Pirates Near Future in the Multiverse

11-29-24 – By Gary Morgan – @garymo2007 on Twitter

It’s so hard to predict how this Pirates team is going to go.

It was easy to talk about the beginning of this new regime because it was very unlikely they’d do anything that didn’t resemble a standard tear down and build up battle plan.

Well, despite where they are, they’ve very much so done that part, and figuring out what’s next, well, it’s near impossible. So I’ve decided today, let’s look at the near future in a multiverse way. You know, multiple universes where each one starts with a different choice and where they likely lead. Or, at least where I think they’d lead.

We won’t come out of this knowing what they’ll do, but we might come out of it knowing we like a few paths, as opposed to just one. Hey, maybe we’ll find so many potential good paths we’ll feel it’s insane to expect they’ll fail. LOL, ok, probably not, but lets have some fun here and see.

Pirates Timeline 1 – Status Quo

In this timeline, Ben Cherington doubles down on being right. He thumbs his nose at all of the pissing and moaning around him and says, nope, I’m right, we’re finishing the race my way.

So this means some low tier free agents, some smaller trades, but he retains his farm system as is for the most part, especially all the young pitching and decides, these guys are going to play better baseball, period.

He could of course be right or wrong. If he’s wrong, he and Derek Shelton are likely fired and the next GM and coach inherit a team that still has some nice pieces under control, and a clear mandate to take it the rest of the way. There would be next to no chance he or she would avoid trading some of that top talent, probably would want to swap out a bigger piece on the actual roster too. Change would come, but it would take at least a year longer than fans wanted.

If he’s right, it might depend on how right he was. Let’s say they make a wild card and bow out quickly. There could be enough equity built up there to allow him to stay on the path he’s decided on and allow slow progression to continue. Ideally, additional talent starts making its way here from the system and he potentially keeps the window open for half a decade.

Pressure would build to push in at least more of the chips to kick it over the edge as early as the next offseason, but perhaps fans would at least believe more in the foundation being built on.

Pirates Timeline 2 – Pushed Into Action

In this timeline, Ben Cherington and crew feel the pressure of narrowly surviving to see a 6th season and push aside their cautious nature to use the assets they have right now to maximize the time they have Paul Skenes.

I say it that way because quite simply, even in this alternate reality, there is a limit on what this team will spend. It doesn’t matter how much you’ve changed Ben’s heart, his heart doesn’t hold the purse strings. So I paint a picture that Paul Skenes is gone after his rookie deal simply because I see him selling off prospects and pushing in as many pieces of silver as he’s given to win with him, completely eliminating the plausibility of retaining him beyond.

This is unhinged Cherington. He goes scorched earth here and trades everything, bringing in salary and talent for now. Bubba, Harrington, Johnson, Griffin, Barco, whatever it takes. I won’t name players here but let’s say he lands a power hitting lefty first baseman, a corner outfielder with power and a short stop too. All of them have control for 2 or 3 years.

The rotation is good, the overall roster is good, and many of the pieces are still internally grown youngsters. It’s a good looking team ya know.

You’d like to think in 3 years, they make the playoffs, if not all three years right? You’d hope you have a division in there too, just to get that monkey off the back. That’s as far as I’ll go, get in the dance, anything can happen. Could that be a championship? Sure. Would they be favorites? Um, no, not while LA is a team.

Then it’s over unless you’ve become much better at drafting and developing in this timeline too. 3-4 years from now they’d have to move on from much of what they brought in, and yes, it would be time to be dealing Paul Skenes, and Keller, and Jones. Maybe you extend Jones or something but for the most part, you’re moving on from this “window”. Reynolds, Cruz, you know, this generation.

One way or another, it’s back to a rebuild. I can be done well, but, I mean you just watched him do this one. The best argument is he’d have better players to move to get it started.

This is a depressing end to what would be a golden age of Pirates baseball for this generation. You have to pay the price in baseball, especially if your owner won’t stretch and truthfully, there are only like 10-15 teams who wouldn’t have to perform some variation of this periodically. That’s the system, even if you want it to be as simple as some spend and some don’t.

Pirates Timeline 3 – Earth 1

In this timeline, Ben Cherington accepts at the very least the organization needs new eyes and ears with experience and heeds their advice to shoot for serving two masters. Winning now, and for a while.

Structural changes to the organization have already been made. Hitting coach replacement, with a different philosophy on how to reach players. Replacing John Baker as farm director, they can call that whatever they like but it wasn’t done because he was super successful. Bluntly, Baker had never done the job at the MLB level before, and now he’ll get help and moved to a more appropriate spot.

They’ve reinforced the pitching coach with an experienced stud whisperer in Brent Strom. Replaced the head of analytics with someone who has a much more digestible (reportedly) method of relaying the findings. And they’re handing them to a new hitting coach who is again, reportedly, very good at understanding and applying them.

