As a rule, teams tend to be less aggressive, and take fewer chances, when behind in games. The logic is sound, but at the same time, is it really necessary? Is there not often something to gain by pushing the envelope and putting pressure on the opposing side, regardless of the score? I asked that question to Derek Shelton earlier this week.

“I think it’s game-situational,” the Pirates manager replied. “The question I would [throw] back to you — this is rhetorical, of course — is ‘What’s the variation in terms of number of runs when you start to take chances, or don’t take chances?’ If it’s three or less, you probably have a greater chance of being aggressive. If you get to the point where you’re at four-plus, you have to be very careful… because the risk-reward may not play out.”

Going deep with runners on is arguably the best way to erase multi-run deficits, but that’s not a reward Shelton has seen much of since taking the helm in Pittsburgh prior to last season. The Pirates hit just 22 home runs with men on base in 2020. Only the Texas Rangers, with 20, hit fewer. And there weren’t a ton of solos, either. All told, Willie Stargell’s old team out-homered only the Arizona Diamondbacks and the St. Louis Cardinals.

Of course, not every good team has a lineup full of bashers. Your father’s Cardinals are a prime example. In the 1980s, St. Louis had multiple championship-caliber clubs that were largely bereft of power. They made their hay by motoring around the base paths. I brought up how it might be interesting to look back at how often they ran when trailing by multiple runs.

Shelton retorted with unassailable logic. Read the rest of this entry »

According to Stanford Healthcare’s website, a chondral defect “refers to a focal area of damage to the articular cartilage (the cartilage that lines the end of the bones).” It can be caused either by injury or by a preexisting disorder, and it is often not repairable. Efforts to treat the defect can include a process in which non-viable cartilage is removed and small holes are made in the bone to create pathways for stem cells to travel to the area of missing cartilage, with the hope that the cells will create new healthy tissue. It can also be fixed with bone and cartilage from a donor “that is specifically matched to the size and dimensions of the defect.” In any case, the procedure is an extremely delicate one, and recovery is a slow, arduous process with no guarantee of success.

After years of pain in his left knee, however, a procedure like those was something that left-handed pitcher Tyler Anderson could no longer put off. He underwent surgery in May 2019, having thrown just five games that season. His return — not to mention the quality of pitcher he might be post-surgery — was ambiguous enough that the Rockies waived him that September, allowing the Giants to claim him. As it turned out, Anderson was healthy enough that he pitched a full season in 2020 (albeit helped by the pandemic-imposed delay in starting the year). And he was impressive enough that he now has a guaranteed big league job for 2021.

The Pirates made Tyler Anderson their first major league free-agent signing of the winter on Tuesday, agreeing to terms on a one-year, $2.5 million contract. He will step into the rotation slot vacated by the trade of Joe Musgrove; between him, Steven Brault, and Mitch Keller, it’s probably a toss-up as to who will be the Pirates’ Opening Day starter.

Read the rest of this entry »

Quinn Priester has gained a lot of helium since ranking seventh on our 2020 Pittsburgh Pirates Top Prospects list. Thanks to stellar showings at the alternate camp and instructs, the 6-foot-3, 215 pound right-hander has climbed into the middle of Baseball America’s and MLB Pipeline’s Top 100s. (Our 2021 Pirates offseason list hasn’t run yet, but according to Eric Longenhagen, Priester will feature prominently and will grace this year’s Top 100.) Just yesterday, Jim Callis wrote that some scouts have told him that Priester — the 18th overall pick in the 2019 draft — could emerge as the best pitching prospect in baseball in 2021.

Priester, who’ll celebrate his 21st birthday this coming September, was featured here at FanGraphs 12 months ago. Last week, he caught us up with the strides he’s made since that time.

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David Laurila: You were at the alternate site last summer. What was that experience like?

