The Pirates Acquire Spencer Horwitz for Package Featuring Luis Ortiz

12-11-24 – By Gary Morgan – @garymo2007 on Twitter

In the grand scheme of things, this really isn’t a “big” deal.

Nobody traded a known star here. Nobody acquired a player that should be seen as a finished product either. Whatever your feelings are on the surface, I just ask that you try to clear your mind and walk through this with me.

I’ll tell you what I think of course, but how you feel is completely up to you. I just want to make sure you’re seeing all of it, instead of just the pieces that paint it one direction or another.

Let’s start with the actual deal.

Some will call this a 3 team trade between the Blue Jays, Guardians and Pirates, but technically speaking, I don’t think we really need to discuss any aspect of Toronto here. It’s irrelevant to the deal struck by Cleveland and Pittsburgh.

The Pirates Get 27 year old Spencer Horwitz drafted in 2019 in the 24th round. He’s a left hand hitting first baseman who’s also played some second base, but the glove plays best at first as he has a considerably weak arm. He comes to the Pirates with 6 years of team control.

The Guardians Get 25 year old SP/RP Luis Ortiz, SP prospect Josh Hartle and SP prospect Michael Kennedy.

What the Pirates Lost

Luis Ortiz – A promising young pitcher who has put together a spotty beginning to his career, but has stuff to build on that makes him intriguing. You’ve watched him, so you know this already, but he started 15 games in his 37 total appearances in 2024, good for 135.2 innings with a very sexy 3.32 ERA. While a member of the rotation, he pitched to a 3.22 ERA, so the extra work actually helped him streamline and settle a bit. The concern with Ortiz is potentially how sustainable these numbers were. He doesn’t miss bats nearly enough, and almost never induces ground balls. His biggest improvement in 2024 was probably cutting his walks from 12% of batters he faced to 7.6%. This drop in walks made his homerun number (16) less painful than they would have been the year before, and kept his ERA in check. Lucky or not, and his numbers suggest he really was, he produced a 3.0 WAR figure just last year. Good young pitcher, easily the feature of the deal for the Guardians. He could step right into their rotation or wind up filling the swing role again.

Michael Kennedy – Let me start here, I’m incredibly biased here, I LOVE Michael Kennedy’s future projection. A lefty starter who had just gotten to Greensboro the Pirates High A affiliate, so he had a long way to go and a lot can happen on the trip there. In 2024 his second professional season he put together a 3.66 ERA with a 1.088 WHIP and doubled his inning count from 2023 to 2024 with 83.2 IP. Big promise. Probably at least 2 years away from even threatening MLB.

Josh Hartle – Another lefty, just drafted last year, in fact, he has all of 1.2 innings under his belt in Bradenton. He was on some services the Pirates 17th ranked prospect but functionally, that’s not really relevant. This is a lottery ticket in every sense of the words. Solid chance Cleveland had scouted and coveted both Hartle and Kennedy in their own draft research.

What the Pirates Got

Spencer Horwitz – 27 year old drafted in 2019 in the 24th round. He’s a left hand hitting first baseman who’s also played some second base, but the glove plays best at first as he has a considerably weak arm. He comes to the Pirates with 6 years of team control.

That 6 years of team control won’t matter a lick unless he continues to improve though. Last season after finally getting a shot with Toronto he hit 12 homeruns in 97 games and only 381 plate appearances. Thing is, that matched his professional high water mark. In 2021 he split time between High A and AA, good for 12 dingers in 485 plate appearances then he followed up in 2022 with 12 more, this time in 483 plate appearances.

Power is not being sold as his game, on base percentage is. Let’s just skip from draft day to 2021, like so many other players drafted in 2019, he essentially lost two years of on paper development. In 2021, a .862 OPS, in 2022, a .843 OPS and then in 2023 he posted a .945 in Buffalo before earning his first MLB call up and last year .790.

Doesn’t strike out much, walks a good amount, great hit tool, not so much on the power side, unless you want to let one year sway you and he’s slow, and I mean like 7th percentile in the league slow. Yasmani Grandal had an MLB Sprint speed that landed him in the 1st percentile, so think faster than Yas, but not by enough to make a difference.

Why Did it Take So Much?

Well, for starters, “so much” is really in the eye of the beholder. Sure, it’s 3 players for 1 so mathematically, yes, it’s not even, but only 2 guys in this trade will play any role in 2025 MLB games.

The key to this is really embracing what Luis Ortiz is to the league. Not us. Not those of us who watched him come up and look like Juan Marichal in his cup of coffee, then wrote him off quickly in 2023 when he hit rumble strips and grew to appreciate his work in 2024.

The league doesn’t watch players like that, they just want to know what you are now, and where your ceiling might be.

I mean, here is how he was painted by Cleveland.com as they broke down the trade.

The key for Ortiz as he joins his new club will be to figure out more ways miss barrels, whether that’s by adding offspeed pitches to his profile, or refining his breaking pitches. Last season he ranked in the 59th percentile with a 37.7% hard-hit rate, according to Statcast.

Work in progress. I think that’s fair. I think that’s what we would have said if the Pirates were to acquire a similar profiled pitcher.

The cutter Luis added last year helped, but it came at the expense of his changeup that he tried to introduce in 2023. All 3 of his offerings have similar speed profiles from the sinker, 4 seam fastball and slider, which probably feeds into his difficulty missing bats.

Bottom line, he’s starting to look like the statue you envisioned, but it’s going to take some precise blows with the chisel to help him take the next step.

Bluntly, he’s in a great org to see that happen, not that he’s leaving a poor pitching development setting, but Cleveland has much more opportunity available.

It took “that much” because Horwitz has 6 years of control and a very projectable floor, a floor that worst case has him as a righty mashing platoon player. Luis has a very projectable floor of back end relief pitcher.

