8-2-25 – By Gary Morgan – @garymo2007 on X
I was working my ass off this whole week covering the trade deadline. Its very hard to not just pivot entirely to the reactionary side of things. You’re just trying your best to keep up with it, cover it, and yes, move on from it onto the next thing.
So eventually I got sick of being mad about the returns, or who they didn’t deal, and I started thinking to myself, might there be something better to be mad at? I really think there is, the way they’ve handled prospects.
And I don’t mean that they’ve had a ton who absolutely deserved MLB time and effort, but as with everything the Pirates contradictions are many on this front.
Let’s talk through some of my thoughts here, because what really got me going was the decision to keep these rentals on the roster and push off the playing time for prospects and young players yet again.
The best place to start is a guy like Liover Peguero.
I guess I could have typed it all out, but look at this. Called to the Bigs for the first time in 2021, and here we are 4 years later, he’s had 2,539 minor league plate appearances with a .742 OPS. Not great, certainly not perfect. Absolutely not a lock to be an MLB mainstay, that’s not the argument I’m making.
No, I’m just saying, that’s about 2.5 times more than enough to know what he’s going to learn in the minors. 253 major league plate appearances resulting in a .653 OPS. Again, not great, but what you should learn from his MiLB time is he probably has at least a .700 OPS bat in him, you know, if you let him play.
For most of 2023 while Oneil Cruz was injured, Tucapita Marcano, Chris Owings and Alika Williams got the playing time.
OK, I mean, the team traded for Alika Williams, he could play the position and he was coming off a good stretch in Tampa’s system. Tucapita was a prospect Cherington had tried to get twice before finally landing him, of course he wanted to see him. Liover got 213 plate appearances that year in the majors, a decent look, more than either of the other two.
The team moved on from Marcano, and Williams although he’s still in the system, and all of 2024 went by with Peguero taking 10 MLB plate appearances. This is the year they moved Cruz to CF, and acquired Isiah Kiner-Falefa to be the short stop.
IKF has been fine here, but this team has desperately lacked power, OPS in general.
That’s a lot, I get it. You can make a perfectly good excuse why Peguero hasn’t really been given a chance up here but this is the story with a lot of guys.
This is a player that has nothing left to learn in AAA, you’ve run the clock on him to the point he has no more options after this year, and you’ve left yourself all of 54 games to see what he is before you have to decide if this guy is at the very least part of your 26-man or he’s being DFA’d.
In those 54 games, now you also have to somehow keep a veteran Kiner-Falefa busy too, so clearly all 54 aren’t going to Peguero, even as they transition to bouncing him around the diamond.
Think about it, how are you to make an educated decision on this guy?
The Pirates love blocking up these positions with rentals, or for some reason, the guys who were roughly in the same spot as Peguero that this team acquires, well they too get priority. This might make sense if Peguero was say, Huntington’s last deal, but it wasn’t, it was Cherington’s first.
This is one player.
Cherington picks and chooses winners and losers.
Jared Triolo is a premium defender, but again, this team’s biggest issue has been offense, or lack thereof. Since 2023 Jared has been handed 821 MLB plate appearances, good for an OPS of .637.
I can’t promise you Peguero would be better.
But this entire conversation has not been to talk about one hard done by player. No, I’m trying to understand why you’d acquire a 29 year old “blocked” prospect and then keep a rental on top of Peguero?
This doesn’t mention Nick Yorke, Billy Cook, Ronny Simon, Malcom Nunez, not SS candidates, but certainly guys you could consider for 3B.
Again, not all, or even any of these guys have some right to get a chance, but we sure as hell should get a chance to see them play.
You sell the fans that you’ve acquired this talent, close to the league. You go out of your way to describe to us that you have to take risks. You have to get players who haven’t had opportunity yet, but might turn into something when you give it to them.
And yet, rarely do they actually do what I just repeated directly from their mouths.
Next year, in an effort to “try” they’ll sign more rentals if history is our guide, and they too will prevent us from getting eyes on any of these players. And they’ll be right, in a way, the rental will probably be more prepared for MLB, probably have more consistent at bats. What they could provide, well, you’ll have a good long record of evidence, so you won’t be shocked by what they get done.
See, it seems like a great plan, because at the time, you’re telling yourself this is my baseline, I’ll simply move them when one of my prospects shows me it’s time.