Quinn Priester: “It was about two weeks, so it wasn’t a whole lot of time, but it was super big for me. I got to be around older guys, some who have been in the big leagues, that have experienced things I haven’t. I’ve only had half a season with two short-season teams — I haven’t come close to a minor-league season of 144 games — so I’m behind the learning curve in that respect.”

Laurila: What can you learn from being around more experienced players?

Priester: “Just the way they prepare. They have intent with every throw, because they know how valuable those throws are over the course of the season. Wasting throws is going to lead to more soreness, and stuff like that. It was cool to literally see how to play catch again, and not just be the high school kid who throws really hard. It was about getting in the work that I need to get in, like staying behind fastballs and making the most out of the couple of curveballs I’ll throw in catch play. Rather than just throwing, I was having direction and a goal. Read the rest of this entry »

Pittsburgh’s sell-off continued over the weekend, with the Pirates sending starting pitcher Jameson Taillon to the New York Yankees in return for four prospects. The 29-year-old didn’t pitch in 2020, his season lost due to rehabilitation from Tommy John surgery in late 2019, the second such surgery of his career. Taillon, a former 2010 first-round pick, has suffered more than his share of setbacks, missing three years of his career and most of a fourth due to his elbow injuries and a sports hernia; he also missed time in 2017 due to testicular cancer. He heads to a Yankees rotation with a lot of interesting upside talent and a surplus of question marks.

Taillon’s departure to join former teammate Gerrit Cole in the Bronx represents the end of an era in Pittsburgh. Taken in consecutive drafts in 2010 and ’11, Taillon and Cole were frequently imagined together as the two aces at the top of a future Pirates rotation. For a team that had had recent first-round busts in the quickly injured Brad Lincoln and the bafflingly selected Daniel Moskos, this pair was the cornerstone of the rebuilding efforts of the then-new Frank Coonelly/Neal Huntington regime. Both pitchers were consensus elite choices in the draft and were selected without any of the team’s trademark cynical calculations about whether a player would sign on the cheap.

Taillon and Cole met their lofty expectations as they quickly worked their way through the minors. Cole, a college draftee, made his 2011 major league debut just two years after draft day, and if not for injury, Taillon would have likely followed him early in 2014. Missing two years is an enormous setback for any prospect, but the Pirates averaged 93 wins per season over 2013-15 and could afford to be patient. As the holes the team had to fill in order to continue winning increased, ownership’s commitment to investing in the roster did not, and the Pirates needed Taillon in 2016 more than they did in ’14 or ’15. And he succeeded, requiring only a 10-game tuneup at Triple-A before debuting in the majors and pitching well enough where he would have gotten some Rookie of the Year votes if he had been up for the entire year. Read the rest of this entry »

Sunday, the Pirates traded starter Jameson Taillon to the Yankees for a package of four prospects. Dan Szymborksi will provide in-depth analysis of the deal as it pertains to the Yankees soon, though I’ll note to start that with the return of Luis Severino and Domingo Germán and the additions of Corey Kluber and now Taillon, the Yankees rotation will be reliant on several high-risk, high-reward starters this season.

Of course, nobody likes trading away good big leaguers, especially those who the club and city care about for reasons beyond their on-field performance. Taillon has persevered through a lot, including testicular cancer and an August 2019 Tommy John, the second such surgery of his career. When he next steps on a big league mound, it will have been nearly two years since he last did so. That layoff (he has been throwing live BP to hitters since late last summer and has been throwing bullpens during the offseason) creates volatility that mirrors the added volatility of this particular prospect package. Taillon could be an anchor of the Yankees rotation next year or might be a shell of himself. Regardless of which he would have been in Pittsburgh, the Pirates are not ready to compete and so I think they did well to trade him for four good prospects today, acquiring upside but also mitigating risk by getting several players in return.

