When it comes to stealing bases, the Central division leaders couldn’t be more different. The Pirates rank first in baseball with 44 steals in 53 attempts; the Twins rank last with six steals in 11. But for the past ten games, these two teams have been taking a similar approach. Since the end of April, both have been ramping up their efforts, stealing far more often than they did over the first few weeks of the season. To be fair, that means something completely different for either club: for Pittsburgh, it means stealing at a rate we haven’t seen in years; for Minnesota, it means simply stealing at all. In both cases, it warrants a closer look.

In 2022, the Twins ranked last in baseball with 38 steals and 55 stolen base attempts. Their team leaders in stolen bases, Byron Buxton and Nick Gordon, had just six steals apiece. The Rangers, who led the league in steals, ran more than three times as often as the Twins:

Part of the problem was the lineup Minnesota was working with. Of its top five players by plate appearances, the fastest runner was Carlos Correa, who had a sprint speed in the 44th percentile and hasn’t been a stolen base threat since his age-21 season. Luis Arraez, Gio Urshela, Jose Miranda, and Gary Sánchez were the only other Twins with more than 450 PA, and none of those guys is winning a footrace, to put it kindly.

Even the fastest players in Minnesota were hesitant to run, however. Buxton was only on pace to add another four or five steals had he remained healthy; a player with his skills could have easily stolen 25–30 bags, at least. Presumably, he was staying put out of an abundance of caution for his physical safety, yet if that were the only explanation, it’s odd he was running as often as he did. He stole enough bases to put himself in harm’s way, but he wasn’t running enough to maximize his value on the basepaths. Other Twins who stole less than you’d expect included Gordon, Jorge Polanco, and Max Kepler. All three had above-average sprint speeds and above-average OBPs, but they attempted significantly fewer steals than in 2021. In other words, speed wasn’t the only problem. By all appearances, the Twins were discouraging their players from taking extra bases. Read the rest of this entry »

Any time something crazy happens early in the season, such as the week that Adam Duvall was leading the league in WAR, I tend to dismiss it with a single word reply of “April.” But the calendar has now flipped, and the shower-month has become the flower-month, so it’s getting a bit harder to ignore the Pirates, standing at the top of the NL Central with a 20–9 record, a whopping 10 games above last season’s victor, the currently last-place Cardinals. Nearly 20% of the season is now done, and it’s probably time to talk about whether Pittsburgh is for real.

First off, going 20–9 is always an impressive run. Teams that do that aren’t always great teams, but they’re usually at least middling and only rarely actually bad. There have been exactly 1.21 craploads of 20–9 or better runs over the last 20 years, and only two with a run that solid, the 2021 Cubs and 2005 Orioles, finished with 75 wins or fewer. And while the Pirates had more than their share of basement-dwelling opponents (the average opponent has a .430 winning percentage), great performances in baseball tend to be in environments that are most conducive to those performances. The Yankees had the best 29-game run last year, at 24–5, with 21 of those 29 games coming against non-playoff teams.

Suffice it to say that the projection systems were generally not optimistic on the idea of the Pirates being contenders in 2023. Our preseason depth charts gave them a 3% chance to win the division and a 6.5% chance of making the playoffs. ZiPS, which liked the Cardinals better than the combined projections (a prognostication that’s not looking great right now), was even more down on Pittsburgh, with only a 0.7% shot at the NL Central and 1.8% for a postseason. These weren’t hopeless numbers, but they certainly left the Pirates as a longshot. But as of the morning of May 2, our projections now have the Pirates at 18.5% to win the division and 32.3% to make the playoffs. And the updated ZiPS projections for 2023 suggest a chaotic division if everyone’s somewhere around their median projection. When you take into account Pittsburgh’s hot start, the Cubs playing very well, St. Louis’ bleak April, and Milwaukee’s pitching injuries, ZiPS sees the NL Central as wide open:

The good news for Pirates fans is that the assumptions needed to get here are not particularly aggressive. Neither ZiPS nor our Depth Charts combined projections have decided that Pittsburgh is a great team, or even a good one. In fact, both methodologies still see them finishing below .500 — Depth Charts as a .467 team, ZiPS as a .490 team. Read the rest of this entry »

The Pirates, you might have heard, are in first place at the end of April. Not only that, they’ve played like a first-place team and then some, outscoring opponents by 48 runs in 29 games. Heading into Sunday, their pitching staff had the second-best ERA and FIP in the National League. Their offense had posted the second-best wRC+ in the NL as well; based on the first month of the season, the only thing fluky about them has been the names on the backs of their jerseys. Maybe they’ll cool off, maybe they won’t, but full credit to them for an exceptional first month of the season.

