For the Pirates, Archer Trade Not Looking Sterling
At 2018’s trade deadline, the Pittsburgh Pirates made a surprising move, picking up underperforming Chris Archer from the Tampa Bay Rays in return for Tyler Glasnow, Austin Meadows, and the ever-popular Player To Be Named. Once that latter nom de guerre was revealed to be Shane Baz, it meant that all three players heading to Florida were names of serious prospectage. In Eric Longenhagen’s top prospect list for the Pirates going into 2018, Meadows and Baz ranked No. 2 and No. 3, respectively. Glasnow, who didn’t qualify for the list due to service time, ranked second the year before.
How did I feel about this trade last year? At the time, I thought it was eminently reasonable for both sides. My argument was that the Rays would have been hard-pressed, even in sorta-contention, to turn down this kind of return given that the team’s long-term win condition is an assembly line of impact prospects.
For the Pirates, I argued that if this was part of a change in approach to more of a short-term, win-now approach in the offseason, this move could be justified, even with the team having a similar path to winning as the Rays do. This kind of bold, win-now or win-soon attempt (along with picking up Keone Kela from the Rangers) was something that was missing from the Pirates in recent years when the strength of their roster was at its peak.
The Pirates did not end up pushing their chips this offseason, though their signing of Jordan Lyles looks way better so far than I ever expected. But the winter moves were largely the kind of low-impact, solid-value moves the team has excelled at. They’ve even done well in several of these so far, with Francisco Liriano currently sitting at a 2.73 FIP and Melky Cabrera at .339/.375/.471 (though admittedly BABIP-aided).
These are the types of moves that win at chess, trading your movement-hampered bishop for your opponent’s strongly placed knight or giving up having both bishops to weaken their pawn structure. The problem is, that’s frequently not enough in baseball. Looking up at the league with fewer financial advantages and a division in which every single other team was in win-now mode, the Pirates didn’t need value trades, they needed to put an opponent’s rook in their pocket when the latter went to the bathroom.
Where I’ll definitely have to eat some crow is the fact that Glasnow and Meadows have developed much more quickly than expected. It turns out that they were actually already win-now players and the Pirates didn’t know that. And even worse, it’s Archer struggling in the here and now, with a worrying walk rate.
Even more concerning is that the increase in walk rate is largely earned. While walk rate stabilizes quickly, it doesn’t mean that every change in walk rate is an ability, as it’s a general rule of thumb. In Archer’s case, unfortunately, it is. Batters are swinging less and it’s almost entirely the out-of-zone pitches they’re refraining from offering at.
It’s not yet in the public ZiPS projections, but I have a model to help identify walk outliers using the plate discipline stats, which I refer to as zWalk (more can be found in the article I wrote about Aaron Nola). And yup, Archer’s walk rate is where it should be. The Pirates appear to have bought a project rather than an ace.
Similarly, Glasnow’s walk improvement also looks real. zWalk does think that he’s not quite a pitcher who should have a walk rate quite as low as the 1.7 BB/9 he’s paused at while on the IL and in fact thinks that his 3.1 BB/9 with the Rays last year is a more realistic number.
If anything, it puts Glasnow’s performance before and after the trade in even sharper contrast. One of the most important plate discipline numbers for a pitcher’s walk rate is that first-strike percentage, and Glasnow’s jumped from 52% in Pittsburgh in 2018 to 65% after joining the Rays.
And it appears that this is consistent with an active change in approach. David Laurila talked with Rays pitching coach Kyle Snyder in August of 2018 about this very subject.
“We’ve talked about being aggressive to large areas of the strike zone, especially early in the count, in terms of early-count zone rates. We’ve talked about his breaking balls — they’re very similar in terms of their break values, with his slider being the harder of the two — and how to use those. We haven’t talked about anything mechanically. He made an adjustment in Pittsburgh, about a week or two before we acquired him, and he’s picked up right where he left off. Things have continued to fall into place.
