Gerrit Cole is reportedly on the verge of joining the Astros:

Or… maybe he’s not:

In any case, it sounds like a deal will get done eventually:

Unless it doesn’t:

While something may or may not be imminent, such a trade would not be surprising: the Pirates have decided to retool at some level and Cole’s name has come up all offseason, first connected to the Yankees (though the Yankees were apparently unwilling to part with Gleyber Torres). The Astros are a top AL contender, the sort team looking to consolidate its position.

The possible return is not yet clear, though the Astros possess the sort of high-end prospects which the Pirates currently lack in their system. So, on the surface, this potential trade makes a lot of sense. A club headed for a rebuild sells two years of control of a top-of-the-rotation arm to a contender.

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Below is an analysis of the prospects in the Pittsburgh Pirates farm system. Scouting reports are compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as from my own observations. The KATOH (stats-only) statistical projections, probable-outcome graphs, and (further down) Mahalanobis comps have been provided by Chris Mitchell. For more information on the 20-80 scouting scale by which all of my prospect content is governed you can click here. For further explanation of the merits and drawbacks of Future Value, read this. *This post was updated with prospects acquired in various offseason trades (McCutchen, Cole) after its initial publication*

60 FV Prospects

Aside from a May back injury that sidelined him for a month, Keller had a successful 2017 and reached Double-A in August. He struck out 116 hitters in 116 innings, against just 32 walks, while continuing his career-long avoidance of the home run. He has surrendered just 13 homers in 317 career innings. The foundation of Keller’s profile is grounded in his fastball and fastball command. He was throwing only in the upper 80s the fall before his senior year of high school, but Keller’s velocity began to increase as the draft approached, and it has continued to do so. His fastball now sits 93-96 and touches 97.

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Dick Enberg died on Thursday, at the age 82, in La Jolla, California. His roots were in Michigan. Born in Mount Clemens, Enberg lived on a farm in Amada and attended college in Mount Pleasant. He went on to cultivate an inimitable broadcast style and become known to sports fans everywhere.

To say that Enberg reached the pinnacle of the profession would be an understatement. He called some of the biggest games in college basketball history, several Super Bowls, and more than two dozen Wimbledons. As the voice of the California Angels, and later the San Diego Padres, he was behind the microphone for nine no-hitters. Two years ago, the Baseball Hall of Fame honored him with the Ford C. Frick Award for broadcasting excellence.

Enberg was reportedly as good of a person as he was a broadcaster and based on my brief interactions with him that’s certainly true. When I first met Enberg, we spoke of our shared Finnish heritage and small town Michigan upbringings. He couldn’t have been more congenial. I recall walking away impressed that a legend could be so humble.

It is by no means hyperbolic to call Enberg a legend. Here is what two of the best broadcasters in the business had to say when I asked them about his passing.

Len Kasper, Chicago Cubs: “I was very saddened to see the news. Dick was one of the first big time national sportscasters I remember hearing as a kid. I took a special interest in his work because he went to Central Michigan University, just a few miles from where I grew up. I was fortunate to get to know him a little bit when he joined the Padres TV booth and we had several great conversations. The word iconic gets thrown around lazily in our business, but if Dick Enberg wasn’t an iconic broadcaster, I don’t know who was. I will throw out one other thing. His tennis work was totally underrated. I watched a ton of it in the ‘80s and ‘90s and he was the #1 voice of THAT sport too! He did everything! Versatile, knowledgeable, understated, he had everything you’d want in a national broadcaster.” Read the rest of this entry »

Some teams have fairly clear decisions when it comes to adding or dismantling. The White Sox faced a pretty clear decision to tear down. The Orioles appear to be coming to grips with reality. The Marlins might as well tear it all down at this point. The Yankees were wise to begin adding at the deadline and continuing to add this offseason. The Cardinals look like a team that should add and are trying to do just that this winter.

The more challenging places are teams at a sort of crossroads, those teams that are in the middle of the pack. Those teams that might be able to compete in 2018 but might be better off planning for 2019. There are fewer of these teams as the sport appears to be becoming one more of Haves and Have Nots, but they are out there.

In the NL there are teams like the Pirates (81-81 projected record), Giants (80-82) and Mets (80-82), in which case you can make an argument that all three could buy, sell, or hold. The Giants seem interested in adding. The Mets seem to be more in a holding pattern … and the Pirates? The Pirates seem to be leaning toward selling, they are at least exploring the markets for Andrew McCutchen and Gerrit Cole.

I argued earlier in the summer that the Pirates should be soft sellers, but then last month I wrote they ought to also keep McCutchen for his final year given what might be a modest return. (After all, Pittsburgh, McCutchen named his newborn son ‘Steel’). So while I’ve had some trouble deciding what exactly the Pirates ought to do, perhaps it’s time to commit more fully to selling. 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 half a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Pittsburgh Pirates. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Batters
The Pirates’ position-playing cohort recorded the fourth-worst collective WAR mark in the majors this past season. The most immediate source of their troubles was evident. In last year’s version of these same projections, Jung Ho Kang and Starling Marte were forecast for nearly six wins between them. Due to a variety of indiscretions, they were limited to just 339 plate appearances and 1.2 wins, all of them Marte’s.

While Kang remains absent from the club indefinitely, a full season of Marte (504 PA, 2.6 zWAR) ought to address some of the pains endured by the 2017 edition of the team. With the exception of third base, ZiPS calls for the Pirates to extract two or three wins from every position. That points to the possibility of an average group of hitters. It also indicates there’s little margin for error here.

In light of the that, it’s not surprising to hear — as Buster Olney reported before dawn this morning — that the club might be searching for ways to trade Andrew McCutchen (630, 3.4). Whatever the return, his departure would almost certainly render the team less competitive in 2018.

