental boost to get himself right and it’s not happening in black and gold. Oneil Cruz talked last week about how his confidence was down and he needed to build it back up. That’s the case with Davis. He’s young. He’s talented. He’s going to bounce-back but, until he does, he’s actively hurting this team’s chances to log wins and play competitive ball.
Rowdy Tellez
If your favorite target for offensive scorn this year wasn’t directed at Davis, it likely is to Tellez. The biggest position player free agent signing this past offseason, Tellez and his $3M contract had a dark cloud over him entering the season. Many fans were clamoring for – and expecting to see – a reunion for Gold Glove finalist Carlos Santana, whom the Pirates traded at the deadline to division rival Milwaukee Brewers. Ironically, Santana replaced Tellez, whose injuries suffered during the year had led to a drop in production and, at the end of the season, led him to become expendable from the team’s plans.
Tellez received HEAPS of praise from the front office, who got him a promotional spring training video – where he appeared to not know who Termarr Johnson (aka “King Slime”) while countless examples of broadcasters proclaiming how close he is to breaking out can be heard regularly when watching or listening to the games.
I’ll be honest, Tellez isn’t great and he certainly shouldn’t be part of this team’s long-term plans. On the season, he has a triple-slash of .205/.292/.269, ranks at or near the bottom among all first basemen at nearly every hitting stat and until the final game of the Giants series, hadn’t managed an extra-base hit since the calendar turned to April.
Here’s some good news: Tellez isn’t doing as bad as he looks. Ok, I know that feels wrong or, at the very least, misleading, but it’s also probably true. For starters, his line drive rate of 22.4% ranks 10th best among qualified first basemen and is just above Guardians slugger, Josh Naylor (21.6%). He’s also making hard contact more than a third of the time at 34.5%, ahead of Naylor’s 33% and has an average exit velocity (89.9 MPH) on par with Phillies corner and 2-time MVP, Bryce Harper.
So what’s the problem? He’s had some bad luck. Like, REALLY bad luck. His expected batting average is a more respectable .243 with a .397 expected slugging percentage. Still not great but would put him in the middle of the pack among all first basemen. Right now, we have to hope that what he found this weekend in San Francisco – where he went 3-for-6 with 2 doubles and an average exit velocity of 102.9 – finally clicks him into gear and he can become closer to his 2022 self and further from the face of a flailing franchise.
Jack Suwinski
By this point, fans are used to the peaks and valleys that Suwinski brings to the table. Will he hit 3 home runs and drive in 6 runs today? Will he strike out looking multiple times? It could be either on any given day. Unfortunately, this season has seen far too much of the latter and exactly none of the former. Suwinski is in the midst of his third season with the Pirates and has never looked worse.
While strikeout rate dropped from a career-high 32.2% in 2023 to an above average 18% thus far this year, the rest of his numbers have fared much worse. He has a .180/.260/.292 slash line with just 2 home runs and 4 doubles over his first 100 plate appearances of the season. Jack has become less selective with pitches and is swinging early and more frequently. This has led to a significant drop in barrel rate (6.9% down from 15.7%) and hard hit rate (36.1% down from 43.4%) while increasing his ground ball numbers (41.7% up from 27.9%).
The key to Suwinski being successful is being more selective on pitches that he can make solid contact on and elevate. Like Tellez, his expected numbers indicate that he’s had some bad luck but the approach needs to improve for the base line stats to reciprocate.
What Else Can We Do?
While these three obviously have been weighing down the offense, some other members of the staff have been either wildly overperforming (see Michael Taylor’s .409 BABIP) or not finding the expected success with the bat (Cruz’s team-leading 36.2% K rate or Ke’s frustratingly low .091 ISO). I talked about these issues and more on my weekly podcast, discussing lineup restructuring or minor league call-ups as potential options to give the team a boost.
But the plain fact is that the main pieces, by and large, are all on this team now. Yes, we may see a Nick Gonzales or Liover Peguero back up at some point but they are supplemental parts in this machine. If the Pirates will push for the post-season in 2024, the 13 position players in the clubhouse today will have to be the ones to make it happen.
For better or worse, we’re in it for 162 games with this squad. And for all our sakes, let’s hope they can bring back that early season magic before the clock runs out.
#LetsGoBucs
Steel City Pirates 
Thanks for the insights, Michael!
I so wish we could talk merely about the select pitchers in rough patches, the fielding mistakes, and maybe a few hitters who’ve been particularly down (Davis, Tellez, Triolo, and Suwinski, let’s say). But yeah, as much as you can’t lose if the other team doesn’t score, you also can’t win if you don’t score.
When a GM is guilty of treating players like formulae or robots tuned to projections, that’s damning. I’m a proponent of data and research, definitely useful when harnessed prudently, but one cannot eschew the fact that hitting (and pitching, for that matter) is more art than science, so to speak.
In the 2×2 table of outcomes, I thought the absolute least likely quadrant for Davis was bad hitting and acceptable defense, but here we are.
Correct, Tellez is my greatest frustration, as he’s been least tainted by the Haines-Cherington one-size-fits-none approach. I also didn’t expect much of him, but man, I expected at least a few more extra-base hits (with around the same number of singles) by now. Good to know his BABIP has been unlucky, though.
On the note of that regime approach, Suwinski might reflect its pitfalls more than anyone else. In his case the call to take many pitches actually might match, and yet their tinkering with him suggests the pendulum oddly swung too far the other direction. So baffling. There doesn’t seem to be much nuance to the regime approach, consistently painting with the big roller even when the pencil-tip brush would be more appropriate.
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