So is First Base Like, Just His Now?

Probably not.

Spencer has some pretty impressive numbers, but what he’s done against lefties leaves something to be desired.

The Blue jays gave him 300 plate appearances against right handed pitching in 2024 and he hit .285, with a .380 OBP, .484 SLG, .864 OPS and all 12 of his homeruns coupled with 15 doubles.

Against lefties, 81 plate appearances, a .194 AVG, .272 OBP, .250 SLG, a .522 OPS and 0 homeruns. Tiny sample size, but don’t expect the Pirates to double this or anything.

I’m sure the Pirates will try to see what they can do to make him functional against both sides, but this is what they enter with, knowledge wise.

That likely leaves the door cracked for Bryan Reynolds, Jared Triolo, Billy Cook, Endy Rodriguez, hell, maybe even Henry Davis or Joey Bart to lend a hand when facing at the very least a tough lefty, but they’d be doing themselves a disservice to just accept he can’t do it at all without trying.

We aren’t dealing with a power profile here, and we’ve seen this club do ok with other lefties who simply couldn’t face their same sided counterpart by focusing on contact and patience. For this player, that might actually help tremendously, but bottom line, I think this is indeed it for first base.

I’ll also say, this is a guy who sprays the ball all over the park, while his power primarily comes from pulling the ball. The biggest fear with a guy like that is they start trying to pull everything to increase the power numbers and lose everything that made them special in the process.

How About Some Comps Smart Guy?

Well, how about we start with some free agent or trade options many of us were interested in for the gig, then I’ll get into some he projects to develop into.

I think it’s fair to say, any of the 5 guys I compared are much more favorably received by the majority of fans. I mean, probably by me too, but ya know, considering Wade, Naylor and Bellinger would all be very likely 1 year plugs, Burger would have been a couple years of help and Walker would easily have been the Pirates largest free agent contract ever, not too shabby.

If you want an actual comp for what he could become, honestly LaMonte Wade Jr. is my best swing. He’s an on base over power type, solid defender. Not a star, but a nice piece to have. Maybe Adam Frazier fits here too pretty well.

So Did We Get “Fleeced”?

I think you could look back on this deal 10 years from now and very likely make that case. If only because of what Cleveland we should almost expect will do with 3 nice arms in that system, but I hate the term fleeced, and honestly, it’s tossed around like hard candy at a nursing home.

It fills a nasty gash this team has had for the vast majority of my adult life at first base, and while I can’t predict he’ll hit his ceiling here, I do believe his floor right this second sits around LaMonte Wade Jr. And I’d have taken him 7 days a week and twice on Sunday, power be damned.

As bluntly as I can say it, I think this deal is fair for both sides, and I think it will make both teams better.

Why Not Trade Better Prospects for a Better Swing at Help?

Well, I just listed a lot of what was out there, and pointed out how little control most of them had left for one thing. While I’d have been happy if they went in almost all those directions, they’d all be patches at best. We’d be right back here next year looking for the same thing.

Truthfully, if Horwitz doesn’t perform, we still might.

The Pirates could have gone heavy in free agency for Pete Alonso or Christian Walker, but a couple things here.

First, there will be a bidding war for both of those players, and the war would be with teams that just swung and missed on contracts worth excess of 750 million dollars. In other words, they wouldn’t win this, unless they were willing to overpay, and probably by a lot.

Second, this team more than any other offensive metric needed to add left handed hitting. They were one of the very worst in baseball at facing righties and just like you should have learned in CCD, there aren’t as many lefties. This guy rakes against righties. Sure, not for power traditionally throughout his career, but he ranked 17th in all of baseball versus right handed pitching last year with a 147 wRC+. This is based on a minimum of 300 plate appearances, but I see no reason to look at less than that. I mean, that’s higher than Bryce Harper. This fills a need, in more than one area.

And yes, he’s dirt cheap, which should enable them to keep adding to the priorities Ben Cherington just outlined last night at corner outfield, relievers, specifically left handed.

They could have gone in other directions for sure, but I can’t dismiss he fits the lineup well from a need perspective. You’d love more power, but you might have to get that from the corner outfield spots.

As part of the picture, this is a perfectly fine addition.

Overall Feeling

The Pirates got better last night. And I specifically mean in 2025.

They added another player to the mix who plays a position of need, with solid projectable numbers that target an area of extreme deficiency for this club and the MLB player they sent out was very likely to be pressured back to the bullpen by mid season if not earlier. Not that he wouldn’t have helped in the pen instead.

They also did this without losing any of their top prospects, which leaves them of course the opportunity to impact the team themselves, or, potentially factor in on a bigger deal to address some of those other needs.

If you look at this deal and believe it’s all they’re doing, yeah, it’s not enough. If you look at this deal as part of what they’re doing, it’s a good start and they’ve left their options wide open by not taking on salary or depleting their pool of high ranking prospects to barter with.

Truth is, we won’t know if this was a good trade or not until we’ve seen it play out, but this deal was very much so in the spirit of what everyone screamed at Ben Cherington to do. Trade from pitching depth to bring in offensive help.

Check.

The last thing I’ll touch on is his age. He’s 27, and while I’ve already mentioned he’s an MLB COVID baby (anyone drafted in 2019), it’s important to note, Christian Walker didn’t really emerge until he was 28 after being blocked for years by Paul Goldschmidt. He’s just now reaching free agency at 33 after making a place for himself in MLB. While Horwitz has nowhere near the power Christian has, Walker doesn’t have Spencer’s bat to ball skills. He could very well work himself into something decent here, and the only reason to care about his age is if you won’t be satisfied with 6 years of the guy. My guess is by the time he hits free agency, we’ll be ok with moving on.

Keep going Ben.