ZiPS obviously can’t talk to a pitching coach, but the improvement was enough that ZiPS was confident enough to project Glasnow at a 3.89 ERA for the Rays as a starter, which would not have likely disappointed the Rays. Obviously, he was crushing that number before his trip to the IL.
Archer-for-Glasnow is now looking like a straight-up loss for the Pirates. Unfortunately, there were two other prospects in that trade, and while Baz is still in the low minors, Meadows has been just as dangerous.
One can understand why the Pirates let Meadows go. Injuries had been an issue and his .261/.323/.384 line in the minors in 2017 was on the light side. While he had acquitted himself well in a midseason callup, the Pirates felt they had outfield depth to spare. But like Glasnow, Meadows found a new gear in Tampa, first hitting .344/.396/.771 for the Durham Bulls (with no BABIP-inflation issue).
Before the thumb injury, Meadows was clocking in at .351/.422/.676. He has added 25 points of OPS since returning.
Get ready to cringe a bit, Pirates fans, per the Derek Bell variety, because there’s one chart to go: the ZiPS estimation of the future WAR at the time of the trade and where it stands now. Note this also leaves Baz off, as I don’t like projecting A-ball pitchers if I can get away with not doing so.
| Player | Time of Trade | Entering 2019 | Now |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chris Archer 2019-2021 | 9.9 | 9.4 | 8.5 |
| Tyler Glasnow 2019-2023 | 8.3 | 11.7 | 17.4 |
| Austin Meadows 2019-2024 | 9.5 | 11.0 | 15.5 |
| Subtotal | 17.8 | 22.7 | 32.9 |
The projections for the trade were hardly amazing, but under the right circumstances, there was justification for the Pirates if they got the best player in the trade and swapped value for tempo, getting their future contributions for Archer condensed into the 2019-2021 period. But just since the trade, the Rays are projected to have added 15 wins resulting from Meadows and Glasnow improvements. That might sound like a lot, and it is; the error bars remain large, but that center moving that much, that quickly, for two prospects in a trade is an unusual development. Meadows staying healthy has been difficult for him, and even without showing structural damage, Glasnow’s absence with a forearm injury creates an additional element of risk, but the Rays have a lot of spare room to win this trade.
For the Pirates, the Archer deal may not have looked like a disaster at the time, but it’s looking like one now. Hindsight is 20/20 — I absolutely would have traded Lou Brock for Ernie Broglio in 1964 — but like an Angel Hernandez strike zone, history isn’t always fair.
Dan Szymborski is a senior writer for FanGraphs and the developer of the ZiPS projection system. He was a writer for ESPN.com from 2010-2018, a regular guest on a number of radio shows and podcasts, and a voting BBWAA member. He also maintains a terrible Twitter account at @DSzymborski.
so you’re saying they’re going to the danger zone?
As long as they don’t get ants.
Oh, dukes.
I swear I had something for this!
I can only assume that the Pirates thought they could work some magic with Archer to figure out why he is on a three year streak of dramatically underperforming his peripherals, and that they could actually get an ace out of this. If you think of it in the context of a buy low on an ace it makes a bit more sense, even if time has shown that this may just be who Archer is
Still not as bad as the Yelich trade in my book.
A number of high k-rate pitchers regularly under-perform their peripherals. After a while you have to accept that for a small number of players the peripherals are wrong. Even when he was at his best he allowed far too many baserunners for it not to bite him. Real aces – Kershaw, Scherzer, Verlander, can post WHIPs under 1.00 for a few years while at his best Archer was around 1.12.
In this era, very few pitchers with high K-BB% fail to get good results. And Archer is the most extreme of those.
Of the top 100 in total IP since 2016, Archer ranks:
— 14th in K-BB% (19.7%), but
— 68th in ERA+ (98).
