6-15-24 – By Gary Morgan – @garymo2007 on Twitter
I’m as impatient as the next guy.
You may not see me tweet or post on Facebook every time a hitter stares at strike three over the heart, but if they ever get that future downfall of society brain implant thing that instantly sends our thoughts out, well, lets just say you wouldn’t see me as the patient fan many of you probably do.
Hey, even when I have time to think I make sure I go out there and push the panic button sometimes. I did it with Bailey Falter, I for sure did it with Nick Gonzales. In fact, when it comes to patience, it’s too early for all those silly apology forms to be filled out as well.
I’ve written before about why it’s really hard to pull off a meaningful deal for anyone at this point of a baseball season, so look, you’re either going to accept that or not. If you want to live in the world of 5% probability AND expect your Pittsburgh Pirates to be in that 5%, OK.
My guess is you’ll be mad long after the deadline has passed, almost no matter what they do.
If you’re willing and able to push on past that and see a month from now as more of a true open market, cool. I won’t go so far as to say it can’t happen, instead I’ll just say its far more likely that the store is open, with product on the shelves and real willing sellers in a month than there are now.
The Pirates are patient, most fans would probably say too patient. They have been.
We’ve watched them spend far too much time with players who had very little chance of mattering here. That’s all true, they’re guilty, you’re right, they’re wrong.
That’s also in the past.
They were playing games that mattered, but they were more interested in playing 162 games, keeping anyone they actually believed in healthy, and yes, losing so they could get cracks at super affordable, super high-end talent.
In other words, their patience with Josh Van Meter probably shouldn’t be seen the same way their patience with say, Jared Triolo is.
Jared is young, cheap, under team control for most of the decade if they want him, an excellent defender at several positions. The tools are there to say he can build on his frame and develop into something.
Doesn’t mean he will, doesn’t mean he’ll ever turn out but what makes him different than Josh Van Meter is he hasn’t already had 4 or 5 MLB teams give him every opportunity to prove what he was.
Jared is getting a long audition, and it’s a lot easier to justify with the way he flashes the leather. Well, that and the hard to ignore fact there isn’t anyone better pushing to do what he does. Nobody that wouldn’t equally be in full on audition territory.
When the team had seen a nice long stretch of Triolo as a starter and someone named Nick made a push, the team made a move and Gonzales has played in all but one game since while Triolo is essentially playing the Alika Williams role.
Now, patience with a guy like Rowdy Tellez, that’s a horse of a different color. This is forced patience in a way. Let’s paint a picture, say Jack Suwinski, Bryan Reynolds and Oneil Cruz are all doing what we hoped they would. Say they’re all sitting on like 15 homeruns apiece, well, you might see them pretty easily say goodbye to Rowdy Tellez. Cruz and Reynolds have been ok, I mean they’re hitting a few out, but this team has next to no left handed production. It’s popular to pretend anything could be better, and in some aspects, for sure, you can do better, the thing is, you can’t just pick anyone and get the very specific thing they wanted from him. Left handed power.
Don’t get me wrong, there comes a point where, look, it’s just not there. I mean Houston just paid Jose Abreu like 30 million dollars to go away. The Pirates will get there with Rowdy too, unless he actually produces. My point is, he’s gotten this much time expressly because nobody provided enough of what he was signed to provide.
Even my Abreu example is tainted, the Astros had seen an entire season of less than they paid for and this year he was just a shell of a baseball player let alone the absolute beast he was.
Fans are never going to be happy watching a guy struggle at the plate, especially a guy who has a history of not being perfect.
I’m not nearly as ready to claim Rowdy is back and going to perform from here on out like the broadcast seemed to crow about last week, but I am willing to hope for it.
Jack Suwinski keeps getting chances for many of the same reasons as Rowdy, and his ability to play Center field. His late inning 2 run shot in the opening game of the Rockies Series is exactly why. If he does that once or twice a week and almost nothing else, it’s more valuable than another right handed hitter. Jack has now been given almost 1,000 MLB at bats, so the massive adjustments and the deep dark slumps that engulf the far too infrequent hot streaks is becoming less about reaching potential and more about learning what’s there. 50 homeruns in that stretch is nothing to sneeze at, it’s certainly not something to DFA unless you have no choice by way of running him out of options.
A playoff team may never be able to accept a player with Jack’s profile, but there was one way to find out, playing him.
That’s what this is really about, understanding the only way to answer questions in baseball is to play. Henry Davis is a bust right this second if you decide you’re never going to give him another chance. Giving him a chance, yeah, it might mean you have to watch him look like an adult fishing with a toddler’s pole at times in the batters box, but he’s going to play, when healthy. It does this team no favors to enter next year still unsure what they have with Henry, or at the very least, to be sure they’re giving him the right list of things to work on this Winter.
Quinn Priester isn’t a bust, he’s a young starter with a bunch of stuff. He could go the way of Wil Crowe, or he could transform himself into a Mitch Keller type. If you’re the Pirates, it’s worth some patience, and yes, even some games “they clearly don’t care about winning” by starting him.
They want to win, but they can’t just ignore this stuff has to continue. It’s never for one season going to be a thing this franchise can avoid. They’ll always be on boarding a kid somewhere.
As the deadline approaches though, you’ll likely see them become a bit more selective. For instance, you could see the team feel they need a veteran backup infielder and they might option Triolo down to make room for it. That’s not so much giving up on him as it is “OK kid, you showed us half a season, need some work”. Now let’s go get this thing.
You might see them upgrade Michael Taylor, Rowdy Tellez, Edward Olivares, and yes, Henry Davis/Yasmani Grandal, they may even find by then that Falter has excellence in him, but it’s a bit too inconsistent and choose to upgrade there.
Patience always comes with a timeline. If you mention the word, you’ve already decided what it means to you. For baseball teams, the definition is never 2 dimensional, and it certainly isn’t fair or the same for everyone.
Fans never like a slow start, and they’re almost always loathed to accept a turnaround until the success period has doubled the poor stretch. Most players will tell you everyone has a cold month, and they’d all tell you fans usually forgive it late but never forget it early.
So yeah, that’s the story of patience. Few fans have it in the moment, including me. But take a step back every once in a while and at least try to understand why situations are different for different players. You can still call them dumb, promise.
Steel City Pirates 