2022 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 a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Pittsburgh Pirates.

Batters

The offensive projections are kind of bleak, but they also represent the 2022 highlight for the Pirates, at least if ZiPS is correct. The offense basically consists of three highly interesting (in a good way) players.

When all is said and done, Oneil Cruz may end up having the best career of the three. The team’s sixth-ranked prospect entering 2021, Cruz destroyed minor league pitching on his return to Double-A. In a week for Triple-A Indianapolis, Cruz went 11-for-21 with five homers in six games, resulting in him getting a call-up for the final weekend of the season. Cruz is a physical anomaly, a 6-foot-7 player who can credibly play shortstop and run the bases very well. While there will naturally always be whispers about a shortstop that big staying at the position — and Cruz has gained about 30 pounds since his early prospect days — the Pirates aren’t in a position that should preclude them from letting him play there as long as he can. It’s what the O’s should have done with Manny Machado years ago, but they instead prioritized J.J. Hardy. The projection is even more exciting when you realize how few games ZiPS is projecting for Cruz due to various injuries and the missing COVID season.

I hope that Ke’Bryan Hayes isn’t doomed to always have his production compared to the impressive offensive numbers he put up in his debut in 2020. Coming off a .751 OPS Triple-A stint in 2019, he was never really supposed to be that type of player. Instead, the expectation for Hayes should have been that of a roughly average offensive third baseman with solid power upside and a fantastic glove. Still, 2021’s offense was likely on the low end of what we’ll see from Hayes offensively, as he was dealing with wrist issues all year. A computer system is going to have a lot of trouble with a guy playing through an injury — as will anyone making an evaluation of a player in that situation — and I would definitely take the over on this projection.

And then there’s Bryan Reynolds, whose projection will likely inspire readers to take to Twitter to tell me that regression toward the mean doesn’t count this time. Breakout seasons are a frequent source of this, generally because people wildly overestimate how often breakout seasons actually establish a new baseline of performance. There’s a reason why “just use last year” performs so poorly as a projection system. But let’s do a little better and illustrate this phenomenon.

To get a quick sense, I looked at every hitter who had a season of at least five WAR, but fewer than seven WAR, at ages 25-27. I further limited it to players for whom this was at least a two-win improvement on their last career-best single-season WAR to that point. In other words, I captured players with breakouts of similar size and quality at similar ages to Reynolds (Age 26, 5.5 WAR, previous best 3.2). I also eliminated the players who didn’t play the following season (all six of these players served in World War II). That leaves us with 146 players.

The average WAR for those 146 players in their breakout year was 5.8. The average in the following season? 3.5, with a median of 3.4:

• 15 of the 146 players (10.2%) matched the WAR from their breakout year.
• 33 of the 146 players (22.6%) managed at least five wins the following season.
• 61 of the 146 players (41.8%) fell short of three wins the following season.
• In the following season, 20.5% fell short of two wins, 6% were short of one win, and one unfortunate was below replacement level.

The player who was below replacement level was Cito Gaston, who hit .318/.364/.543 for the 1970 Padres. In his remaining eight seasons in the majors, he hit .245/.286/.375 with -3.4 WAR, though he had better fortune as a manager. If I limited the scope of the career-bests to only include players with two-to-three win breakouts (Reynolds’ was 2.3), none of the basic stats changed. In that case, the average WAR the following season was 3.4; nothing else changed meaningfully.

Does this mean that Reynolds won’t match his 2021 season? Of course not. Some of those 146 players did. By and large, they had good, long careers; the players in this group finished with an average of 31.7 WAR (ZiPS projects Reynolds to finish with 30.9). Fourteen of those players ended up in the Hall of Fame, including Honus Wagner, Edgar Martinez, Willie McCovey, Andre Dawson, and Billy Williams, and others might some day (Joey Votto, Kenny Lofton, Jim Edmonds, Ken Boyer). If Reynolds can establish his 2021 as a new baseline, he may join them. But that’s not the way to bet in 2022.

Just to finish this section, while there’s no doubt a lot of consternation about the Pirates trading Jacob Stallings, he’s also a catcher who turns 32 next week. And the team didn’t replace him with a butcher behind the plate; Roberto Pérez has a long history of being a solid defensive backstop. In this case, it’s just a smart baseball move; having both Pérez and Zach Thompson is more valuable than just having Stallings. Stallings is entering his first year of arbitration — at least under the old CBA — and at $5 million for Pérez, the swap might actually end up being more expensive for the Pirates, not less.

Pitchers

My plan was to write so many words about the offense that my editor might not notice that I didn’t write anything about the pitching. But editors are tricksy, so I’m going to have to do it.

ZiPS does not care for the pitchers currently employed by the Pittsburgh Pirates. With the Baltimore Orioles, ZiPS at least liked John Means, saw some great, quick upside in Grayson Rodriguez, and gave the bullpen passable marks. So think of this pitching staff as The Orioles Without the Good Parts, which sounds like the catchphrase for the least successful advertising campaign in the history of commerce.

At $2 million, José Quintana has the benefit of at least being interesting. While he underperformed what the Cubs were expecting when they sent Eloy Jiménez to the White Sox, he was rarely awful and generally durable until he lacerated his thumb washing dishes and eventually required surgery. (This is why I own a dishwasher!) Quintana’s contract is basically beans in baseball terms, and if he bounces back, the Pirates could get a pretty good return in trade come July. Plus, the team has to actually play the season, and to do so, the Pirates have to figure out how to get something like 4,000 batters out, a task they’re poorly equipped to handle.

All joking aside, while none of the Pirates’ starting pitchers are even-money to be two-win contributors in 2022, at least some will get there, and the organization is quite deep in those one-to-two win pitchers. The book’s still not closed on Mitch Keller, and Zach Thompson was quietly effective in Miami and could crafty-righty his way into being a mid-rotation fixture. Roansy Contreras shot up the prospect rankings in 2021, figuring out how to punch out batters at a rate he hadn’t been able to pre-COVID, all without adding walks into the mix. Contreras projects with an ERA+ over 100, the only projected full-time starter to do so.

As for the bullpen, ZiPS does really like David Bednar, a hard thrower with a splitter towards the fastball side of the spectrum, who appeared to have a breakout in 2021.

As for the rest of the bullpen, lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod FIP tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis WAR nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate 162 2/3 innings velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur walk rate sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, Colorado Rockies sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

Will the Pirates ever field a consistently competitive team? Perhaps, but it’s unlikely that it will happen in 2022. The bigger picture is murky, however; the team’s last period of playoff relevance fell short in large part because ownership wasn’t willing to invest significantly in the team during the years when that investment mattered. As long as the team refuses to use savings from down cycles to fund bursts in the up cycles, the Pirates will be doomed to brief spurts of high-quality play.

Players are listed with their most recent teams wherever possible. This includes players who are unsigned, players who will miss 2022 due to injury, and players who were released in 2021. So yes, if you see Joe Schmoe, who quit baseball back in August to form a big band orchestra that only plays nu-metal versions of baroque cantatas, he’s still listed here intentionally. ZiPS is assuming a league with an ERA of 4.36, similar to the post-June substance-enforcement environment.

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 that 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 assuming that the designated hitter will continue in force in 2022.

ZiPS is agnostic about future playing time by design. For more information about ZiPS, please refer to this article, or get angry at Dan on Twitter.