That’s EXTREME underperformance. Everyone else at 19%+ has at least a 114 ERA+. No one else in the top 25 by K-BB% has worse than a 107 ERA+. To find the next guy below 100 ERA+, you have to drop all the way down to #34 in K-BB% (Vince Velasquez, 16.0%).
It wasn’t unreasonable on its face for the Pirates to think Archer would rebound. But still a bit of a reach if they thought he’d be a real ace, given his age and track record.
That’s particularly true for pitchers with bad fastballs who rely on one particular offspeed pitch for most of their value, especially sliders. Archer is on the extreme end, but he’s similar to Jon Gray, Michael Pineda, and Ricky Nolasco in that respect.
I don’t know why the Pirates gave the Rays Shane Baz as well, because I guess Huntington felt bad about Corey Dickerson playing so well in Pittsburgh.
I have no idea why the front office insists of giving Ray Searage strikeout pitchers when he has absolutely no idea how to coach them. He still has several strong performances to his credit, including Lyles, but the performance of Glasnow/Cole/Morton immediately after getting away from him, really raises serious questions about his methods and style. What I am pretty sure of is that Glasnow and Baz would never succeed in Pittsburgh under Searage.
I don’t take joy in players’ injuries, but the old adage “health is a skill” really applies to Meadows, who is extremely injury prone, and Glasnow seems destined for TJ, so we’ll see if those future values actually happen, but right now it’s an absolute disaster, the kind that a team with such a terrible owner cannot afford.
I suspect they gave them Shane Baz to beat whatever other offers were coming in for Archer. Which means all those other teams probably are breathing heavy sighs of relief.
Possibly, although it’s possible Archer would be better in a system where he had more freedom.
The net effect will probably be that Bob Nutting never authorizes another prospect for vet trade.
For the Pirates, this trade was bat shit crazy stupid the moment it was made. It sent a signal to the fans. The Pirates want to win more games right now. Left unsaid were two related claims: the Pirates were unconcerned with future attempts to contend for championships and were more concerned with flagging attendance. The trade was a gutless business decision. The organization and it’s shortsighted fans got what they asked for: bad baseball with diminished hope for the future.
I suppose they will best the McClatchy Line (81 wins) this year. So there’s that.
The front office had done a good job of ignoring the yinzer masses calls to go all in, but caved under the pressure of declining attendance and bad PR from the Cole/Cutch trades. I had no major issue with it at the time, I am still doubtful that the Bucs would have fixed Glasnow, but then not continuing the all in approach last winter was assanine.
Searage may not have gotten Glasnow on track, but, to my mind, that means the Pirates need to find a pitching coach who can work with the pitchers they have. The Pirates have drafted these well-regarded pitchers:
Taillon
Cole
Glasnow
Keller
Baz
Only Cole and Taillon have provided value to the ML team. Glasnow and Baz were wasted on a ghost. Keller….
I stopped following the team (which I began to follow in 1961) because of this trade. If the Pirates won’t work to win championships, why follow the Pirates.
Of course, Bell having what looks to be a breakout season has me interested — in Bell.
Johnny Bench called.
Everything you say is exactly how I’ve felt. I supported the trade at the time because I thought it was signaling a more aggressive approach from the front office and ownership. It did not.
But even as frustrated I get by seeing Glasnow blossoming into the pitcher I always thought he could be, I always remember how he looked as a starter for the Pirates. We gave him 17 starts, and he posted a 7.24 ERA/5.31 FIP. He was walking 5.5 batters per nine innings. He had two quality starts and only made it 6 or more innings three times. He looked a little better in relief last season, but he wasn’t setting the world on fire. Everything about him looked awkward and uncomfortable.
Now is there blame one can assign to the Pirates organization? Absolutely. There should be answers as to how we developed him, made him approach pitching, called games, etc… and how that differed from the Rays approach. It’s similar to how I felt about seeing Gerrit Cole turn into a K machine. But while Cole demonstrated his dominance plenty of times throughout his Pirates career, I never once saw it with Glasnow. Even when I watched his starts in AAA back in his sparkling ERA and K figures were clouded by high walk rates and sky high pitch counts.
