Now Tommy Pham Is a Pirate, Yarrrgh

Tommy Pham is on the move again. The well-traveled outfielder reportedly agreed to a one-year, $4.025 million deal with the Pirates on Thursday, meaning that he’ll join his ninth team over the past five seasons and the 10th of his 12-year career. Past experience suggests he should probably rent instead of buy.

Pham, who will turn 37 on March 8, spent time with three different teams in 2024. Despite a very solid 2023 showing — .256/.328/.446 (109 wRC+) with 16 homers, 22 steals, and 1.9 WAR — with the Mets and Diamondbacks, he went unsigned through spring training before finally inking a deal with the White Sox in mid-April. He escaped their record-setting futility when he was traded back to the Cardinals (who originally drafted him in 2006) as part of the three-way swap that sent Michael Kopech and Tommy Edman to the Dodgers, and then was plucked off of waivers by the Royals on August 31. At least he’s gotten back-to-back trips to the postseason thanks to all that moving around.

Whether it was because he missed spring training, never stayed in one place for long, or was increasingly subject to the ravages of aging — spending time around those White Sox and Cardinals teams could take years off a man’s life — Pham did not play well in 2024. He hit just .248/.305/.368, setting career lows in on-base percentage and walk rate (7.3%) as well as a full-season low in slugging percentage. (He slugged .312 in 125 plate appearances during the pandemic-shortened 2020 season.) He was basically replacement level in 2024, and his 91 wRC+ fit into the weird pattern he’s shown over the past half-decade, with above-average seasons in odd-numbered years and below-average seasons in even-numbered ones. Maybe that bodes well for the Buccos.

Pham’s numbers contain many unsettling signs. He’s a very disciplined hitter, chasing just 18.2% of pitches outside the zone, the sixth-lowest rate from among the 207 hitters with at least 400 plate appearances; his 40.5% swing rate was 11th lowest. Yet pitchers were unafraid to challenge him in the zone; he ranked ninth with 54.8% of pitches there. He didn’t do a ton of damage with them: His .423 slugging percentage on in-zone pitches was 43 points below the major league average, and his .298 wOBA on such pitches was 19 points below average. His overall quality of contact fell off notably from 2023 to ’24:

Throughout his career, Pham has made hard contact consistently, with numbers that have almost invariably placed in the 85th percentile or higher. The 2024 season marked a departure from that, as his exit velocity dropped by nearly two miles per hour. It still placed in the 70th percentile, but that was down from two straight seasons in the 93rd percentile. Similarly, his career-low hard-hit rate marked a drop from the 89th percentile to 64th, and his career-low barrel rate from the 69th to the 43rd. His xSLG was his second-lowest mark, and he even fell short of that by 39 points. As his double-digit average launch angle suggests, he got under too many pitches; his 23.6% under rate represented a career high and a 7.3-point jump from 2023.

If Pham’s 2024 performance looks like an aberration in that light, his breakdown by pitch groups suggests a more alarming pattern. Normally, I’m not a huge fan of Statcast’s aggregations because they tend to paper over some nuances, but woof, over the past four seasons, Pham has been weak against anything that’s not a fastball of some type:

Aside from his 2023 showing against breaking balls, Pham has posted wOBAs and xwOBAs of .280 or lower against breaking and offspeed stuff annually for the last four seasons. Put another way, only twice has he slugged higher than .309 against a non-fastball pitch group during that span (breaking balls in 2023 and offspeed stuff in ’21). Circling back to an observation I made above, when pitchers got ahead of him and then landed breaking balls or offspeed pitches in the zone, Pham managed just a .249 wOBA, 28 points below the league average, and for the 2021–24 period he was 22 points below average (.251 vs. .273).

On the other side of the ball, Pham’s defensive metrics were not good either, as he set a career worst with -10 DRS and was also below average in terms of FRV (-5) and UZR (-2.6). But here I’m inclined to cut him considerable slack. After playing just 136 innings in center field from 2021–23, he spent 223 innings there for the White Sox, mostly from late April to early June when Luis Robert Jr. was sidelined by injury; that accounts for -7 DRS and -2 FRV. He was bad in right (-4 DRS, -4 FRV) as well, but those 387 2/3 innings were spread over three teams and adjacent to seven different center fielders. Even while he’s been average to below average during his nomadic years, it’s difficult look good under those circumstances.

Pham figures to be in some kind of right field job share with the Pirates, who non-tendered Bryan De La Cruz and Connor Joe in November. Bryan Reynolds is slated to start in left with Oneil Cruz set for his first full season in center after shifting from shortstop late last year. Pham’s platoon splits have been just about dead even in the past two seasons. (He was particularly effective against lefties with the White Sox but slumped mightily against them in his subsequent stops.) The candidates to share time with him in Pittsburgh are all lefties, namely Joshua Palacios, Jack Suwinski, and Adam Frazier. None of them performed well in 2024; Palacios’ 93 wRC+ came in just 78 plate appearances while each of the other two posted a low-60s wRC+ in just shy of 300 PA.

Pham is coming off a rough season with some disconcerting trends, but that’s exactly why he’s here, making a modest salary for a team that projects to be competitive but a bit below .500. Maybe it all comes together for the Pirates with a full season of Paul Skenes, Jared Jones, and Mitch Keller atop their rotation. If it doesn’t, you can bet that some GM will be ready to take a flyer on Pham in late July or August.