Good Intentions, Poor Results; A Story About Wanting Things Both Ways

9-6-24 – By Gary Morgan – @garymo2007 on Twitter

As exciting as this young rotation has been to watch grow here in Pittsburgh, there’s been a constant and at times easy to ignore drumbeat underneath the whole season.

Inning counts and the process of stretching out arms at multiple levels.

I think it’s completely fair to say once it became apparent Jared Jones and Paul Skenes were both going to pitch for the Pirates this year that the team was going to have to handle it delicately.

More than that, the Pirates according to them, planned to also be competing for a playoff spot.

Now, as soon as this was the stated goal, and we knew it would not only include these two hurlers, but feature them, it started to sound like trying to drop a handful of change on a store counter and having it match the total due without going over.

Ok, maybe that’s a bit dramatic, but it at least was a narrow path, I think we can all agree there.

The Pirates, a franchise that tends to not do simple things like pinch hit when it’s obvious or use bottom 5 in speed players to hit leadoff was now going to be tasked with a delicate dance.

The Goals as We Know Them

1. Give Paul Skenes and Jared Jones room to completely acclimate themselves to MLB life
2. Ask both pitchers to stretch themselves out and be ready to finish the job in 2025
3. Manage the entire rotation in such a way as to make finishing the season in the Majors was possible

Now, all of that in and of itself, makes total sense. In fact, they’re all mostly unavoidable things to try with rookie pitchers.

Add in the 4th goal, and things stop making quite as much sense. 4. Compete for the playoffs.

As soon as that was part of this, I started to question what that might look like. I pictured Paul Skenes leading the staff into the playoffs like just about everyone else did, but then I started wondering how many innings he’d be at by the time they got there.

Nevermind though, it wasn’t worth worrying about until the situation actually came up.

Obviously, it never did, so in one way, I’m happy I didn’t waste energy sweating it, even so, as I’m watching this rotation now and how they’re handling the effort, I have a new question, if they were in it, how likely is it they’d be ready to go and not shells of themselves anyway?

Skenes is at 141.1 combined innings, Jones is at 122.1. Many of you remember me writing back in April the team would like to see Skenes eclipse 150 this year and Jones 140, so both of those figures are on track, at least as it comes to finishing the season.

Thing is, there’d still be a potential playoff to contend with. Now, lets be real, from there you take it series to series of course and this team no matter how hopeful we were multiple series probably not the likeliest of scenarios.

What’s really bothering me right now though the constant shuffling of this rotation, the delay tactics, the stop gap starters, the bullpen games, all of it, is creating a very hard to adjust to rotation mix. Sure, it makes sense to give these guys plenty of space, push them back here and there, pull the out of a game early when it makes sense, but everything being viewed through the prism of stretching these guys out.

Next year it’ll be easier.

Mitch Keller will be good for his 175-200, Jones should be easily in the 175 area and Skenes I’d imagine will be hard to keep from hitting 200, if healthy of course.

I don’t believe this 6 days rest thing will continue into 2025 either, but that could be a hurdle they have to deal with. The innings will be available, but they’ll still have something hanging out there like this that “they’ve never done before” to contend with.

The point is, I think they’d probably have played it different down the stretch if they hadn’t played themselves into it not mattering. If they hadn’t changed course, fans would have had some questions when Luis Ortiz started the first game of the Wild Card.

The issue isn’t going to go away entirely for these guys next year, but it’ll fade into the background. For them anyway.

Johan Oviedo will return and face innings restrictions, Bubba Chandler, Thomas Harrington, and Mike Burrows will all be held back to a degree, but it won’t be quite the same, the horses of this rotation will already be here, stretched out and ready to carry the majority of the work load to support them.

Being competitive, with these pitchers, this year, are probably 3 things that didn’t ever fit together as well as our wishful thinking wanted it to.

I still think it could have been managed differently, but not much. I’m sure you’d rather just assign blame to Derek Shelton, but this was going to be an issue even if Earl Weaver’s reanimated corpse were in charge this year.