Five Pirates Thoughts at Five – Better but Far From Fixed

5-6-24 – By Gary Morgan – @garymo2007 on X

It don’t feel fixed, but it feels like they’ve at least cast off a few weights and have a chance to tread water now. I’d hardly crow about a 2 game winning streak or winning a series against the hapless Rockies, this team is supposed to do that, but you have to start somewhere, and this was certainly a welcome step.

Let’s get after it.

1. Jared Jones – Freak, Fantastic, Historic

I’m starting to feel like the 90’s pop band Jesus Jones was a psychic allusion to the coming of the Pirates Pitching Messiah Jared Jones. Every outing he sets a new Rookie record, and almost just as often that record also happens to be applicable to all experience levels. He’s doing things that quite frankly, Paul Skenes will struggle to live up to.

Just the other day, First Pirates pitcher in the team’s illustrious history to go 7 innings of shutout ball, 1 or fewer hits, 10K’s and zero walks. Think about that, in ALL of the Pirates history, never before.

He comps to players like Jacob DeGrom, and Spencer Strider but in many ways, he has even more perplexing stuff because he isn’t painting corners, unless he wants to, he’s producing whiffs at a record setting pace and he’s doing much of it in the heart of the strike zone.

Appreciate what you’re watching, and more than that, prepare yourself mentally to potentially have two guys capable of this kind of dominance in your rotation. It’s 100% rational to assume Paul Skenes might just not look quite this insane. He has that kind of stuff and talent, I’m not questioning that, but it speaks to how incredible Jared Jones has been.

7 Games, 41 innings, 12 Earned runs for an ERA of 2.63, 52 Strike outs, only 5 walks a WHIP of 0.780.

In my wildest dreams, I maybe, maybe thought Paul Skenes could put something like this together to start his career, but after having watched this with Jared, honestly, I think that’s a lot to ask, I’ll settle for Paul just having success, these are unfair expectations for anyone to reach for to start their career.

I know I’ve not been around as long as some of you, but I’ve never seen anything like this. Maybe Tim Wakefield when he came up with that Knuckler and juiced the Pirates forward, but honestly, it didn’t feel like this to me.

2. Henry a Bust?

Oh my, slow down. Look, the Pirates have handled Henry Davis progression in a way I’ll never understand. Meaning, they allowed their needs to overshadow what this kid was capable of. Even before his now notorious hand injuries that supposedly prevented him from catching last year the team wasn’t catching him every day. His bat exploded in the minors, just went ham.

Let me remind you why this kid got called up when he did.

Drafted in 2021 he skipped Bradenton all together playing 2 games in the FCL and 6 in Greensboro. .308 between the two levels, 1.195 OPS.

Hey, it was a hot start for an advanced college bat, playing against 18-20 year olds, he should have destroyed them right? He’s a 1:1 after all right?

2022, he has some hit by pitch injury concerns and bounces all over the place, in fact he played in 5 different teams if you count the Arizona Fall League. Amongst the 4 Pirates teams he played FCL, A, A+ and AA Altoona he only managed 59 games and 255 Plate appearances. Again, he caught, but that’s just not a lot of games. Still, he posted a .264 Average, with an .852 OPS. 10 homers made the trip too, a good sign but nothing to get too excited about.

Now onto 2023. Nobody expected him to debut in 2023 at the MLB level. He started the campaign in AA Altoona, hadn’t caught much, had really not gotten close on the number of at bats you want to see. I openly laughed at people who suggested it in the offseason. I openly stated it was “Obvious Endy Rodriguez was in front of him and would get the call first”.

I, and everyone else was wrong. Endy struggled at the AAA level, and Henry hit the hell out of the baseball.

41 games in Altoona, .284 Average, 10 homeruns, 1.015 OPS, I mean he was destroying the AA level. Even his BB/K 32/35 was pretty special for the level. He caught 30 of those games and played in the outfield 7 times. Endy hadn’t been called up yet, but Davis needed a bump.

Surely he’d slow down in AAA. Endy will still be first I kept saying, Davis simply hadn’t caught enough and we had a DH named Cutch remember? So Endy it’ll be.

