3-16-25 – By Gary Morgan – @garymo2007 on X
Did you ever meet someone new at work and they just rub you the wrong way?
It’s not like you had a fight with them or they called you every name in the book, there’s just something they said, or a look they gave or they have an idea that makes it seem like you’ve been twiddling your thumbs for 8 years doing things the “wrong” way all this time.
Ever have that experience where you realize you were wrong, or at the very least misread them in that initial meeting?
This is the story of onboarding prospects onto your roster.
Some guys come in and hit right away, their position opens up for them like Moses stood there with his staff making sure he had a wide berth to take it over and own it, and they just seem to fit in the room like they grew up there.
It’s like the new guy coming in with a ton of experience and knowledge, a temperament to use those skills without showboating and oh yeah they bring in great coffee and pastries for everyone too.
Other guys, well, they have a hard time fitting in. What they’re supposed to be good at, someone else has been good at it for a very long time, and aren’t ready to stop. The couple projects he was given to start, he screws the pooch with and in general it just looks like it’s never going to happen.
This is a much more frequent experience for young players. Things that worked for them in college (AKA AAA) suddenly don’t work anymore. Lessons they were taught, well, they flat out don’t apply here in the real world, and frankly, it feels like everyone on both sides of the field knew they never would but nobody bothered to ever say anything.
I try to put prospect on boarding into real world context like this because simply, it’s really hard as a fan of any sport to truly allow for the process.
There’s never a good time to struggle. There’s never a time when your team is fine with you struggling mightily at the MLB level. Even if you team knows they don’t have a winning squad, they probably don’t want you up in MLB struggling and removing the shine on your rose.
All off season, the Pirates roster has been clearly deficient on the offensive side.
I’ve done this too. I’ve said it was light, I’ve shown it was light, and until I see different, I believe it’s light. Light on power, light with on base percentage. Light with sure things.
Thing is though, they’ve also got a lot of players who really could emerge this year, and I mean guys that fans have long since burried.
Henry Davis, Jack Suwinski, and Ji Hwan Bae have put together very promising Spring Training efforts early on. That is what it is, it’s a positive Spring performance. Until it’s more than that, you really can’t call it anything more.
What they’ve done isn’t enough to nudge your buddy at the bar and tell them you told them so. It’s not enough to forget all the struggles they’ve had.
It won’t turn everything around for them on a dime, or guarantee them a spot on the roster, but it is exactly what you have to do. It’s a step you must take to have an opportunity to take the next one.
This is baseball folks.
Andy Van Slyke, my favorite player as I’ve made no secret of, started his career in St. Louis in 1983. He wasn’t horrible, wasn’t great, in fact, the reason he was available via trade was the Cardinals saw him as a very borderline player to actually take to arbitration. Again, he was ok, looked like he was probably an MLB player, just maybe not a starter.
He was traded to the Pirates of course in 1987 and given opportunity to start, well, he took off.
This is many times how it works. In fact, the first time Van Slyke topped an .800 OPS was his 5th season. The first time he hit more than 15 homeruns was also his 5th season.
We Pirates fans don’t remember all that other stuff, because he came here ready to play, trained and mentally he had the added knowledge that being “good” wasn’t going to get him paid.
If you give up on every hitter who doesn’t look like they’re ready to take over the league in their rookie season, you wind up missing out on guys who take more time to get there, and if you aren’t going to buy your stars, you better make sure you’re patient enough to grow your own.
Now, none of those three I listed is a lock to make it. That’s not the argument I’m making, but I am saying take caution in pronouncing prospects dead prematurely.
I’d also say, if 1 or 2 of these guys breaks through in 2025 the entire lineup will look and function a lot better than any of us see it going.
This is baseball. It’s not like any of the other sports, it’s why we love it, and why we hate it too. Prospects take all kinds of different paths to the league. Some are messy. Some shoot out the gates like Jack, then get smacked in the face by the league knocking them back all the way to level one again.
Some get called up too early, asked to play out of position, coached to play away from their strengths, allowed to thrive on bad habits in the minors that surely won’t work in the Bigs. Others simply don’t believe they need any coaching and despite the talent they never move out of the starting gate.
For fans, I say this a lot, but it bears repeating. Criticize these guys all you like, scrutinize their play, what they need to improve, what they need to simply eliminate from their game, whatever, but realize for some of these guys, they’ll follow 5 or 6 different treasure maps before they finally crack through, when they do, you won’t care about how it happened.
This is a big year for more than a few Pirates youngsters, if they can manage to have a couple of them show up, this team is in a lot better position than many pundits would tell you.
You may have already made up your mind about guys like this, just remember, being cheap isn’t the only reason baseball’s ramp up payment structure for kids is built this way for every team. By year 3-4 you should have some clue about this player. Thumbs up or down by year 3-4 and then you have to start paying or move on.
The Pirates are on the verge of either developing a few guys who took a bit longer than hoped, or, potentially moving off an “Andy Van Slyke” to some other team. They could just realize despite their best efforts they just aren’t MLB players too, either way, that’s where we are with some of these guys, and know what, all we can do is ask them to show up when they get opportunity.
That’s what all three of these guys have done this Spring.
As compared to the alternative, yeah, it’s better.
Steel City Pirates 