All that said, many of those moves don’t pay immediate dividends, so to win now they’ll still have to make moves, and sign players.

In this timeline they limit the prospects they’re willing to part with, but not so much that they’re paralyzed. In other words, they’re willing to part with Bubba but only for a piece that helps for a while. Even then they’d try to talk you into someone else.

But they get one done, because they have to. You still have the feeling of a “pitching factory” but have also strengthened the team. And yes, you sign a guy or two.

At best, this is a wild card run team in 2025, but it looks a lot closer, gets you over .500 for damn sure.

To take this approach, you’d have to know your owner believes that kind of progress is enough to keep your job. You’re still making long range changes like replacing the International Head Scout on the ground in the Dominican Republic, and if that record in 2025 don’t keep you employed, well, you might wish you were in our first reality ya know?

You’ve at worst, handed your replacement a good situation. They’d be walking in with a decent situation in the farm system, some decent pieces to deal if they so choose, or the ability to take a ton of paths. For the organization, this would be doing a solid. Again, it’s asking a guy to be very altruistic if he thinks he’s getting canned unless this overachieves.

Pirates Timeline 4 – Festivus Reaction

In this reality, the Pirates do very little. They sign a decent outfielder, maybe an old first baseman and some relievers and they decide this team can win and improve together.

But….

They pay attention to and answer some Festivus grievances too.

The decent outfielder they sign, lets say they answer the they never sign anyone for more than a year thing right here and give this dude 3 years.

Next, let’s show everyone why we aren’t spending more on free agency and extend Paul Skenes for 10 years, and Oneil Cruz for the next 6 or so as well.

Explain to fans openly and honestly how you plan to grow payroll via these extensions. You’re trying to keep your own players here longer, instead of paying more for lesser players on the free agent market.

Hire a communicator to help, cause I don’t see the skill set in house.

These types of moves, coupled with young pitching still bubbling, it would start to change opinions on the trajectory at least.

They’d still have to do it on the field of course, and much like our last timeline, this would be little more than besting .500 and competing for a wild card unless they overachieved or some guys took bigger steps than we thought they might.

It’s not “all in”. But in many ways, it’s more of an investment than we’ve seen this club make in showing us some long term planning than they’ve mustered since the onset of regional tv money having influence on the game.

Slow and steady progress, but hope that it will last, signed right in front of you by some pieces you hope are a big reason for more, piled on top of the others they’ve retained.

Pirates Timeline 5 – Nutting Sells

A big part of me is writing this simply for the people who comment it without actually reading the damn piece. lol

Anyway.

Yup, pretty simple, Bob Sells the team. Don’t worry about to who, just someone who has the money.

This year, I mean like this pretend it’s breaking news today ok, nothing changes. A new owner isn’t coming in and at this stage of the offseason blowing things up or cleaning house. They might have their own advisors who start noodling in on things, or being the devil on the shoulder throughout the organization but functionally, I bet almost everyone survives.

For this year.

It would be an audition year for them, and the new owner. He or She might well want to make a splash and direct his new and sure to feel the axe over his neck GM to target a big free agent, get it done. Set a record, I got you.

Or, they could just ask what the budget was and increase it, leaving it up to the GM to decide how best to spend it as opposed to directing his energy into a prize.

Maybe they just come in and essentially say “as you were”, completely hands off witnessing the operation in an effort to diagnose the issues, and implement changes once they’ve seen a cycle. You know, like the team isn’t going to get purchased by someone who somehow avoids having Bob explain to them exactly why he runs it the way he does. Maybe he’s pretty convincing ya know?

Either way, I don’t think this year we’d feel it. Unless he or she is a good talker. They could talk fans into accepting their vision for the future almost regardless of how the team performs in 2025. Most fans would accept they got here and wanted to look around first, again, so long as the message was something direct like, there’s no reason we can’t increase payroll here in Pittsburgh. Say something vague like this, well, if you’re starving and someone gives you your least favorite food, you’ll bite.

Long term, you’d of course hope it gets better, again, they’d be purchasing a franchise that legitimately has one of the biggest draws in the game, that in and of itself is a great starting point, especially if you’re willing to take the types of risks that keep a player like that here so your lucky lottery pick turns into a legacy of success.

My guess is Ben and crew are done either way after 2025, if for no other reason than baseball people know baseball people and just like presidential administrations, new regimes bring in their own people, so shake ups are almost assured.

It would truly be the unknown, which alone is appealing to a fan base that has for 40 years now almost always known what was coming, and when.

Hope you enjoyed this alternate universe look at the Pirates. It’s really how you have to think about this team, because there’s one thing for sure, where they are isn’t great, time to pick a tunnel and go.