So why am I singling out David Bednar?

Heading into the season, Bednar was one of the few Pirates who it was safe to assume would be good. Carlos Santana and Andrew McCutchen are big names, but they’re getting up there in years. Bryan Reynolds would be good, most likely, but perhaps not in Pirates colors. But Bednar is a rock. He was an All-Star last year, for God’s sake. Read the rest of this entry »

The good times are rolling in Pittsburgh. Though their seven-game winning streak ended on Tuesday night as they failed to hold a 7-2 lead against the Dodgers, the Pirates are off to a 16-8 start, their best since 1992, and they lead the NL Central by a game. What’s more, they’ve finally sealed a long-term deal with their star left fielder, as Bryan Reynolds has reportedly agreed to an eight-year, $106.75 million extension that covers his 2023-30 seasons.

It’s the largest contract in Pirates history, outdoing Ke’Bryan Hayes‘ eight-year, $70 million extension as the team ventures into nine-digit territory for the first time. The deal includes a six-team no-trade list, the first time in 17 years that the Pirates have included some form of no-trade protection in a contract. Notably, it does not include an opt-out clause, an item that had previously been a stumbling block when the two sides neared a deal with the same dollars-and-years framework just before Opening Day. Reynolds wanted an opt-out after 2026, meaning that the Pirates would gain only one more year of control if he were to exercise that option.

As with that proposal, the contract incorporates the 28-year-old Reynolds’ $6.75 million salary for this season, his second of arbitration eligibility (as a Super Two, he has two more remaining). He also receives a $2 million signing bonus, with salaries of $10 million and $12 million for 2024 and ’25, his final two arb years, and then $14 million for ’26 and $15 million annually for ’27-30. The Pirates hold a $20 million club option and $2 million buyout for his services in 2031, his age-36 season.

If those annual salaries seems a little light to you, you’re not alone, but the particulars of his situation make it worth a closer look. We’ll start with Dan Szymborksi’s ZiPS projection from February, which suggested a six-year, $95 million valuation for Reynolds’ 2024-29 years:

Under the actual contract, Reynolds will be paid just $81 million for those six years. On the other hand, he’ll make $15 million for what eyeballs to be about a one-win projection for 2030, so much of that shortfall comes out in the wash.

The problem for Reynolds — the reason the dollar figures aren’t bigger — is something of a perfect storm of service time and aging curves. He was stellar in 2021, making the NL All-Star team while hitting .302/.390/.522 (141 wRC+) with 6.2 WAR, but he slipped to .262/.345/.461 (125 wRC+) and 2.8 WAR last year. Even with ZiPS forecasting him at 4.0 WAR this year, going forward he projects to lose about one win for every two years as he ages. On top of that, his salary is being drastically suppressed by the arbitration system during what project to be his strongest seasons; as a free agent, he’d be worth over $30 million a year for 2023-25, but he’ll only make about 30% of that.

As Dan summarized via Twitter, “[I]t’s hard to value those seventh and eighth years very highly at all for a 3-4 win player that far away in his mid-30s. Obviously, Reynolds would have done better if he were a free agent this year. But he’s not and this price is the product of his age and MLB’s service-time rules; Reynolds just didn’t have a great deal of leverage because the Pirates already had nearly all the years they wanted.”

That’s a bit of a harsh reality, but it’s offset by Reynolds getting the stability and security he valued. Though he requested a trade in December after the team reportedly offered a six-year, $80 million extension — over $50 million short of the eight-year, $134 million deal he was seeking — he cared enough to return to the table and found a way to stay, even forgoing the opt-out.

It’s nice to see Pirates fans get nice things for a change, and the structure of Reynolds’ deal is such that even by the craptastic standards of the way the team has been run under owner Bob Nutting, none of the annual salaries should be backbreaking. Unless his option is picked up, Reynolds won’t even set the franchise’s single-season record for salary, and not until 2027 would he surpass Andrew McCutchen for the highest salary solely paid by the team, which turns out to be an important distinction given their dismal history:

Is Reynolds as good as prime Cutch? No, but McCutchen signed his six-year, $51.5 million extension 11 years ago, and industry inflation has obviously pushed salaries upwards since then. Someone was bound to break McCutchen’s franchise record before the next ice age arrived, and it makes sense that it was Reynolds, whose 6.2 WAR in 2021 was the highest for a Pirate since McCutchen’s 7.4 WAR in ’14.

