3-31-25 – By Gary Morgan – @garymo2007 on X
The Pirates had a brutal series in Miami to open the season, and it’s about to get harder as they head to Tampa to face the Rays before coming home this week.
As we sit here, they still have a chance to come home with a .500 record, but the way they’ve played we’ll be lucky to see anything better than 1-6.
Now, let’s go!
1. Oneil Cruz is Not THE Issue
I’m saying it plainly like this because while I recognize there are things Oneil Cruz doesn’t do well, times he isn’t locked in, areas he can improve on, I can also draw up a list of the top 15-20 issues this team is dealing with and I might not even add Cruz to what I come up with.
There seems to be a contingent that wants him punished, or “held accountable” for his miscues. Miscues like not running as hard as he can here and there. Misplaying a ball hit over his head. Making a poor decision to try to throw out a runner instead of hitting the cutoff man.
I understand the sentiment, but in practice, I’m not sure I understand what you want.
His batting average stinks, but in 17 plate appearances he’s walked 6 times, vs only 3 strike outs. His OPS is at .925. He’s already stolen 4 bases.
This team struggles to score runs. So you want me to what, sit him?
Ummm Have you seen the rest of the lineup? Did you see on Sunday what it looks like without him?
I don’t think the Pirates have the luxury to play hard ass with this guy. Sorry, they’re like 6 or 7 solid MLB hitters away from being able to bench someone like Cruz for not running 100% once or throwing home thinking he could get an out.
That doesn’t mean someone coaching shouldn’t go up and tell him what he’s done wrong, or point out to him what he needs to improve, or incentivize him to go all out all the time, it just means what some fans see as accountability, is actually a lot more what I call self sabotage.
If you want to bench Cruz to teach him a lesson, I’d ask, isn’t it more important that he plays and learns real lessons in the field? The sun won’t rise on a day this team can afford to not have his bat in the lineup, even as a wholly imperfect player. A lot of his problems stem from barely playing outfield and the team did him no favors by not having him play out there a lot this Spring, you know, in the practice games.
You can bench Cruz and have your accountability when you show me 6 guys in this lineup that will make it not kill your chances to win while you’re supposedly schooling the guy.
Should he be better? Yeah. At the plate, I think we’ve seen real growth and patience to show pitchers if you don’t pitch to me, I’ll walk, happily, and I’ll wind up at second base before you can blink too. It’s not his fault there aren’t a lot of guys who are going to finish the job and get him home.
In the field, he’s played 27 games out there after never playing anything but SS on his entire trip up and MLB career. This takes time and he may never be better than average out there, but he runs like a deer, has a canon for an arm and is worth a much longer look before we decide.
And he’s not dumb. He likely speaks at least one more language than you do, his mistakes come from overestimating his ability at times, letting himself get defocused on occasion and inexperience. Not stupidity.
If you want to see this kid tank, make the game something he doesn’t enjoy doing. Fun is his motor, go ahead and dump water on it, see if it combusts.
2. Is Endy Starting at 1B and backup Catcher Sustainable?
Set aside how he played. I know that sounds crazy, but it’s not really why I’m concerned here. He’s been out of the game for a year, I expected this to be difficult and as to first base, he just found out the day before games started that he would be shuffling over there. I have a bit more patience than that, even as it’s not been good.
What I mean here is, I know he’s not hitting, I think he will improve. I know he’s not been great in the field, I think he’ll improve here too.
I say all that because my issue is more about all the roster stuff that has to happen to make this position work for the team.
In order for Endy to start at first, he needs to play there I’d say 4-5 times a week. That means Joey Bart needs to start at catcher 4-5 times a week too. Now, Endy probably can’t play 7 days a week, so if he’s going to have to play catcher 2-3 times so Bart can sit or DH, that’s going to make getting Endy at 1B those 4-5 times difficult, if not impossible.
The options at first until Spencer Horwitz returns are Jared Triolo, and the recently recalled Emanuel Valdez. That can work, but with Endy not hitting, and his replacements not either, combined with the difficulty of finding ways to get rest for guys, I can’t see them getting awfully deep in the season with this setup.
This isn’t a call for Henry Davis or Jason Delay specifically, but the team simply won’t last like this. Using your backup catcher to start somewhere else on the surface seems like a nice way to stretch your bench a bit but it presents enough hurdles that eventually there has to be a payoff for it.
The way they’re doing it early on, they’ll wind up with both Endy and Bart having their tongues wagging by the end of April.
3. Yankees Cheater Bats?
Here’s the thing, it’s already been ruled to be legal.
In case you have somehow missed this story, here’s what they look like…
Now, they look weird, but the principle is rather simple. Examine your hitters, see where they wind up hitting the ball most often and move the barrel to that location.
Again, this meets the rules. Rules I’m sure we’ll see the game try to address, but they can’t change rules mid-season so these are likely here to stay for 2025.
