It’s been a quiet winter in Pittsburgh. The Pirates lost almost no one from last year’s 76-86 team, but they didn’t add many players either. Their biggest acquisition is probably Aroldis Chapman. After that, it’s Marco Gonzales, Rowdy Tellez, Yasmani Grandal, or Martín Pérez. They’re competent major leaguers all, but hardly exciting additions. But as it turns out, the Pirates had another move to make, and it’s a welcome one:

BREAKING: Right-hander Mitch Keller and the Pittsburgh Pirates are in agreement on a five-year contract extension, sources tell me and @kileymcd. After a breakout season in which he struck out 210, the 27-year-old Keller will anchor the rotation for the team that drafted him.

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) February 22, 2024

This is both exciting and necessary, at least in my opinion. The Pirates haven’t developed many effective starting pitchers in the last, well, ever. Only one Pirates starter in the past decade has eclipsed 10 WAR with the team: Gerrit Cole with 13. After that, their success stories are Jameson Taillon, Joe Musgrove, and, well… Iván Nova is sixth on the list, and that came in 2.5 years after the Yankees traded him to Pittsburgh. As Stephen Nesbitt and Ken Rosenthal recently chronicled in The Athletic, it’s been an ugly decade for baseball in the Steel City.

Mitch Keller has already accrued the third-most starting pitching WAR in the past decade with 7.5. He’s entering his sixth big league season this year, though ups and downs early in his career mean that it’s only his fifth year of service time. The road to success has been bumpy — from 2019 through 2021, he compiled a 6.02 ERA and only racked up 170 innings of major league work. Things have gotten better since then, though. He threw 159 solid innings in 2022 and then made 32 starts in 2023, both times looking like a consistently effective starter rather than the roller coaster ride of earlier years. Read the rest of this entry »

A month after Rowdy Tellez was non-tendered by the Brewers, the first baseman signed with the Pirates to little fanfare. It’s not hard to see why that particular transaction flew under the radar. Back in the good old days of December, the offseason was at its peak. There were more pressing concerns than a player with exactly 0.0 career WAR joining a rebuilding club. Yet two months later, amidst the dullest stretch of the winter (and perhaps a bout of offseason-induced delirium), I have realized we made a dreadful mistake. FanGraphs has cursed Rowdy Tellez, and now it falls on my shoulders to reverse the spell. Let me explain. Read the rest of this entry »

The Pirates have an above-average farm system that includes a number of high-ceiling pitching prospects. Paul Skenes is the most notable — the 21-year-old right-hander was selected first overall in last summer’s draft — but he’s far from the only electric arm in Pittsburgh’s pipeline. As many as half a dozen hurlers will populate the first 10 names when our Pirates top prospects list comes out this spring. Whether any of them will help propel the Bucs to playoff contention remains to be seen, but in terms of potential, the group presents a tantalizing mix of talent.

I asked Pirates General Manager Ben Cherington about a few of those promising young arms during November’s GM Meetings.

———

David Laurila: How happy are you with your pitching pipeline?

Ben Cherington: “We’re excited about it. We also know that pitching development never stops and there are things ahead of all those guys. Part of the reason we’re excited is the talent, but the truth is, no matter how well you do in pitching development there is usually attrition of some kind. You need some volume to make it work, and we think we’re starting to develop some volume. So again, we’re excited. Every one of those guys has targets that we’re working on this offseason, and we’re anxious to see where they’re at come spring training.”

Laurila: Has your pitching program evolved in the last few years?

Cherington: “We believe so. We’ve got some signal on that. It’s improving in some areas, and in other areas we still need to be better. We can’t ever be satisfied with it. But we’ve made some strides with things like breaking ball pitch design, pitch usage, sequencing in the minor leagues. We’ve made some strides with deployment, getting better at identifying what skills fit in different roles and getting guys into those roles. At the same time, there are more things to get better at. All of it is important.”

Laurila: Which of your pitching prospects most stands out for his stuff? I’m thinking pitch metrics. Read the rest of this entry »

David Bednar was an unproven San Diego Padres pitcher when he was first featured here at FanGraphs in March 2020. The burly right-hander had made just 13 big-league appearances, all in the previous season when he’d allowed eight runs in 11 innings of undistinguished work. A 35th-round draft pick four years prior, he’d been lightly regarded as a prospect.