As for his current performance, when I checked in on him just a couple of weeks ago, Reynolds was off to a sizzling start, hitting .356/.367/.778, leading the NL in slugging percentage and homers (five), and ranking fifth in both WAR (0.7) and wRC+ (184); amid that tear, he was named NL Player of the Week. Now he’s down to .294/.319/.553, and his 127 wRC+ is just two points ahead of last year and two behind his preseason ZiPS projection. Regression doesn’t mess around, kids.

That said, even given the ups and downs, Reynolds is hitting the ball harder this season than he has in the past, and the sample sizes are either approaching or past the point where they start to stabilize, so his performance is worth an update:

Via Baseball Prospectus’ Russell Carleton, exit velocity begins to stabilize around 40 batted ball events and barrel rate at 50 BBE, so you can start to take what he’s done thus far seriously; he’s in the 84th percentile for the former and 92nd percentile for the latter. Ground ball, fly ball, and hard-hit rates begin to stabilize at 80 BBE, a total he should reach soon after he returns from the bereavement list. (Reynolds left the team for a personal matter on Sunday, which allowed the Pirates to recall 33-year-old career minor leaguer Drew Maggi, who has yet to get into a game — what’s Derek Shelton waiting for?)

With more balls in the air, a higher average exit velocity, and more frequent barrels, Reynolds has an expected batting average of .314 (95th percentile) and an expected slugging percentage of .604 (93rd percentile); he’s fallen off from the major league-leading .896 he put up during the season’s first two weeks, but that was always going to happen.

The good news for the Pirates is that even as Reynolds has cooled off, other players have stepped up, to the point that Connor Joe (.328/.423/.590, 174 wRC+), Jack Suwinski (.269/.385/.635, 166 wRC+) and McCutchen (.270/.371/.527, 141 wRC+) are outhitting him within a lineup that ranks sixth in the NL in wRC+ (108) and fourth in scoring (4.92 runs per game). Meanwhile, on the other side of the ball the Pirates are allowing only 3.92 runs per game, the NL’s fourth-lowest rate, and they’re tied with the Brewers for third in the league in run differential (+24) behind only the Cubs (+45) and Braves (+38). It’s still early enough not to get too wound up about their start, but for the first time in awhile, the Pirates are offering significant measures of hope, and wrapping up Reynolds for the future is something worth celebrating.

The Pittsburgh Pirates have been a pleasant surprise so far this season. Far exceeding the low expectations placed upon them by prognosticators, the Bucs boast a 16-7 record, tops in the senior circuit. Their best hitter has likewise been a pleasant surprise. Sixty-six plate appearances into his fourth big league campaign and his first in the Steel City, Connor Joe is slashing a robust (and obviously unsustainable) .357/.455/.643 with 10 extra-base hits and a 194 wRC+. (His .467 wOBA comes with a .384 xWOBA and a .439 BABIP.) Over his last six games — all Pittsburgh wins — the 30-year-old outfielder has gone 9-for-19 with three doubles, a triple, a home run, and a pair of walks.

Joe talked about his evolution as a hitter, including what he learned from former big league slugger Phil Plantier, when the Pirates visited Fenway Park earlier this month.

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David Laurila: Let’s start with my favorite icebreaker question: Do you view hitting as more of an art or as more of a science?

Connor Joe: “Oh man. It’s a good mix of both. It’s a combination of everything, right? It’s science, because you need to be educated on what the opponent is trying to do to you. But it’s also not so scientific. It’s more athletic, right? So yeah, it’s a good mixture of a lot of things.” Read the rest of this entry »

The Pirates are off to a surprisingly hot 13–7 start, tied for the fifth-best record in the majors, and they have a burgeoning offense to thank. At the close of play on Thursday, after scoring 37 runs over a four-game stretch, they rank second in the National League with 103 runs scored, are tied for fourth in the majors with 27 home runs, and are third with a .446 team slugging percentage and eighth with a .339 wOBA. They’ve managed to limit strikeouts — they’re seventh among major league teams with a 20.6% strikeout rate – and have improved their walk rate by two percentage points since last year. Pirates pitching has handled their side of business well enough — their 12th-ranked 4.03 ERA represents a significant improvement from 2022 but looks a little cleaner than their 17th-ranked ​​4.30 FIP and 22nd-ranked 4.55 xFIP — but the real bright light has been that offense.

