7-5-24 – By Gary Morgan – @garymo2007 on Twitter
Yes, the General Manager will have to add to this team if they’re truly going to go anywhere in 2024, but there’s an unescapable truth too, one most fans don’t want to hear.
As evidenced by quite literally not being able to hear Ben Cherington utter it without believing the team is all the way back to 2020.
The Truth is, If they win, it’ll be because guys like Oneil Cruz, Bryan Reynolds, Ke’Bryan Hayes, Jack Suwinski, and Henry Davis lead the charge. These are all players who are here, should be here for the foreseeable future, and more than anything, they provide things that aren’t going to come cheap or easy on the market.
Now, you can hate hearing that, you can hate the GM saying it, you can certainly hate me saying it, but if you deny it, I’m sorry, you never thought they were good enough in the first place.
I really want you to think about how the team could truly improve without contributions from these players. They aren’t going to go get a third baseman, so good, bad or ugly, Ke’Bryan Hayes is going to keep being in the lineup.
Oneil Cruz is going to play most days, regardless of who they sign or trade for. Bryan Reynolds will look up in September and have played close to 155 games of the 162 if he’s healthy. Jack and Davis could be upgraded, probably should be upgraded, but they aren’t going to acquire someone who catches and provides anywhere near the hoped for contribution from Hank. Jack could find himself on the bench or minors, but nothing would be better for this team than for him to find his stroke.
A month ago, many fans thought it was a sure thing this team would have to go out and get 2 or 3 relievers. Now, they probably aren’t all that far from having Borucki, Bednar, Chapman, Mlodzinski, Holderman, Ortiz and Nicolas. That’s 7 arms I personally feel good about in the pen. I didn’t mention Hunter Stratton, or Braxton Ashcraft.
See, the improvement for the floundering bullpen, was right there, on the roster, waiting to improve.
I’m not sure if you recall, but the team officials said all the same stuff about the bullpen as they have the offense back when it was the bane of our existence, and look at where they are now. Even while anything but healthy.
The team can be completely wrong, but the fact is, many of these players, simply aren’t guys the team can easily replace.
They said all this same unacceptable stuff about Rowdy Tellez, and all he’s done is become one of the hotter hitters in baseball for a month.
It’s such a fine line between sitting on your hands and being appropriately patient. Of course it’s dependent on how often it works but for this GM, I don’t see many people who bring up when he was right on this front, do you?
I mean, there’s a reason, because being right about something small while the overall picture is still pretty ugly tends to not net you much recognition for doing the right things.
Bottom line, if this team is in it, they’ll add, and they have room for it to be a really good player, they just have to be specific about where that player fits, because as I said, many of these underperforming players, well, they aren’t getting replaced.
Elephant in the room, Andy Haines has not shown the ability to help improve the pieces they have the way Oscar Marin has. And no coach has a 100% hit rate, the evidence is simply mounting that Oscar Marin is well above the line. In fact, he’s the only coach the Pirates have that in my mind has likely put his name on the radar of MLB, the second he’s cut loose he’ll have another job. Veterans improve with him quite often, he has two rookie pitchers dominating MLB, he took a project and turned him into Mitch Keller. Hey, maybe this is easier, Bailey Friggin’ Falter.
On the offensive side, man, how can I describe what a hitting coach brings to the proceedings? First most guys will tell you if you ask, and we live in a city where players go to meet and greets all the time. You don’t have to rely on me for this, ask them.
Then you meet them, instead of telling them you saw them hit that one ball against the Cardinals and gushing while you wait for them to scribble their signature, ask them actual baseball questions, they for the most part genuinely love this.
The first thing you learn is the hitting coaches, and I mean good ones, bad ones, do essentially the same thing at the big league level. They chart, they formulate plans for attack against individual pitchers.
“Help” tends to be limited to timing adjustments, hand positioning, maybe a tempo suggestion in stride. Almost everyone I’ve ever talked to has a bunch of guys in their personal life who they get advice from.
Something that could be missing, communication between the Manager and the Hitting Coach, and by this I mean, who’s in a good place, vs who isn’t, but this could just as easily be Derek Shelton feeling much more passionately about splits or even just who he personally trusts.
Either way, they’ve presided over 3 of the worst Pirates offenses, if you include this season, in recent history. In many ways, what they do doesn’t matter, because frankly, it isn’t working.
They can change that, or they can continue to only manage to add 1 or 2 guys who “get” it every year.
I will say this, the sentence “whoever they get Haines will screw up” is moronic. Anyone acquired at the deadline will barely be touched. They won’t try to impart “the Pirates way” on them. They won’t have Haines try to improve them. They’ll get scouting reports and solicited advice, that’s about it.
Therein lies the problem.
Ben Cherington is absolutely correct when he says this team needs to improve internally much more than believing the deadline will cure all ails. Derek Shelton is too. The problem is, both of these gentlemen are expecting that somehow the things they’ve done over 3 years to improve their players offensively, has largely failed, so expecting that same system to now maximize these players in a matter of months on it’s face is disingenuous.
That doesn’t change the truth though. These players have to be better, they have to be the ones who largely make this club better.
I think that’s largely going to be an unfruitful endeavor, to me the question is, will they finally decide they’ve seen enough of this offensive coaching unit or will we enter year 4 of thinking we have talent and watching it wither?
Yup, improve internally. I believe some of it is in there, if only from Cruz starting to trust his ankle and kicking the rust off. But if you’re waiting for Haines to unlock Henry, well, you better hope Henry unlocks himself. If you’re waiting for Andy to convince Ke’Bryan to just embrace being a singles hitter and be better at it, don’t hold your breath. Baseball is hard, Coaching is supposed to make some of the hard come without thought via repetition and understanding.
I hope one day to understand what this management group thinks they see.
Steel City Pirates 