Nick Gonzales, Starting Second Baseman?

12-17-24 – By Gary Morgan – @garymo2007 on X

When you talk about the holes this team needs to fill, everyone seems to cede second base to Nick Gonzales.

Some are full throated about how excited they are to see him take another step and cement his role. Others are willing to see him as the starter, but leave room for him to be beaten out by any of the ample options the Pirates keep amassing to play seemingly only second base.

Ben Cherington’s first Pittsburgh Pirates draft pick, the 7th overall in the 2020 Entry Draft, Nick Gonzales is now 25 years old. After missing his first professional season due to COVID, debuting in MLB at 24 in 2023, was a fairly decent ascension, especially given how many games he lost to injury on the way.

It’s funny, you almost forget how swiftly he worked his way through the system when you’re watching a team that jumped Henry Davis to the bigs in the same year after being drafted first overall in 2021. He too suffered from injury along the way, and never was developed defensively half as well as Gonzales.

Henry is a story for another day, but continuing with why we don’t appreciate Gonzales’ steady path, there’s Paul Skenes less than a year from winning the College World Series, starting the All Star game and your draft classmate Jared Jones moving down everyone from February to the end of May.

It’s funny because in many ways while Henry has struggled to get his footing, Nick Gonzales took his first demotion, asked questions and set out to correct the issues the team had with his performance.

I really thought Nick brought something to the team, and further, I really thought they suffered from his injury. Yeah, he hit .270 which on this team made him look like right handed Ted Williams. Yeah, without a lot of homerun stroke, he managed to come up with 19 doubles and many of them were timely.

They needed to see him improve his K rate which sat around 28%, which frankly, looked a lot like what he did in the minors, and when he came back with a 19.1.

His hard hit rate improved, his barrel rate jumped and his xBA Expected Batting Average almost quadrupled.

Nick the Stick finally started looking like more than a nickname. He finally started using his quick hands for more than jumping on fastballs and started using it to buy himself time to recognize offspeed and waste it or pop it the other way. All improvements that needed to come if Nick was ever going to be more than an interesting prospect.

He was given 94 games last year in the Bigs, after starting in AAA and it would have been more if not for the injury bug.

Thing is, Nick has continued to grow in a fairly linear way, which you can’t always say for a prospect.

Heading into 2025, there really is a lot of competition for playing time at second base, and here’s what Nick needs to improve on to become the every day guy there and hold off all comers including Termarr Johnson who should get a look either late this year or next Spring for sure.

• Improve Splits, Nick has always been a killer against lefties, but as a starting player, you’re always going to face far more right handed pitching. If he can just raise his OPS against righties by say 25 points, a smidge under .700 they’ll be hard pressed to take his bat out of THIS lineup for a while.
• Develop chemistry with whomever they choose to play short stop and turn more double play opportunities. Aside from that, I have almost no issue with his glove over there, he’s actually been really solid.
• Time for some of that power to show up big boy. If you’re going to play second base in the bigs, you have to hit some dingers. It’s not a premium defensive position, so the stick really needs to come to play. The trick is, you can’t have it destroy the great work on limiting the swing and miss. Some of this is just maturity.

Now, it’s not just up to him. This team needs to allow him to continue his growth and at least give him the uninterrupted look they gave Jared Triolo last year. I know they have some other guys they want to see, but to me it’s vitally important to get some of these draft picks to stick and become part of the core, that’s not going to happen if he’s splitting time with Triolo, Yorke, Cook, IKF, Bae, Valdez, whomever. Wanna sit him against a righty with a flying saucer slider, ok. But let’s leave it there, at least for a while. If you aren’t going to pay for offense or deal for it, you better damn sure give your prospects a shot when they’ve given you signs you’ve chosen well.

That’s probably the most obvious thing to say about Nick, it’s starting to feel pretty easy to think he’s at least a major league baseball player, and there’s still room to become a lot more than that.

I know there’s a lot of negativity about payroll, and I’m not even saying I don’t share some of those same feelings. But there’s a lot of this too.

There’s a lot of kids just like Nick, in different stages of their own journey. A journey that is rarely as easy as anyone from fans to the team, to even the player himself wants it to be, but they were also the point of all the pain we’ve been through.

You don’t have to like this method of building a team, but at some point, you will have a young team, with a couple veterans, and you have to hope you were right about more of them than you were wrong.

I don’t think it’s time to panic on an of these top prospect types at this point. Henry, Endy, Peguero, ok, maybe Bae, lol. It’s been a long trip, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t look exponentially better than it did when we started.

If you’re counting up players who’ve probably shown you their ceiling that are currently on this team, and I mean they could perform there for a while yet, but I think you’ve just about seen their highest high, I have Hayes, Bednar, Bart, and without moving to first base to stay a bit fresher, probably Reynolds. Everyone else has room to grow, even Mitch Keller.

That’s not a good place to be if you need to be sure of what you are, but it’s a great place to be if you just want to know you’re headed in the right direction.

I like Nick’s chances. I like that every offseason he’s taken his list of targeted work and come back better than he left. And I expect 2025 to be no different.