2020 ZiPS Projections: Pittsburgh Pirates

After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for eight years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Pittsburgh Pirates.

Batters

This depth chart is a little uglier than a few days ago thanks to the trade of Starling Marte to the Arizona Diamondbacks. (For Marte’s projection, I command thee peruse the scrivenings of my colleague Jay Jaffe.)

The departure of Marte shakes up the outfield a bit, leaving the Pirates with no obvious “good” option in left field and possibly ensuring that Bryan Reynolds plays center, where ZiPS is not at all a fan of his defense. And this may not be the last major change we see from the Pirates, who appear to be entering a full-scale rebuild. The team has little star power to actually build around and while they have a number of solid players in the lineup — Josh Bell, Reynolds, and Gregory Polanco are all good — they lack an impact player who seems likely to be part of the next good Pirates team, as the Braves had with Freddie Freeman when they entered their rebuild. Reynolds will probably stick around due to his limited service time, but I’d be mildly surprised to see the other two still on the roster this time next year.

Speaking of Polanco, he’s a bit like Dansby Swanson in that he was a top prospect who has just kind of become “a guy.” That’s fine and all, but ZiPS sees him as past the age where there’s real upside remaining; the system used to see superstar potential in Polanco every year until about 2018.

In the short-term, outside of left field, third base stands out as the biggest issue. Colin Moran has been a middling enough hitter to stick at third, but his defense has taken giant steps in the wrong direction, to the extent that I think he’s done as a starter when the team’s next third baseman unceremoniously shoves him off the hot corner.

The offense won’t be Detroit-lousy, but the ceiling is very limited and it’s hard to see a scenario in which they flip the script.

Pitchers

It’s not a good sign when your top projected starter and the top projected reliever won’t actually be on the team for the upcoming season. Jameson Taillon had Tommy John surgery in August, the second such procedure he’s undergone, and will miss the entire 2020 season. Felipe Vázquez faces about two dozen extremely serious criminal charges, including statutory sexual assault, covering multiple incidents and seems unlikely to play baseball again.

Like the offense, neither the rotation nor the bullpen are likely to be horror shows. ZiPS projects the Pirates to have four starting pitchers who’ll hang around league average, but doesn’t envision many scenarios in which they surprise and become a top 10 unit. Chris Archer may have salvaged his career by making his two-seamer walk the plank, leading to a 3.29 FIP in 41 second-half innings pitched, but it’s still risky to count on him and I worry about any pitcher who missed time with shoulder inflammation. ZiPS is sunnier than Steamer is when it comes to Trevor Williams, who the FIP gods brutally abandoned in 2019, but the optimism here is that he’s a mid-rotation starter, not someone who can anchor the rotation.

I feel like a broken record, but the story is largely the same with the bullpen. Keone Kela is the only reliever ZiPS seeing as being obviously better than average, with most of the pen hovering in that 100-to-108 ERA+ range. ZiPS hasn’t given up on Nick Burdi, but I’m not quite sure he actually still exists at this point. If Burdi’s healthy, he’s probably one of the few real breakout candidates on the team.

Prospects

Now if you want a player who ZiPS does like, turn your eyes to Ke’Bryan Hayes, the son of ex-Pirate Charlie Hayes. He’s a very different type of player from his dad, who was never exalted for his defense. Scouts have raved about Ke’Bryan’s glove, and the probability-based zDEF that ZiPS uses agrees whole-heartedly. The +9 defensive projection for Hayes is actually ZiPS trying to be conservative due to the general difficulty in minor-league defensive statistics. If ZiPS trusted zDEF as much as it trusts the metrics used in the majors, Hayes would actually have a projection of +15 at third. He should be the player mentioned above who dispatches Moran, and imminently.

While it would be fun to see a 6-foot-7 shortstop, ZiPS thinks that Oneil Cruz‘s time at the position should be ending in the near-future, projecting him at roughly 11 runs worse than average per 150 defensive games at short. Cole Tucker’s upside is less than Cruz’s, but ZiPS sees him as being a serviceable shortstop in the majors for awhile, projecting him to finish with 1200 hits and 15 WAR in the bigs. In other words, probably about where Kevin Newman, the incumbent shortstop, will end up.

As for the pitching, ZiPS sees Mitch Keller as the primary source of upside and the only pitching prospect in the organization with a career projection north of 10 WAR. That’s not quite as depressing as it sounds, mainly because most of the team’s pitching prospects are in the low minors and thus, it’s a bit of a crapshoot. It’s likely some of those pitchers join Keller across the 10-WAR threshold in the next year or two. ZiPS just isn’t prepared to guess which ones yet.

One pedantic note for 2020: for the WAR graphic, I’m using FanGraphs’ depth charts playing time, not the playing time ZiPS spits out, so there will be occasional differences in WAR totals.

Ballpark graphic courtesy Eephus League. Depth charts constructed by way of those listed here.

Players are listed with their most recent teams wherever possible. This includes players who are unsigned, players who will miss 2020 due to injury, and players who were released in 2019. So yes, if you see Joe Schmoe, who quit baseball back in June to form a ska-cowpunk Luxembourgian bubblegum pop-death metal band, he’s still listed here intentionally.

Both hitters and pitchers are ranked by projected zWAR — which is to say, WAR values as calculated by me, Dan Szymborski, whose surname is spelled with a z. WAR values might differ slightly from those which appear in the full release of ZiPS. Finally, I will advise anyone against — and might karate chop anyone guilty of — merely adding up WAR totals on a depth chart to produce projected team WAR.

ZiPS is agnostic about future playing time by design. For more information about ZiPS, please refer to this article.