Here’s where it breaks down, this team never trusts a prospect until they’ve done it up here. Most don’t, honestly, but the difference here is, they simply don’t want to ever try it.
By the time they do, it’s desperation time, not unlike where we are with Peguero.
Again, maybe that’s on Peguero, he never fully pushed for an opportunity that made it overwhelming, but Nick Gonzales did last year while Jared Triolo ate up 2B opportunities.
There’s always going to be an element of picking and choosing, and you’re always going to like certain players better than others, but you do this entire endeavor a disservice when you can’t bring yourself to try these players.
Let’s say, Peguero takes full advantage of these 50 some games. Will that be enough to be SURE he’s a guy you should start with in 2026?
Let’s lower the threshold, let’s say at the very least he has proven himself at least capable of being an MLB player. Next step on this club if he were to have options is to have him play AGAIN in AAA so he can get regular playing time. Because that’s never an option in MLB right?
So you’re stuck in a box. No answer that will come this year will satisfy anyone that he’s the answer, if they keep him he has to make the team in 2026, or DFA him. Someone else will pick him up and then he’s essentially Alexander Canario.
Which begs another question, how do other teams do it? I mean, is it just that we draft or develop especially bad, or do the Pirates just have an aversion to the hard work they need to do?
If you ask me, this comes from the Pirates putting more stock in trying to reach adequacy prematurely, to show faux progress over the good of the effort itself. We should be 2 solid years into Peguero. We should know what he is entirely, but instead, we needed to see throngs of 1 year deals, flipped or worse, retained for little to no gain.
It’s not just the training, it’s the opportunity, or lack thereof when the training has been done, when nothing is left but to actually see what the hell they can do in the majors. Long ago, when the team tore down that was a time to sign some free agents, reasonable ones, free agents for 2 or 3 years at strategic positions. They’d make for more valuable trades when you do move them, providing you allowed a a youngster to actually do such a horrible thing, I mean lord forbid you pay a guy who isn’t starting because one of the 37 prospects you deal for shows promise.
No matter what subject you look at covering this baseball team, the problem is always fear.
Afraid to play young talent
- Because if they struggle, they might drop in rankings, or lose value in a potential trade, or embarrass someone you paid money for on the open market
- Because starting their clock means having a plan about how to use the player and not miss their prime years because you either took too long, or went too early and couldn’t adjust
- Because fans don’t see rookie players as trying, and this team can’t for the life of them understand that means they’d rather you bring in a real free agent you don’t plan to have beaten out, whereas a guy like Tommy Pham sends them begging for a rookie.
- Because analytics are never going to tell you a rookie, a normal rookie, not Paul Skenes, is going to be ready. Major league talent takes major league playing time to become a major league player. At some point you always have to pay the price, and the price is growing pains on the field of play.
This team is afraid of just about every risk, and there is none bigger aside from spending money of course than prospect development. At the end of the day it takes guts to trust your scouts, your development team, your player, to come to the major leagues and continue to learn. And that’s what it is, continuing the learning process, not the end of the race, just an indication you’ve finished the qualifying round successfully, you still have a long way to go to win.
I say this from the perspective of what a team should be thinking, not you. You as a fan have every right to get frustrated way too early with a kid. You have every right to irrationally call for DFAs for guys who were top 100 prospects not 3 months ago but have struggled in a couple outings.
Teams don’t have that luxury. Well, teams that have to get their talent from development can’t anyway. The Dodgers can wait for a prospect that makes it undoubtable. The Pirates, well they have to be smarter than that. They have to realize that the .650 OPS they can get now has a chance to grow into .700 or .740, or if the prospect actually has what it takes, something north of .800 and an MLB regular. Do this early, you might have 4 maybe even 5 years of control left of an actual MLB player, affordably. Do it late and you might have 2 or 3 years you want before ultimately deciding he’s too old to invest in. Do it the way the Pirates do, and most of the time you’ll wind up with a feckless and used car lot feeling AAA level.
These are the things that tell me what really needs to change here on the baseball ops side. Sure, they don’t make great decisions all the time, but they make enough good ones on talent that they should be finding more nuggets in their sifting. Instead, this team stops sifting as soon as they don’t see a 2 ounce piece.
Because of that, their fans go to be hungry, year after year.
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