Still wrong.

In Indianapolis, yeah, he kept chugging. The team had him catch 5 games and play the outfield 9 times. We had Endy catching, and the team needed to develop him, again, we and the team thought Endy would be first, and it was becoming clear, Henry was going to hit so the team feverishly started inventing a path.

AAA Indy, 14 games, 63 Plate appearances, 2 more homers, 13/13 BB/K, .375 Average, 1.120 OPS, and importantly an MLB team that couldn’t hit their way out of a wet paper bag at the time (sound familiar?).

Up he came.

He struggled at the MLB level especially in the field, at the plate in 62 games he posted a .213 Average, 32/25 BB/K, .653 OPS. 7 Homers too. Not great. Promising. Certainly not damning. I think it’s fair to say we wondered where the hell he’d play. Then Endy went down and next thing you know this kid who hadn’t fully figured out how to hit at this level is now preparing to start as the catcher every day.

Early season disaster. Offensively anyway.

This kid didn’t forget how to hit, he just had too much asked from him far too quickly. This is a good ball player, and he’ll be back with a vengeance. Remember the whole journey, rather than assume 23 games in 2024 turns him from that kid destroying the minors into a terrible pick. He’s just a talented kid with a super strange development path. This demotion might help normalize it a bit and help him recapture the player he knows he is. Once he starts squaring up balls again, it’ll all come flushing back to him and when he believes it again, then, you call him back up, wiser, stronger, less worried about being demoted because he lived through it once and more than anything, not feeling like he needs to be the team’s savior, they just got done telling you unless you hit you can’t even save yourself.

3. What is Development?

More apt, what is developmental success to you? from the moment I started doing this, I’ve heard just about everyone point to the development system as being the major issue with this club. Not just this year, but over the course of time.

I can see that, I mean how often do they hit on guys who weren’t number 1 picks? I mean forget they haven’t had a ton of those pan out for a minute, shouldn’t you luck into some guys picked lower? Other teams sure do.

Shouldn’t they have more wins on the international market? I mean they spend more than most teams legitimately, where is the fruit?

I’ll tell you when I don’t hear it, I don’t hear it brought up with a guy like Jared Jones who absolutely flew here through the system getting better year after year, stronger, better stuff, right out of high school in the 2nd round he shouldn’t be seen as a total surprise either. In fact Carmen Mlodzinski a Comp B pick arrived just as fast.

Is it impressive they brought in Alika Williams and he’s now a pretty productive glove first bench piece? Or do you give the Rays credit for him? If you do, they certainly don’t get credit for the arguable hardest part of the journey, the jump from AAA to MLB.

Mitch Keller was a long range project, did their poor development make it take that long, or did the patience of their development system afford him the opportunity to work through all of his issues?

Hunter Stratton, or David Bednar?

What is success? I can tell you their hit rate isn’t much worse than any other organization and it’s really too early to say Ben Cherington’s 1st round selections aren’t going to work out. We just talked about Davis, Gonzales looks like he’s pushing his way back into getting another look, Carmen Mlodzinski (comp B selection technically a number 1) will be back up and is really a victim of having options right now. Skenes will be here and you could argue he simply didn’t need developed. Termarr was a high school kid and in high A he’s off to a slow start but man you aren’t scraping him off your plate yet.

We’ve already seen nice progression from a bunch of other picks like Jack Brannigan, Solometo, Chandler, Barco, White, Jebb, and even some international guys like Shalin Polanco and Yordanny De Los Santos have looked like there are some signs.

Point is, I’m not sure we have what we need to say THIS development system, almost entirely reimagined under Cherington and not really started until 2021 due to COVID is good or bad.

Much of what we’ve seen try to crack the bigs like Ji Hwan Bae, Liover Peguero, Quinn Priester types, well, they still have a chance to make it.

The flameouts like Travis Swaggerty, Will Craig, Cole Tucker, Kevin Newman types, are we blaming this regime for them? I’m not, none of them have done a blessed thing since.