It’s baffling how a guy can go from looking lost deep in the jungle to busting his way out in spectacular fashion.
Morton and Glasnow have both publicly commented that they were frustrated that Searage wouldn’t let them throw high fastballs as often as they wanted. I don’t know if Cole has made any comments, but the change in approach is extremely noticeable- his FB% this year is 52 and was 56 last year- it was never below 60% with the Pirates. Charlie Morton is even more extreme- from 2013-2015, the lowest percentage was 67.7% (I assume the heavy sinker is classified as a FB). Ever since joining the Phillies, his highest FB rate is 58.3%, and in two of those seasons, he was under 50%, while adding a cutter to the mix.
Searage tries to have a one-size fits all approach to pitching. The problem seems to be that because of his success with guys like AJ Burnett, JA Happ, Volquez, and others, it seems like he thinks that what worked for them must work for everyone else. I think we have plenty of evidence now that his method is not fool-proof.
Believe me, Cole was VERY vocal about how we handled him.
My working theory has been this. Give Searage a sports car that needs to be refurbished, there’s nobody better.
But a brand new Porsche? He’s never going more than five over the speed limit.
Perfect analogy.
Are you calling Glasnow a fool? There’s probably a better way you could’ve worded that.
I had the sense that there was a trading-broken-toys aspect to this trade. But Archer was far more broken than he looked, and the Rays fixed up their guys. It looks absolutely terrible now, but based on what we knew at the time, I don’t think it was terribly lopsided.
i am definitely a person who still believes that the eyes are the best way to see what is happening. I could never understand all the love Archer was getting. Why he was under performing his peripherals wasn’t nearly as important as the fact that he WAS under performing, consistently, and by a lot. That says something, there are reasons for that. Was he terrific while he was cruising but couldn’t make the right pitch when he had to, maybe, but , regardless of what kept him from being a winning pitcher, the eye test screamed that there was much less there than the numbers the baseball cognoscenti tried to make everybody believe. I wasn’t a great fan of Meadows or Glasnow, and knew nothing of Baz, but my opinion of Archer, being very overrated, made me think the Rays had the edge when the deal was made but I didn’t think it would turn into Lowe and Varitek for Slocumb so quickly.
So I think the extent to which he underperformed his peripherals, at least in a career sense, was mostly overblown. From 2013-2016, if you take a look at his ERA vs. FIP, you’ll see that they’re awfully similar most of the time (and he actually overperformed in 2013). It’s also worth noting that this year he has had both awful results and awful peripherals; his walk rate has just exploded.
But something happened starting in 2017–you can see how his hard hit rate went from about 32% to 39%, and it hasn’t come down much at all since then. That’s an enormous difference. Guys with hard hit rates around 40% tend to post wRC+’s of about 120; guys with hard hit rates around 32% are more in the 100 range.
My thinking at the time was that both Glasnow and Archer could benefit from a change of scenery. It was pretty clear Glasnow was not able to pound the bottom of the strike zone like the Pirates wanted, at least not effectively; he needed to throw strikes and just his stuff get whiffs. Archer, on the other hand, probably needed someone to help him not get hit quite so hard, and that’s something that the Pirates have done pretty well with.
But it turns out that whatever the Pirates have done has actually made Archer worse. Perhaps the moral of the story is that you should never trade for a starting pitcher from the Rays. With the exception of David Price, it seems like the Rays don’t ever trade a starting pitcher unless they’re convinced the end is near, and they’re often right.
I think the collective lesson is never trade with the Rays unless you understand exactly why they like their end of the deal better than yours and are OK with it.
I think Huntington was overconfident after soundly winning the Daniel Hudson for Corey Dickerson trade. But when it comes to pitching, I would hold on tighter any time the Rays come looking at one of my underperforming guys.