We’re already getting to the appropriate time in this piece to repeat FanGraphs’ April refrain: it’s early. But when looking for answers this early in the season, I like to follow a general rule of thumb: the more granular the data, the better. As Russell Carleton wrote in this 2011 piece, “The way to increase reliability of a measure is to have more observations in the data set.” This early in the season, we can often learn more reliably from statistics that are based on every pitch a hitter sees or every swing he takes — something like swing rate or contact rate — than metrics with at-bats or plate appearances in the denominator. This makes plate discipline and pitch selection a good area to explore looking for answers in April.

In the case of the Pirates, improved pitch selection has been a great triumph so far this year — and it’s not that they’re necessarily being more patient, but more that they’re making better decisions. The team is swinging at 45.5% of offerings this year, down just a tenth of a point from last year, but far more of those swings are targeting pitches in the zone. Pittsburgh ranks second in the majors with a 27.9% chase percentage, an improvement from 31.7% last year. After finishing dead last in 2022 in zone swing percentage at 65.3%, the Pirates are all the way up to sixth this season with a 69.3% rate. The improvements have been nearly universal, but even as their depth has been tested with injuries to Oneil Cruz and Ji-Man Choi, a few picky Pirates are leading the way. Read the rest of this entry »

Oneil Cruz’s fractured fibula is the biggest story surrounding the Pirates. On the positive side, the return of Andrew McCutchen to the fold is neat, and Tuesday night’s walk-off home run by Ji Hwan Bae was pretty cool. To these eyes, however, the most noteworthy thing about Pittsburgh thus far — even beyond the fact that the team’s 7–4 start is its best since 2018 — has been the torrid play of Bryan Reynolds. The 28-year-old outfielder has been the one of the game’s hottest hitters, and he’s done it as progress toward a contract extension has ground to a halt just when it seemed that a deal to keep him in black and gold was within reach.

Reynolds ended last weekend as one of seven players who had collected hits in every game this season (José Abreu, José Ramírez, Nolan Arenado, Randy Arozarena, Bryson Stott, and Jordan Walker were the others). He and Abreu both went hitless in Monday night’s Pirates-Astros contest, and by the close of play Tuesday, only the streaks of Stott and Walker remained intact. Still, season-opening hitting streaks come and go pretty quickly; of more interest is that Reynolds has been putting up eye-opening numbers. Through Tuesday, he’s hitting .356/.367/.778, leading the NL in slugging percentage and homers (five) and ranking fifth in WAR (0.7) and wRC+ (184). Mind you, those numbers looked even more impressive before his 1-for-8 on Monday and Tuesday nights, but the sudden itch to write about Adam Duvall, an even hotter hitter in this young season, going down with a wrist injury got in my way.

For Duvall, Reynolds, and everyone else, we’re still in Small Sample Theater territory, but as with the Red Sox slugger, some underlying numbers have me wondering if we’re seeing real improvements to his game. For starters, like Duvall, he’s cut his strikeout rate dramatically: Last year he struck out 23% of the time, and for his career he’s at 21.5%, but this year, that’s down to 10.2%. Given that strikeout rates stabilize around 60 PA and that Reynolds is at 49, this could wind up being noteworthy, though unlike Duvall, his swinging-strike rate hasn’t fallen quite so dramatically, going from 12.9% last year to 11.9% this year. His 31.1% chase rate is down 4.5 points from last year, when he tried to hack his way out of a slow start, and is just half a point lower than his career mark, but even so, he’s walking in just 4.1% of his plate appearances, less than half of his 9.7% career mark.

All of this translates to more contact than usual for Reynolds, and he’s making the most of it. Seriously: He’s hitting the ball in the air much more than ever, and his average exit velocity, barrel rate, and hard-hit rate are beyond anything in the Bryan Reynolds catalogue. Read the rest of this entry »

The Pirates are off to a surprisingly hot start, winning six of their first 10 games and sitting in second place in the NL Central. But that fair weather cloud has a dark lining, as the team’s young shortstop, Oneil Cruz, landed on the injured list on Monday with a fractured ankle. While Cruz’s injury was (thankfully) well below Jason Kendall’s broken ankle running to first in 1999 on the gruesomeness scale, it was enough to require Sunday night surgery. The early timetable for Cruz indicates that his 2023 season isn’t necessarily finished, but it’ll likely be four months, or sometime in mid-August, until he’s likely to be back in playing form.

