12-30-24 – By Gary Morgan – @garymo2007 on X
It may be the last 5 Thoughts of the year, but it’s the first of a little bit of a rebrand for the feature too. I’m dropping the “at Five” part. It’s been a bit of a running joke that I post this thing almost any time you can imagine with the exception of 5, so it’s time to drop it and change things up a bit.
Everything I do here will stay the same, but holding onto a concept in it’s entirety when part of it has become a gag would be just as dumb as doing damn near the same things for 40 years expecting a different result, who could be that dumb right?
And I can’t promise I won’t bring back the music thing next year, it made this piece interesting for me through the offseason, but it’s time to get back into baseball leading the points again.
Let’s Go!
1. Flip the Script
As we prepared last offseason for the 2024 campaign, the thing most of us were really worried about was the pitching. In general, common knowledge was that the offense was ahead of the pitching, even while it looked as thought the Bucs could have a decent bullpen brewing.
Listen, we, meaning all of us who write, read or just watch, we’re wrong all the time, that’s not news, but it’s not often a team completely flips the perception of their franchise’s strengths and weaknesses in one season.
That’s exactly what happened here though.
Yeah, we had Paul Skenes in our hip pocket and yeah, we expected him to have a chance to make the club and impact the team in 2024, but just about nobody had Jared Jones with his very limited AAA experience to jump up and grab a spot out of camp. Flatly, if you expected Skenes to do what he did last year, congrats, it takes balls the size of grapefruits to predict something you’ve never seen before.
The point is, teams don’t always progress the way you think you see.
The prevailing wisdom of this offseason is that the pitching is poised to be dominant, and not only now but the next wave coming is impressive too. Of course the flip side of the coin is that the offense if woefully deficient and well behind their counterpart.
I’m humble enough to recognize that while I passionately feel that is a reasonable estimation of where the team is and what they face, I have to admit, I felt the same last year about that vision of the future.
I thought we’d enter the 2025 season with some promising pitching that gained valuable experience in 2024 and an offense that was steadily adding talent to the lineup.
Instead, we’re entering with a pitching staff many feel belongs in the top tier of rotations this league has to offer, and an offense many feel couldn’t win a AAA championship.
I’m not saying any of this in an effort to make you think it’s time to stop pressing and complaining about adding offense, I’m just saying, it’s good to remember how very wrong we were last year, before we act like our suspicions about 2025 are being handed down from the mountain on chiseled stones.
Just like almost nobody saw Jack Suwinski falling all the way to AAA in 2024, nobody sees him coming back and hitting 25 homeruns in 2025. Not a prediction, as much as again something I hope opens your eyes to how unexpected performance can be.
In fact, we probably shouldn’t assume the pitching is as well off as we are. These are still young players and it’s very hard to predict what a league with a full season of tape will do to combat what looked unhittable to you last year.
Paul Skenes might have the type of stuff that defies all that, in fact I think he does, but he’s not a standard I believe you want to be holding anyone to, with the exception of him.
The truth is, this team should improve this year, if only because they have players who had no experience, now armed with some valuable time living and working in the league. Doesn’t mean they will, but players they bring in aren’t the only place this team will see increased production from. If it is, they might well finish with the same record after all. Internal improvement was and kinda still is the point of this whole painful thing.
2. Hank Ain’t Dead
Listen, I understand what Henry Davis has done in the Big Leagues has been bad. Completely agree, there isn’t one bit of me trying to convince you it was anything less.
I’m just trying to say, 377 plate appearances, half of which were accumulated while fighting through hand injuries is not enough to cast off a top MLB draft choice.
I put it this way because the 1:1 label is tainted by the Pirates being the selector. In other words, there are people who expect the Pirates to mess things like this up and maybe we’ll yet be shown that’s exactly what they did, but Henry was at the very least going to be a top 5 selection in that draft. No matter what, this was a top of the board talent.
In other words, even if you feel they took him to save money and draft other players they coveted in later rounds due to saving some bonus money, he was very much so a talent that would have been in that conversation regardless of who was picking.