Fast forwarding to today, Bednar is one of the most dominant closers in the game. Now pitching for his hometown Pittsburgh Pirates, the hard-throwing hurler is coming off of an All-Star season where he logged 39 saves, a 2.00 ERA, and a 2.53 FIP. Since being acquired in a three-deal in January 2021, he boasts a 2.25 ERA and a 2.56 FIP, as well as a hefty 31.2% strikeout rate.

How has the 6-foot-1, 250-pound reliever evolved since we first spoke? I asked him that question when the Bucs visited Wrigley Field in late September.

“I’m able to command all three of my pitches in the zone better,” said Bednar. “I also have a better idea of where my misses are. Another big thing is having the confidence to trust my stuff in the zone. I know it sounds redundant, but I’m just competing in the zone. When I attack guys and keep all of my lanes the same, good things happen.”

Bednar feels that his raw stuff is much the same as what it was before his breakthrough. Along with the aforementioned strides, how he sequences has gone a long way toward his success. A former teammate played a big role. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a mean-spirited but persistent thread in American pop culture, in which the Midwest is depicted as a cultural backwater, populated by sleepy, gormless, unattractive rubes and devoid of meaningful art or culture. For example, this sidesplitting musical interlude from 30 Rock. As an East Coast snob who lived for many years among the Great Lakes, I find this line of comedy offensive. Midwesterners are friendly, vigorous, beautiful people, and they live in a land of marvels. (If you’re wondering why I’ve chosen to open with this confusing and risky metaphor: We just got a new assistant editor, Matt Martell, and I’m hazing him by handing him a grenade on his second day.)

But when it comes to pitching, the coastal elites might have a point: Standards have slipped a little in the heartland. For the Chicago White Sox and Pittsburgh Pirates, John Brebbia and Aroldis Chapman, respectively, are marquee signings. (Now I’ve thrown all that goodwill away by puncturing Pittsburghers’ delusion that they’re from the East Coast. How foolish of me.) Read the rest of this entry »

Troy Taylor is an under-the-radar pitcher to keep your eye on in the Seattle Mariners system. A 22-year-old right-hander who was taken in the 12th round of the 2022 draft out of the University of California Irvine, Taylor impressed evaluators in the Arizona Fall League with a two-pitch mix that has him well-positioned for a future role as a big-league reliever.

“I’m a big fan of what he can do athletically, as a mover,” said a scout I spoke to. “His stuff is good. He’s a guy who probably ends up in the bullpen with the Mariners, and sooner rather than later.”

He’s already come a long way. Taylor was an infielder at Rancho Cucamonga’s Los Osos High School, and when he did occasionally take the mound — “I closed a couple of times” — all he really did was throw as hard he could. It wasn’t until he got to Cyprus Junior College, and then to UC-Irvine, that he “actually started learning how to pitch.”

Taylor has understandably learned a lot more about the nuances of his craft since signing with Seattle, but he nonetheless remains anything but a technician. Topping out at 98 mph and typically averaging “five and some change,” he still tries to throw his heater as hard as he can. He identifies as a power pitcher.

Adding a third pitch is a goal — the Mariners have him working on a changeup to use against left-handed hitters — but his fastball-slider combination will always be his bread and butter. The former is not only his best pitch, it has unique characteristics. Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2024 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. For a tentative schedule, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

For a seven-season period from 2010–16, nobody in baseball hit more home runs than José Bautista. The Blue Jays slugger led the American League in dingers in back-to-back seasons, with 54 in 2010 and 43 a year later, and with those soaring totals began a streak of six straight All-Star selections. Remarkably that run didn’t begin until Bautista was in his age-29 season, after he spent most of the first six years of his major league career (2004–09) barely hanging on to a roster spot while passing through the hands of five different teams. He turned the page on that difficult stretch of his career thanks to a swing change, one that prefigured the launch angle revolution that would come into vogue a few year later. With it, “Joey Bats” helped drive the Blue Jays back to relevance, an effort capped by one of the most memorable postseason home runs of the era.