Cruz’s injury came on a literal bang-bang play, one which led to some fisticuffs, or at least some minor shoveicuffs. With runners on the corners and no outs in a 1–0 game in the sixth, Ke’Bryan Hayes hit a bouncer off of White Sox starter Michael Kopech. Yoán Moncada at third was shallow enough that trading a run for a double play wasn’t really possible; the play at home was the easier one. What exactly happened is a minor controversy, but the basic facts are that after running on the outside of the foul line, Cruz took an inside line as he approached the plate, appeared to stumble on the dirt, and careened into catcher Seby Zavala knees first.

I don’t get the impression from the play that Cruz intended to take out Zavala; if you were going for the 1970s-style demolition derby smash that looked great on highlight packages and poor in CT scans, you don’t intentionally put on the brakes and then kind of fall into the catcher clumsily. You don’t see a lot of NFL coaches advising their linebackers to tackle with their knees. Zavala was mic’d up and instantly offered a few not-so-minced oaths, but from his point of view, it’s hard to blame him. From his perspective in the heat of the moment, a runner altered his path slightly to make contact, even though he left space for a good slide, and practically groined him with a couple of knees. It wasn’t quite as bad a slide attempt as Adley Rutschman‘s Tekken-style spin kick into Christian Arroyo’s head, but it was up there. Carlos Santana then came out to have words with Zavala, which resulted in the benches emptying. Control of the situation was restored quickly, however, and we had no Royal Rumble-style brawling. I’m not here to judge behavior, though, at least unless you vote Szymborski to be the Grand Inquisitor of Baseball in the 2024 election. Read the rest of this entry »

Three Sundays ago, the answer to this column’s weekly quiz was Carlos Santana. The question was, “Which player has appeared in the most regular-season games over the past 10 seasons?” and the now-Pittsburgh Pirates first baseman had played in 1,440 — 13 more than Paul Goldschmidt and 40 more than Freddie Freeman and Anthony Rizzo.

Santana professed not to be aware of the distinction when I mentioned it to him earlier this week. He did seem pleased to hear it, and “humbly prideful” might be the best way to describe his reaction.

“I prepare,” said Santana, who celebrated his 37th birthday yesterday. “I prepare my body. I prepare mentally. I also try to enjoy the game every day. That’s why I can play a lot. The game is my passion. This is my 14th year and I want to play two more. Or maybe three more. Whatever God tells me, and what my body says I can do.”

Count Andrew McCutchen among those who are impressed by his teammate’s reliability and durability over the years.

“It’s really good, to be honest,” said McCutchen, who was likewise unaware of Santana’s distinction. “To be able to do it how he’s done it — he’s in [the lineup] more times than not —shows that he’s stayed healthy, which is a key to doing that. You have to be good enough to do it, too. You’ve got a whole lot of variables to be able to do what he’s done.” Read the rest of this entry »

Let me tell you a couple of things about Jack Suwinski. First, when Suwinski was still a prospect last winter, Eric Longenhagen had this to say about the young player’s future:

30. Jack Suwinski, DH

“On-paper performance is especially important for a hitter like Suwinski because he’s a positionless defender who needs to rake to have any sort of big league role […] Because he lacks a true position, Suwinski’s chances of playing a significant role increase with the likely implementation of the universal DH.”

It’s rare to see a prospect listed as a designated hitter. Across all 30 lists our team put together last year, only nine ranked prospects had the letters “DH” written next to their name. That’s less than one percent. Even more unusual was the 20/20 grade Eric gave Suwinksi’s fielding tool. That’s the worst grade you can get: a present 20 and a future 20. Essentially, it means a guy is unplayable in the field with little to no hope of improving in the future. Often, the only time you’ll see a 20/20 in any category is to describe a catcher’s speed. Former FanGraphs prospect guru Kiley McDaniel didn’t even bother to define a 20 grade in his overview of the 20-80 scouting scale, explaining “It’s almost never relevant for players that I’ll be writing about or any of their tools.” Read the rest of this entry »