Overall, yes, development has been a problem. Early on in this regime I’d say what we’ve seen is they have an issue smoothly transitioning AAA players to MLB, but even that man, Jones, Carmen, Jack to a degree, Cruz, Hayes, they’ve had some successes and I for one am not going to diagnose a disease without seeing if they have one.

It’s very likely they still stink at it, but I can’t be there until I start being able to look at Cherington’s picks and signings, fully expect they should be here at this point and can overtly call them a failed prospect. Nick Gonzales being his first pick will always be the first data point here, bluntly, this is the year he should be here contributing or we start to think about him never making it. He and Liover Peguero represent the first two big injections of high end talent brought in here by this regime, and they are where we’ll start to be able to tell the story of their development system too.

Lastly, when you look at a prospect’s age you must factor in all of it. For instance, Nick Gonzales is almost 25 years old, will be this month. When you draft a college bat, you already have to think I have to get this kid through this system relatively quickly. You want their prime years, and those traditionally start in the mid 20’s.

Again, lost the first year to COVID. He reached the Bigs for the first time in his 3rd year of development and he’ll be back in his 4th.

Yes, he’s 25 and that’s old for a AAA prospect, but he’s not old developmentally speaking. Now that isn’t ideal, you want it to go quicker. Somewhere between Henry Davis and Nick Gonzales in an ideal world. But to act like he’s a bust because he’s 25, well, sheesh, just don’t draft College guys, they aren’t for you. For perspective, Liover Peguero is 23 and competing in his 8th season of professional ball as he started at 17. There’s more than meets the eye when it comes to age.

4. It’s Always About More than One Hitter, but…

Oneil Cruz isn’t single handedly responsible for the Pirates offensive woes this season, in fact, even as he’s scuffled he’s still leading the club in homeruns, is 3rd in RBI and has finally gotten his OPS to start creeping back up toward .700. Not what you want, but seeing as most of us ignored he was missing an entire year and expected him to jump right back to where he was, maybe it should be what we expected.

He’s the straw that stirs this drink though. If he’s not going for a stretch, even if the offense holds their own for a few games, as soon as the league sees he’s slumping, they’ll approach the entire lineup in a different way. Handle their bullpen deployment differently and focus on taking away another player in the lineup instead.

He wears it so visually on his face and body language when he doesn’t feel right. Think about watching him hit, you know there are times where you feel he looks intimidating, ready to do damage, ready to kill a mistake, ready to make a good pitch look like it wasn’t. A guy you pitch around every chance you get and hope he doesn’t feel like slapping an outside fastball 300 feet down the left field line.

Then there are times he looks defeated. Confused by the strike zone, almost apathetic that he isn’t seeing this guy and he puts up little resistance. You almost see it in his countenance.

The more he plays this year, the more he’ll lock in and even if he takes all year getting back to where he wants to be, he’ll wield this team’s most important standalone bat the entire journey.

More than any other player his performance effects the lineup around him. A lesson we should have learned last year when he was ripped away from this offense.

5. Ten Days in May

After this series with the Angels the Pirates go on a 10 day stretch against the Cubs, Brewers and back to the Cubs. The Cubs and Brewers have played tug-o-war with the division lead most of the season and the Pirates already split their one and only division series this year, a four game set with the Brewers at PNC Park.

It’s hard to believe the way the Pirates have played the past few weeks, but this division didn’t exactly run away from them and none of these teams are what they’ll be later in the year. They’ll all make moves at the deadline and it’s likely they’ll all be looking to add. In fact, all three have prospects that will leave them little choice but to add and make some moves.

That won’t make these early season contests matter any less. Last year from June 13th through June 21st the Pirates played 9 games against the Cubs, Brewers and back to the Cubs and lost all 9. The team would show flashes of life after that point, but it was a slap in the face that this team simply didn’t belong in the competition and all 3 of these teams have returned a whole hell of a lot of what those teams were made up of.

This Angels series is the Pirates last chance to feel firmly on the horse and ready to run the race before this tough stretch, and losing more than they win will give us quite the picture of where they belong in this division in 2024.