José Antonio Bautista was born on October 19, 1980 in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. His father, Americo Bautista, was an agricultural engineer who ran a poultry farm while his mother, Sandra Bautista, was an accountant and financial officer. Both had graduate degrees, and so theirs was a middle-class family that could afford to send José and his younger brother Luis to a private Catholic school. A good student, José excelled at math and science, and took extra classes to learn English beginning when he was eight years old. In the evenings, he played baseball with friends, and though undersized — he was nicknamed “The Rat” because he was small and had big ears — he excelled. Read the rest of this entry »

Hello, and welcome to another edition of Semi-Rebuilding Team Signs Solid Players. Last time, we saw the Kansas City Royals sign Michael Wacha and Hunter Renfroe. This time, we’re headed 800 miles east, to Pittsburgh, because the Pirates are our next feature. In the past week, they’ve added Martín Pérez and team legend Andrew McCutchen on one-year deals.

The McCutchen signing is the more interesting of the two to me – and also one that felt inevitable since the conclusion of last season. McCutchen enjoyed a resurgent 2023 in Pittsburgh, his first year back after a five-year, four-team odyssey that he embarked on after leaving before the 2018 season. He walked more, struck out less, stole more bases, made solid contact more frequently; if you can dream it, he did it better last year than he had in his previous peregrinations.

The result of that improvement was a 115 wRC+ and a .256/.378/.397 slash line, heavy on on-base and light on homers (12, the lowest he’s posted in a healthy season). Early in the season, it looked like that performance might be a key part of a Pirates playoff berth. But the team faded in the second half, and McCutchen’s season ended on September 4 when he partially tore his Achilles tendon legging out a double. Read the rest of this entry »

For the 20th consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction and MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the next team up is the Pittsburgh Pirates.

Batters

The Pirates’ offense wasn’t particularly good in 2023, but they’re at least interesting in some ways. For one, their best offensive players are either signed for a long time (Bryan Reynolds, Ke’Bryan Hayes) or are very far from hitting free agency (Oneil Cruz, Jack Suwinski). Endy Rodriguez, one of the top catching prospects in ZiPS, is going to miss the season with UCL surgery, so it looks like the Pirates are making lemonades out of lemons and giving Henry Davis every chance to stick behind the plate before giving up and stuffing him in a corner somewhere. For a team that won’t spend significant amounts of money no matter what baseball’s economic system is, having that core already banked gives Pittsburgh lots of opportunities to play meaningful September baseball in a weak division. Read the rest of this entry »

The Pirates have had a rough go of it. After notching three straight Wild Card berths from 2013 to ’15, they saw their production tail off and haven’t made the postseason since. In that time, they also had the second-best pitching staff by ERA and the fourth-best by FIP thanks to a league-leading 51.3% groundball rate. Their rate of burning worms was 2.8 points higher than the second-place Dodgers, the same distance between Los Angeles and the 10th-place Mets.

The Pirates accomplished this by throwing sinkers at a 23.2% clip, separating them from the second-ranked Guardians by 5.5 points, about the same distance between Cleveland and the 10th-place Angels. Coupled with pitch-framing improvements and a move toward more strategic infield positioning, the Pirates experienced a pitching leap that theScore.com’s Travis Sawchik chronicled in Big Data Baseball. This did wonders for a number of hurlers, namely Francisco Liriano, A.J. Burnett, and Edinson Volquez. But others, such as Charlie Morton and Gerrit Cole, only blossomed upon leaving the Steel City.

Pittsburgh’s pitching apparatus isn’t viewed as revolutionary any longer, but they’ve had a solid record with crafty lefties in recent years — think Rich Hill, Tyler Anderson, and Jose Quintana. Marco Gonzales, acquired from the Mariners (via the Braves) along with cash in exchange for a player to be named later, will hope to join that group. Perhaps the soft-tossing southpaw — who, like the Pirates of the 2010s, relies primarily on inducing weak contact — will be the one to reignite something in the Steel City forges. Read the rest of this entry »