I had the opportunity to talk to Chad Hermansen, the Pirates first round selection back in 1995 who could famously “walk on water” and bombed out in the Bigs. He talked to some things about how overwhelmed with information he was when he got to the show, and further how the team tried to change things that had worked for him all along his journey.
It got me really thinking about Henry because he too killed the minor leagues and when he got here, was overwhelmed with new positions, more analytics than he’d ever seen prior to an at bat, pitches nobody he ever faced could throw for strikes and a hitting coach who seemed to do everything in his power to sap aggressiveness from the quiver of every hitter he sent to the plate.
In fact, the Pirates on the record talked about how little time Henry had to take batting practice, let alone extra hitting reps because he had his nose so buried in the defensive growth of his catching game. To the point it felt like the Pirates figured the bat would just come along for the ride, and it feels like a lesson was learned by both sides of this equation.
I’m not here to tell you Henry Davis will be in the MVP conversation this year, but he’s still got an enormous ceiling that he hasn’t even sniffed.
You don’t flush that. Not yet.
I’ve seen him compared to Spencer Torkelson from Detroit, hell I’ve even seen a straight up trade proposed, thinking both are change of scenery candidates. Folks, Tork has almost 1,500 plate appearances in the Bigs, he’s hit 31 homeruns in this league and never hit higher than .263 in his professional career. If you really want a direct comp for Tork, think Jack Suwinski instead, his rise and fall looks a lot more similar.
Henry is a player we should not be cutting out of our plans, even if it’s impossible to know where on the field that might be. He’s also one of the players I’m most excited for Matt Hague to get hold of, because he seems to have a good handle on minimizing shortcomings and not having it eliminate strengths. In other words, he’s not trying to create perfect hitters, he’s trying to cultivate hitters who do something very well and don’t succumb to whatever has been their kryptonite as often.
If the Pirates traded for a player with Henry’s AAA track record, solid chance you’re more excited for that player to get a shot than Davis, because in baseball, familiarity, especially at the MLB level breeds contempt.
3. Best Remaining Fits Via Free Agency
The pickins are getting slim, but then again if you were realistic about what this team was likely to do in free agency in the first place, they always were weren’t they?
It’s not like you see Juan Soto signing and feel like it put a dent in the pool your team was fishing in did you?
These are the guys I’d look at anyway.
Jurickson Profar – Profar is a former top prospect who’s shown flashes along the way, but 2024 was his coming out party. The problem for Jurickson is he’s now 31 years old and just put together the very best season of his career. At his age, good teams are going to want to make him prove it before they commit to more years, and since he’s technically reaching the years where most players start to show signs of decline, they might not ever really commit to more than a year by year type deal. The Pirates could differentiate themselves here if they were to offer him 2 or 3 years. 3 years 20 million might entice him. It’s a million less than his biggest every get, 3 years 21 million and a contract that wouldn’t hurt the Pirates even if he wound up on the bench. A switch hitter with experience in the outfield, second and short stop would help out a lot. I can’t promise this is a boom of a signing, but it’s a good shot at catching a late bloomer and worst case a good bet to add at least 1 WAR to the team with a shot at a good bit more. Give him opt outs if it gets it done. It is a risk for the Pirates, and him a chance to still bet on himself, plus, he thrived in the pressure of a contract season just about every time it came up. If you lose him you lose him, don’t let that effect this year.
Randal Grichuk – Randal isn’t a full time player anymore, but he is a decent right handed stick who murders left handed pitching, has some pop and gets on base. There’s a good chance you could ink him for under 5 million for a season. That’s all I’d do too, the hope would be that you could do better than Grichuk as early as this year, let alone 2026. This is a bandaid, and little more, but he’s a professional hitter well accustomed to riding the pine and producing when used.
Alex Verdugo – Yeah, not my favorite, but he’s a left handed stick who’s put up decent OPS numbers and coming off a down year. His entire career has been played in arguably the two hardest divisions in baseball the NL West and the AL East. The Power has never really emerged like was once hoped and he’s a cautionary tale of how Arbitration can get out of control based on rather early performance and escalate from there. I think he’s going to want multiple years and quite frankly, I’m not sure he’ll get them. But he’s not yet 30, has a history of illustrating what he can do in those tough divisions it could be a nice fit here for a year or two.