That leaves everyone in baseball with a fairly simple choice in my mind, join them or get left behind.
If you’ve got a hitter who finds barrel 50% of the time, chances are they don’t need this and you’d do more harm than good. But if you’ve got a guy who hits everything off the label, this is a cheat code.
Now, if you’re a team that relies heavily on getting weak contact, umm, good luck. Swing and miss pitchers will do ok, contact or fly ball pitchers will likely pay the price.
As I understand it, any team can procure these bats, they aren’t more expensive, they’ll very likely remain legal all season. The only downside I can see for adopting this would be that it teaches your hitters bad habits as opposed to trying to help them find the barrel better via swing adjustments, so when you take it away, it could feel like yanking a carpet out from under your hitters.
If you found out someone invented a pill you could take that’s not a banned substance, but made you secrete a small amount of sticky stuff from your fingertips like Spiderman, good luck keeping any pitchers from taking it. This is just like that, minus the fear you’re turning into a mutant Spider.
Our team will have more on this later in the week, specifically how it might help or hurt certain Pirates players.
4. Major Changes Aren’t Possible Quite Yet
Unless there is an injury, players may not be recalled until they have been down for 15 days. Now, that’s different for some players. For instance, Kyle Nicolas was optioned on the 23rd, while Hunter Stratton wasn’t optioned until the 27th.
Now, that’s by rule. In other words, I can come up with other reasons why you might not want to react so quickly, but this one kinda ends the discussion for now. You might be able to claim David Bednar is injured, but you probably can’t claim he and Holderman and Bae and whomever else you want rid of all have phantom injuries.
Ji-Hwan Bae looked like crap when he played on Saturday. He had 4 at bats, and he struck out 3 of them. He pinch ran on Sunday and made 2 mistakes just there. Still, it’s 4 at bats. Is that enough to completely decide you were wrong? For fans, absolutely. For teams, not so much.
That certainly doesn’t mean you just keep using guys who aren’t performing. Meaning, just because it would be difficult to move David Bednar out and bring up a replacement, shouldn’t mean you have to use him as the closer.
I say all this because quite frankly when the Pirates decided they’re going to bump Paul Skenes to Wednesday and leave a TBA for Tuesday in the rotation, my brain started scrambling to how the team could address it and after I thought I had a hell of a plan or at least a list of possible ways they could go I saw Ethan Hullihen tweet out this rule and remind me I kinda forgot something super important before thinking this through.
Doesn’t mean it can’t happen. Just means it’s going to take someone being hurt, or “hurt”. Now if feelings being hurt is an injury, good chance Bednar is injured AF.
All that said, maybe stop trying to list off all the guys you want called up, at least for another week or so, the likelihood that they make more than one or two of these types of changes before then is very small.
5. The Offense Can’t Afford Sub-Par Bryan Reynolds
Everything we discuss this early in the season is going to suffer from the same issue, small sample size. The best thing I can do is to mention it often, because honestly you can’t really evaluate what you have if you’re going to be ready to make changes after 5, 10, even 25 at bats in this league. You’ll never find out what you have, you’ll never even find patterns to correct.
But plop this Marlins series into the middle of June, pretend these guys all have a full compliment of innings and at bats under their belts, the Pirates won’t win many series in which Bryan Reynolds has 18 at bats with 1 XBH, 5 K’s and a .578 OPS. They don’t have that kind of wiggle room.
Players are always going to have a down series here and there, and when it’s the first one, well, that sucks because it’s absolutely going to get blown up into something it probably isn’t. The scary thing about what Reynolds has done though in my eyes is put up those kind of numbers while the team he’s facing is clearly scared to death to pitch to the guy hitting behind him in Oneil Cruz. As we discussed, the guy is hitting .182, but he’s also been walked 6 times, has 4 stolen bases already and an OPS of .926.
So the Marlins were scared to death to let Oneil Cruz beat them, at least with his bat, and Bryan Reynolds helped make it possible by not being on base enough to force them to give him something to look at.
The Pirates are to blame for having so few hitters like this in the first place, a well documented issue, but that doesn’t change the fact that they turn into the Spanish translation for an American old muscle car, “Nova” AKA, Doesn’t Go when one of them isn’t doing the job.
Reynolds has seen pitches, he’s just not been on them the way he usually is and it’s really left a lot of the heavy lifting up to the guys we didn’t trust to lift.
Again, it’s not Bryan’s fault they haven’t had better backing Cruz up, but Andrew McCutchen and Jack Suwinski both have better numbers than him early on and it didn’t even make the Marlins consider changing their plan.
The players talked a bigger game than management before the season started, the potential of Reynolds and Cruz has to be the biggest reason for optimism on offense as currently constructed, and for that to play out in any fashion, BOTH have to be going.
Steel City Pirates 