Your point on FIP is solid, but his K stats are why I viewed Archer as a big underachiever from 2015-17:
Among the top 100 in total IP for that span, Archer ranked:
— 6th in K%, an elite 28.6%
— 9th in K-BB%
— 41st in ERA+
There was a point in June of 2015 when he seemed to have made the leap to CYA contender. He fanned 15 and 11 in consecutive starts (with no walks), and had a 1.84 ERA at that point. But his ERA topped 4 over his last 19 starts that year, and has stayed over 4 ever since.
In that hot start to 2015, both his K% and BB% were vastly improved from his past rates. But he only sustained the K improvement. Anecdotally, he seemed to have fallen in love with strikeouts, to the exclusion of all other goals.
On the other hand … It could be simply that he’s one of the pitchers most affected by the change in HR context starting in 2015. His HR% spiked right in the middle of that year, and comparing his years before and since, he’s gone from much less than average HR% to higher than average.
Also put me down as someone who believes the only thing that counts is getting hitters out, not how the pitcher achieves this task. For this reason I take a special enjoyment in watching Kyle Hendricks continue to throw a very large percentage of outstanding games.
Please, someone at Fangraphs, do a Josh Bell post so Pirates fans don’t collectively jump off one of Pittsburgh’s many bridges…
Cliff’s notes version, he is utilizing his existing good plate discipline and is now being more aggressive and hitting the ball in the air instead of beating a bunch of grounders. Its not unlike a lite version of Yelich’s changes. A 10% drop in GB% can have a huge impact for a guy with a good hit tool and plenty of physical strength.
Clint’s notes version: he’s hitting the ball really F-ing hard.
This deal should have cost Huntington his job. Making deals for cheap parts is fine but when
you miss on the big deals as badly as he did with this one…heads should roll. GM is first, manager
second, then everyone else. These guys have in charge for a long time: time to go!
This reads like a presidential tweet.
Oh my… What a couple of years does to the definition of the word ‘presidential’.
I’d bet that the directive that generated the Archer trade came from the Owner’s Office.
My sense, too. “Neal, this is Bob. Quick, do something that makes it look like we’re trying to win!”
The firing should be the pitching coach. When Cole and Glasnow both change into Cy Young quality pitchers after being traded I don’t see how you could possibly argue this guy should ever have a job. If you want to pile on, you could argue that Archer got worse (!) and and just about everyone thinks Taillon is better than what he’s showing in an eerily similar situation to that of Cole. Yes, I’m aware of Searage’s rep through some dubious examples where his only skill was knocking walk rates down a peg, usually at the expense of other numbers.
Pirates fan here who is pretty confident player development in Tampa is just better than it is in Pittsburgh. I don’t think Glasnow would ever have become the pitcher in Pittsburgh he has become in Tampa. It’s not like he was incapable of throwing first-pitch strikes until the trade and was suddenly able to do so after. That sort of asymmetric counterfactual makes it harder for me to evaluate the trade.
In some ways, that’ s an even more searing indictment of the baseball operations team than them botching the trade.
I’m sure the Rays don’t pay their analysts all that much, especially in baseball terms. Time to start poaching them.
That dramatic change in walk rate the instant he went to Tampa is pretty damning to the Pirate approach with Glasnow.
The change was that Glasnow figured out how to get his curveball over the plate which allows his fastball to play up if his command of it is still hit or miss. Regarding this trade, everyone seems to forget that at the time of the trade Glasnow was basically a 2 pitch reliever who couldn’t throw any breaking ball for a strike and was walking almost 6 batters per 9 innings. I watched an outing, think it was against the Rays actually, where he literally spiked two curveballs in the dirt in front of home plate in the same at bat. That doesn’t get batters out.