4. Derek Shelton Must Change
When you’re a grizzled old ball coach, you can get away with not evolving or holding fast to your firmly held and battle tested methods. When you’re a first time coach in charge of overseeing intentional losing, you owe it to yourself and the team to learn from it.
I felt last year we should have seen some of that growth. You have never had the horses to run the race an MLB season is, and now you suddenly do have what at least the team is telling you should be enough to fight the good fight with.
So, why did it still look like he was using Bronze Age weapons on a 20th century battlefield?
I still saw the same cliche left-right matchup stuff that seemed to override actual stats being compiled. I still saw the same clinging to roles assigned to relievers that clearly weren’t being lived up to. I still saw lineup changes that seemed more important than trying to sweep a series or salvage one even.
The bottom line, the team either made so many decisions for Shelton on the way here that he didn’t learn because he was given all the answers, or, he just hasn’t progressed at all as a coach.
No rational person could look at what this team has done, especially in 2023 and 2024 and think no changes were needed. So they’ve made a few, and added some more on top of that, but they’ve left in place the top of the pyramid.
Time to show that doesn’t also stand for the top performance he has in him, because when you make a decision to keep a coach who’s had this putrid of a team for this long, solid chance the stink is stuck to them, and further, at some point one must own their own career.
Somewhere along the line, it’s very easy to let your employer take you from a person with marketable skills and steer you into someone who couldn’t possibly do their job anywhere else because they’ve just veered to where was needed or how they were directed year after year.
If Derek Shelton wants to have a future as a Big League Manager, either here or anywhere, he needs to wake up and push back on the things he doesn’t see the same way as the organization, and if he simply does believe it’s all been right, well, enjoy your last year doing this big guy.
One way or another, they ain’t gonna blame themselves Derek, so you might as well go out swinging. Audition for your next gig if it makes you feel better, but either way, you have to find a way to evolve and perform.
I can already see your endless diatribes about how you’ve known since 2021 he was blah blah blah. I get it, you smart, they dumb, but sincerely, it’s never mattered. If Pittsburgh sports fans had their druthers, we’d have Pitt, the Steelers, Penguins and Pirates all sporting new head coaches right now.
5. Getting Here Was the Friggin’ Point
Many people think the goal of a rebuild is to win a World Series in 5 years. It’s not realistic for most markets honestly, but fan expectations rarely are.
The goal is to tear down, draft top rank prospects by stinking bad enough to qualify for the opportunity to do so and ultimately have as many young, cheap and on the rise players as you can manage to gather come together and make your team competitive.
They’ve largely accomplished that goal. There are a ton of young players who make next to nothing, some of whom look just as poised to perform far above their pay grades as some look to fall off the cliff.
We don’t need to agree with how they got here, or how they should spend or who they don’t extend, but it’s hard to deny, they’ve managed to put together what looks like a good pitching staff, with more pieces coming. They’ve locked down a few players, and they have a few hitters who look like they could advance quickly here.
Yeah, they need to add to it, and they’ll add more for sure, but the goal is to be in this position in the first place. As we sit here, the Pirates window for being at the very least the Wild Card mix is open, and until they move on from guys or start making decisions about who to extend beyond what they’ve already done, it’s fairly easy to see and assume that window could be open for 5-6 years. If Bubba Chandler comes along this year, maybe add a year to that. Extend Paul Skenes and you can add even more.
The base has been laid, the deficiencies have been exposed, but they’ve turned themselves into a team looking for a couple things as opposed to 7 or 8 things.
It doesn’t mean they’re in it every year. It doesn’t mean there won’t be years where they’re better or worse, but it simply means for a stretch of time now, they should be thinking playoffs.
Additions will help, but most of what they get done will be from what they’ve built, and what they’re still developing.
That’s where it was always going to come from, just like they told you all along.
I know, it’s not good enough.
Sorry, the truth isn’t always fun.
Steel City Pirates 