On to those prospects. The quartet heading back to Pittsburgh — righties Miguel Yajure (age 22) and Roansy Contreras (21), 21-year-old outfielder Canaan Smith-Njigba, and 18-year-old shortstop Maikol Escotto — is a pretty exciting. Read the rest of this entry »

Mitch Keller has only thrown 69-and-a-third big-league innings, and he’s already had a remarkable career. The baseball gods are a big reason why. In his 2019 rookie season, the now-24-year-old Pittsburgh Pirates right-hander had a 7.13 ERA to go with a 3.19 FIP, and this past season he had a 2.91 ERA to go with a 6.75 FIP.

Hello, BABIP.

In an almost-inexplicable quirk of fate, Keller followed up a .475 BABIP — the highest one-season mark in MLB history — with a .104 BABIP in 2020. No pitcher who threw 20-or-more innings in last year’s pandemic-truncated campaign had a smaller percentage of balls put in play against him fall safely to the turf. This happened with an average exit velocity of 88.5 mph, which was higher than the 87.6 he’d allowed in 2019.

Ben Lindbergh wrote about Keller’s snake-bit season for The Ringer last spring, and the conversation they had prior to publication is what brought the data to the fore.

“I remember getting off that phone call and looking it up myself,” said Keller. “I was like, ‘Oh, my goodness. That’s crazy.’ I knew that I had a high BABIP, but I had no idea it was the highest in history. Once he told me, it wasn’t like I was coming back to the dugout thinking, ‘Man, I think I’m having some bad luck.’ It was actually on paper, as a stat. It was, ‘No, seriously. I was having bad luck.” Read the rest of this entry »

On (day of week), the Padres acquired (talented pitcher) from the (spendthrift team) in exchange for a seeming pittance, including (name of decent but not overwhelming Padres prospect). Now, surely, AJ Preller is done. Or is he?

Oh, hello there! Sorry about that. That’s actually the Mad Libs-esque form that I normally use to cover Padres pitching transactions. Today, I’ve got some details for you. It’s Joe Musgrove heading to the best weather in baseball, Hudson Head and Endy Rodriguez highlighting the group headed out (in a three-team trade involving the Pirates and Mets), and Andrew Friedman gently whispering words of affirmation to himself: “We’ll still win the long game, we’ll still win the long game, the Dodger Way can’t be beat.”

Musgrove isn’t an ace, at least not in the way that new teammates Yu Darvish and Blake Snell are. He would have been Pittsburgh’s number one starter this year, which isn’t the same thing. In San Diego, he’ll slot in as the Padres fourth starter. Let the words of Anakin Skywalker speak for the rest of the NL West: “This is outrageous! It’s unfair!”

Seriously, take a look at our Depth Charts predictions for the Padre rotation:

There simply aren’t other teams throwing out pitchers like Musgrove after a whopping three other pitchers. We think that the Padres, Yankees, and Mets will accrue roughly equal value from starting pitchers next year, but the New York teams are doing it with Gerrit Cole and Jacob deGrom, the consensus best two pitchers in the game. Yu Darvish is nice, but not that nice. The Padres are building their own Death Star rotation, and they’re doing it with volume. Read the rest of this entry »

Position: Player Valuation Analyst

Reports To: Assistant Director, Professional Player Valuation
Department: Professional Player Valuation

The Pittsburgh Pirates are currently seeking a full-time Analyst to join their Professional Player Valuation team. The Professional Player Valuation team is responsible for producing internal valuations of players and for communicating the insights from their research to others within Baseball Operations. This role will provide candidates with opportunities for growth and the ability to learn from others throughout the organization. In this role, you will have the ability to influence roster construction and to see the impact of your work on the field. Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2021 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Aramis Ramirez hit more homers than all but six players who spent the majority of their careers at third base, and he also ranks among the top half-dozen from the hot corner in RBI, and fourth in slugging percentage among those with at least 7,000 plate appearances. While that’s not enough to make him a serious Hall of Fame candidate once his 18-year career is placed in its proper context, the three-time All-Star deserves his due as the final entry in the One-and-Done portion of my annual series.