Like you, at the time, I thought it was a pretty fair trade. I hated to lose both Glasnow and Meadows but it costs to get an experienced pitcher. The trade as it stands right now is pretty much as disaster for the Pirates. Archer has been inconsistent as heck, while Glasnow and Meadows – well, you know. I do believe we miss something when developing these pitchers at the minor league level and then managing in the bigs. There’s strong evidence if you use Cole, Morton and now Glasnow as examples. Something’s amiss.
Well in fairness Cole was an ace for the Bucs too with a 5 win season, just a different kind of one. It is also not like anyone saw Morton adding 3mph to his fastball out of the blue at 32 and now shaking his long list of injuries, the Phils did something with him that was pretty major. You can cite as many pro examples too – Burnett, Happ, Lyles, Liriano, Nova (a little). Its a bit too far to say they cant help P improve.
The trade didn’t seem terribly unfair in terms of “in-season trade for a good starting pitcher”
But it was still stupid, given the position the Pirates were in. 16.4% chance of making the playoffs on FG odds that day, and with four teams ahead of them in the WC
They went 5-5 in his 10 starts for them last year. If they had gone 10-0, they still would have missed the playoffs by four games.
I had the same thoughts – I felt the trade looked decent at the time, in a context-neutral sense at least. It was two unestablished underperforming guys (and a throw-in #12 pick because why not) for an established underperforming guy. Maybe it was a li’l much, but not egregious. The expected outcome is that everyone continues underperforming and the trade is lost to history. On the flip side, it looks really bad when two guys figure it out and they’re both on the same side of the deal.
Same old bone headed Pirates moves. Huntington is a joke GM.
He’s had some bad moves recently, but given his budget constraints, he usually does well. We can’t just ignore that he acquired almost every player on the 2013-2015 teams.
As a childhood friend, I couldn’t be happier for Austin Meadows and his success. Great dude from a great family.
Francouerstein is the Forrest Gump of the fangraphs commenting section. The Atlanta suburbs were clearly a hotbed of talent.
Edit: I realize that comment could be misconstrued. I meant he was in the photos with all the famous people. It was not a comment on his intellect.
No offense taken. I’d probably sound like Forrest Gump to most of you anyways
What were games like between Meadows and Clint Frazier?
I’m assuming you meant when they played each other? The games were awesome. I remember when they matched up senior year there was ~2,000 people in the stands and there was barely anywhere to watch the game at loganville’s old stadium. Frazier was a much better HS player in terms of production and he showed out by hitting two moonshots. The fanfare for a HS game was unlike anything I’ve ever seen
that sounds awesome
That must have be an awesome sight. Every team in the top 10 probably had scouts at that game.
I would imagine each individual prospect will be better than Archer going forward. Great move for the Rays.
Dan, I love the analysis and most of your articles and chats. However, your chess analogy was painfully bad. I implies that knights are inherently worse than bishops and that one would willingly allow a trade of a bad bishop for a good knight without other compensation involved (or an inability to do anything about it) and that sacrificing two bishops for a pawn structure advantage is a viable plan in more than 0.00000001% of chess positions.
I’m definitely here for ChessGraphs. I think the second part wasn’t referring to trading two bishops for pawn structure, it was more, say, trading your white-square bishop for a knight, leaving you with only one bishop but your opponent with two. Bad idea in the abstract but if you leave them with doubled pawns in one column and an island pawn elsewhere, now we’re talking.
If it was just a reference to giving one’s opponent the two bishops advantage (i.e. over any other combination of bishops and knights) it still seems fairly weak. Poor pawn structure could be compensation for that, although the position you describe sounds like it would be fairly open (hard to have a locked pawn structure with that many pawn islands) and would probably favor the bishops, pawn structure disadvantage notwithstanding. Many, many times, trading the bishop for knight is normal, even in the abstract—if a position is closed, for example. And, of course, tactical considerations generally trump everything.
it is my view that the Rays are the best managed team in baseball that also has by far the least money to manage. Having so little money always has them feeling like that have to out manage just to survive.
