4-18-2025 – By Michael Castrignano – @412DoublePlay on X
As the Pirates welcome the Cleveland Guardians to town this weekend, they’ll be seeing the return of Luis Ortiz, who was traded to Cleveland this past offseason as part of the Spencer Horowitz deal.
Ortiz was signed out of the Dominican Republic in 2018, working his way through the system before debuting for the Bucs with some eye-popping stuff.
Over his tenure in Pittsburgh, Ortiz bounced between the rotation and bullpen posting a combined 3.93 ERA across 238.1 innings from 2022 to 2024.
He enters play today with a 6.06 ERA over his first 16.1 frames for the Guardians but is fresh off one of the best outings of his career.
While his fastball doesn’t reach the heights he displayed when he debuted, it still has some punch, averaging 96 up in the zone. Unfortunately for Ortiz, he hasn’t been effective with the offering with opposing hitters batting .318 and slugging .545 against it so far this season.
Ortiz adds in a mid-80s slider, low-90s cutter, mid-90s sinker and a high-80s changeup.
He’ll work the cutter up in the zone almost interchangeably against lefties and righties but stays lower with the other pitches, going slider/sinker heavy when facing right handed hitters and pivoting to the changeup as a secondary weapon versus lefties.
He leaned heavily on his cutter in his last outing but was seeing swings-and-misses on his 4-seamer, with 8 of his 17 whiffs and 6 of his 10 strikeouts coming against the pitch.
Buccos need to be geared up for the high heat. Ortiz has struggled with locating his secondary stuff in the past and if you can spit on those and sit on the fastball, Ortiz might have a very short and very bad welcome back to the Burgh.
Steel City Pirates 
No doubt it has occurred before, probably even for the Pirates, but it can’t be particularly common for consecutive games against different teams to feature starters who began their MLB careers with the like opponent.
Hoping for a biiiit ruder of a welcome back than Williams, though, yeah
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