Ramirez put up big offensive numbers while spending his entire career in the NL Central, bookended by stints with the Pirates (1998-2003, ’15) that included a chance to finally represent them in postseason play. He was part of three playoff teams during his 8 1/2-season stint with the Cubs (2003-11), for whom he was a two-time All-Star, and made the last of his All-Star berths during three lean years in Milwaukee (’12-14). The man could hit: Ramirez batted .300 or better seven times, with a high of .318 in 2004; swatted 25 or more homers in a season 10 times, topping 30 four times; and drove in 100 or more runs seven times; he set highs in the last two categories in 2006, when he hit 38 homers and drove in 119 runs. Tellingly, in a hitter-friendly era he only grazed the leaderboards in those triple crown categories, with eight top-10 finishes but just one higher than seventh place.

Aramis Ramirez was born on June 25, 1978 in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Unlike so many Dominican players who come from poverty, he was comparatively well off, as his father was a doctor and his mother an accountant. Basketball was his first love; he didn’t start playing baseball until age 13, but the fact that he owned three gloves made up for his deficit in skill relative to other kids in his neighborhood. “I was really bad,” he told Sports Illustrated’s Jamal Greene in 2001, “But if they didn’t let me play, they wouldn’t have enough gloves.” Read the rest of this entry »

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

Batters

Ke’Bryan Hayes! Hayes has been a long-time favorite of ZiPS, with the computer already seeing him as a league-average player entering the 2019 season despite having topped off at Double-A Altoona at that point. In recent years, ZiPS has been using a probabilistic method derived from MLB’s Gameday data for minor-league defensive stats, generating a rough catch probability for every ball hit. Sadly, it’s not UZR and DRS, but it can generally tell the good defensive players from the poor ones, and it’s certainly better than some GB/FB-modified range factor or throwing up your hands in despair. ZiPS had Hayes as the best minor league third baseman from 2017-19, at 13 runs above average per season. Now, that doesn’t mean ZiPS is going to project him quite that strongly, due to the inherent issues with this kind of defensive estimation. But it does mean that there’s a high probability that his positive scouting reports are on-point and his good major league performance in a small sample was not a fluke.

Hayes was good defensively in the majors, and between him and Luis Robert, I felt pretty good that this methodology successfully identified minor-league glove standouts without any scouting data involved. What ZiPS did not see coming was just how solid Hayes was with the bat in his rookie season. If I had voted this time around, he likely would have gotten a tally on the back of my Rookie of the Year ballot. Hayes is not a big dude, but his power was impressive where previously it had been a work in progress. Five homers in 95 major league plate appearances isn’t a huge body of work, but he was in the top 20 in exit velocity, between Kyle Schwarber and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. A .700 slugging percentage isn’t in the future, but both ZiPS and Statcast think that he hit the ball like a .500 slugger in 2020. ZiPS isn’t fully there in 2021, but he’s one to watch.

Or should I call Hayes “the” one to watch? The general theme of Pittsburgh’s offense is that although there are few gaping maws of performance in the lineup, there’s a real dearth of impact offensive talent. Being uninteresting is arguably even worse than being lousy, at least from the position of an analyst. There’s a reason the 1962 Mets are fondly remembered by history for losing lovably, and the 1962 Houston Colt .45s are not. Bryan Reynolds and Adam Frazier are competent regulars, but there’s little upside here, and they feel more at home for a risk-averse contender with a single, specific hole to fill, such as Houston, Atlanta or Cleveland (if that team still counts). Colin Moran‘s not a difference-maker, just Josh Bell’s replacement as an uninspiring first baseman. As for Gregory Polanco, the best the Pirates can hope for is that he’s healthy, returns to 2017-18 form, and nets the team a couple of good prospects when he follows his former outfield teammates out of town. That Phillip Evans ranks so highly in this list should be a great deal of concern for the front office, though the de facto starting shortstop having a Pat Meares top comp is ZiPS being mean, not me. Read the rest of this entry »