You should always be wary when trading with a superior management that feels it has to win cause they will win most by allot!
Yeah, these posts about the Rays not having money for analysts and development coaches are silly. The worst team’s worst MLB player probably makes more than all of the Yankees’ analysts and minor league coaches combined. There is a ton of talent dying to do those jobs for every team; it’s the vetting process, the chemistry of your staff, and knowing what you need. It has little to do with money.
I seem to recall fans souring considerably on McCutchen following a AAA hiccup. Both McCutchen and Meadows had top 10 prospect pedigrees and then hit a wall. Just goes to show you that with the right skill set and age appropriateness, a top prospect having a down year isn’t the end of the world.
Cutch had a AA hiccup, which made it more worrisome than not.
…at 20 – just don’t agree with a prospect needing to wreck every level or he might not turn into much of anything. Analysts probably hedge a bit and it takes on a life of its own as the crowd piles on.
Pirates fans did not have much to hope for when Cutch was in AA. His struggles just added to the gloom.
Nice parting shot at Angel Hernandez *mic drop*
How did everybody miss the bit about Archer becoming a Pirate King? I’m embarrassed.
Even worse from the Pirates POV, is they’re paying Archer $27M for 2019-2021. That $9M a year looks(looked?) like a good deal & wouldn’t be an issue for most teams, but, for a low spending team like Pittsburgh, they would certainly be much better served by multiple years of 3 decent- to- great players at or near the league minimum, followed by a the opportunity to get them on a team-friendly extension.
This trade was a dud the day it happened. Pretty much the worst trade in recent memory, especially considering the Pirates weren’t that close to being a real playoff team. They fooled themselves at the peak of a win streak.
Meadows had already flashed with the Pirates. Giving up him alone for Archer would have been dumb but they went further. Meadows and Glasnow looking like studs right away makes it a disaster.
Worst trade since Aram for a bag of balls and salary relief — for the Cubs. Trading for Matt Morris and his salary was a sinker. So too Liriano and prospects to the Jays for salary relief.
The Archer trade will likely wreck the Pirates for years….
When the trade was made I felt it was just a move made by the Pirates FO to make it up to the fans that they didn’t go for it in previous runs and in the 2017-18 offseason. Saying, “Hey look, we made a big move, we’re ready to compete” and then not doing anything of long term substance at all to supplement the trade is what’s worse than the trade right now. Now they are going to watch their former prospects tear up the league for a very long time while they maybe set their franchise back a few years.
I attended Glasnow’s first start at the beginning of 2017, when he had finally won a rotation spot after his cup of coffee at the end of 2016. He struggled immediately (Billy Hamilton syndrome) and the PNC crowd, inexplicably, began booing. The situation deteriorated in the second inning, including a mound visit that resembled those televised during Little League WS blowouts, and Glasnow ultimately got booed off the mound. In the second inning of his *first start*. I remember later seeing footage of the Pirate dugout looking up in the stands in bewilderment at this treatment, in particular Chad Kuhl mouthing ‘What the f*’. You can see all this on the MLB.TV archive.
As a Pirates fan I hate to say it, but after that treatment we didn’t deserve to enjoy peak Glasnow.
I think a lot of Archer’s problem comes down to underutilizing his curveball. He only throws it 2% of the time, and it’s a positive value pitch. It has nice shape, and pretty big velocity separation from his other three offerings. I think the curve can buy him some early-count strikes if he used it more, and might help play up his slider and heat. He’s getting fewer chases, and more contact on pitches outside of the zone when hitters do chase. That tells me they’re on his putaway pitches. The only way to get guys off those pitches is to throw something else. The curve looks like the best option for that.
The trade looks bad now but don’t forget that meadows was injured all the time and glasnow had a big relief risk due to command. Both prospects had lost some of their shine and the pirates probably thought they were leaving a sinking ship.
They developed very differently but who knows if the pirates player dev could have done the same.