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When Travis Sawchick asked you which question was most important on Shohei Ohtani’s questionnaire, you answered overwhelmingly that the team capable of keeping him healthy — or of convincing Ohtani that they’d keep him healthy — would win out. Travis went on to use a metric, Roster Resource’s “Roster Effect” rating, to get a sense of which team that might be. The Brewers, Cubs, Pirates, and Tigers performed best by that measure.

Of course, that’s just one way of answering the question. Health is a tough thing to nail down. To figure out which team is capable of keeping Ohtani the healthiest, it’s worth considering the possible implications of health in baseball. Roster Effect, for example, considers the quality of the player and seems to be asking: which rosters were affected the most by poor health? That’s one way of approaching it. Let’s try a few others and see who comes out on top.

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Not every team approaches the offseason looking to get better in the same way. That much is obvious: budget alone can dictate much of a club’s activity on the free-agent market. A little bit less obvious, though, is how the present quality of a team’s roster can affect the players they pursue. Teams that reside on a certain part of the win curve, for example, need that next win more than teams on other parts. That can inform a team’s decisions in the offseason.

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While the path to the decision took something of a circuitous route over the last couple of seasons, one of the least surprising developments of the weekend was the Pirates’ announcement that they would exercise Andrew McCutchen’s $14.5 million club option for 2018.

After an inexplicable 0.6 WAR campaign in 2016 and an ice-cold start to 2017, McCutchen finally figured things out and rebounded to finish the season with a .279/.363/.486 slash line and 3.7 WAR. If the status of McCutchen’s option was ever in doubt in May, he rendered it a non-issue with a massive June and July, resembling a legitimate superstar during that and other stretches.

According to Matt Swartz’s research, the cost of a win was $9 million from 2014 to -16. Steamer projects McCutchen to post a 3.1 WAR season. The outfielder could reasonably contribute close to $30 million in production, in other words. That’s considerable surplus value at the end of what has been one of the most club-friendly deals of the 21st century.

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Three years ago, this author, then employed as a major-league beat writer by the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, traveled to Cincinnati for the final series of the regular season. The Reds were hosting the Pirates in games No. 160, 161, and 162. The conditions weren’t quite fall-like yet — temperatures sat in the low 80s in humidity-drenched southern Ohio and northern Kentucky — but the Pirates had, at the very least, secured a playoff berth, and their NL Central Division title hopes were still alive.

Those three days in Cincinnati became some of my most memorable on the beat. The series was interesting in part for the decisions made by Pirates leadership amidst the end-of-season chaos of September baseball, decisions made in a largely conventional manner at a time in the game when tradition was being challenged, when players’ roles had begun evolving more rapidly. We continue to see evidence of that evolution in 2017. On the eve of the AL Wild Card game, for example, reporters are asking managers about bullpen-ing, about probabilities, about non-traditional decision-making. This was the backdrop for my long weekend.

The series was memorable for the camaraderie in the press box and the post-game conversations outside the stadium, the type of interactions between writers and scouts — between writers and other writers — that’s perhaps becoming increasingly rare as the economics of the media industry continue to erode jobs and travel budgets. Similarly, some regard player-tracking as a threat to render scouts redundant.

Those three days in Cincinnati, for me, have provided raw material upon which to conduct a sort of personal archaeology, a collection of vignettes to revisit as the regular season comes to an end. The weekend offered some small but revealing examples of tradition’s concessions to science and efficiency in baseball. For better, for worse. The following is intended neither as analysis nor commentary. It’s simply a story.

FRIDAY Sept. 26, 2014

I arrived by air that morning in Cincinnati, having covered the previous series in Atlanta during which the Pirates had clinched just their second playoff berth — and second consecutive playoff berth — since 1992. I don’t remember much from the Atlanta series. It was the second time I had been in a beer- and champagne-soaked clubhouse, the celebration taking place in now-defunct Turner Field. I’m not sure if Uber had arrived in northern Kentucky at that time, but it must not have, because I took a cab to the hotel from the airport. I kept clothing and toiletries to one modestly sized piece of luggage, as I always did, which would fit in overhead storage in the plane, often a Southwest 737, to save time and avoid a trip to baggage claim. Fortunately, the dress code of a writer can be generously described as “business casual.”

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Travis Shaw had arguably the biggest hit of Milwaukee’s season yesterday. With his team on the verge of a crushing 10-inning loss, Shaw stroked a two-run, walk-off home run that helped keep the Brewers in the playoff hunt. A defeat wouldn’t have buried the surprise contenders, but it would have pushed them closer to the brink. They badly needed the win, and the Red Sox castoff provided it.

Even without Saturday’s heroics, Shaw has been a godsend for David Stearns and Co. Acquired over the offseason (along with a pair of promising prospects) for Tyler Thornburg, he’s contributed 31 long balls and an .877 OPS while solidifying the middle of the Milwaukee lineup. Last year in Boston, those numbers were 16 and .726.

The 27-year-old third baseman attributes his breakout to two factors: He’s playing every day, and he’s not stressing about things he can’t control.

“My mindset is a lot different,” Shaw told me earlier this week. “After what I went through last year, I needed to take a step back. There were some things I didn’t agree with, and there were some things I took the wrong way. I didn’t handle them very well

“I tried to play GM. I started reading into stuff — wondering why they’re doing this, why we’re doing that — and it ate at me. I worried about things I shouldn’t have worried about. In the second half, when I got to play, I felt like I had to get two or three hits to stay in the lineup. That didn’t bode well for my mental state, and it obviously didn’t work results-wise.” Read the rest of this entry »