On Second Thought, Let’s Call Konnor Griffin Up After All

It feels incredibly weird to say this but… it’s a good time to be a Pirates fan? Because Konnor Griffin is coming to the majors. He’ll make his major league debut in Pittsburgh’s home opener on Friday.

Griffin was the Pirates’ first-round pick in 2024, ninth overall, and quickly emerged as the no. 1 overall prospect in baseball. A team that’s been as bad as the Pirates, for as long as they’ve been bad, will have some familiarity with the ballyhooed prospect debut, but I’m not sure even they’ve seen anything like this. I was as big a Paul Skenes fan as anyone, and as pumped as I was to see him hit the majors, he’s surpassed even my expectations.

Well, now Skenes is in the majors to stay. So is Bubba Chandler. The Pirates flirted with spending some money this past offseason, and while a 3-3 record is the definition of unremarkable, the Pirates just went on the road and played the Mets and Reds — two of their erstwhile NL playoff rivals — to a draw. The Pirates might be kind of OK. Life hasn’t been this good, genuinely, in more than 10 years.

But Griffin’s debut is the main event. Because as big as the hype around Skenes was, the expectations for Griffin are even greater.

You don’t have to get far into Eric Longenhagen, Brendan Gawlowski, and James Fegan’s Top 100 post to understand what Griffin’s deal is. The fourth, fifth, and sixth words in the capsule on Griffin are “freaky five-tool superstar.” He was the only prospect to get a 70-FV grade in the past two years, and his component tool grades are all 60s and 70s across the board, including 70s for speed and power.

But Griffin is also a plus defensive shortstop who hit .333 across three minor league levels last year — his first in professional baseball — with 65 stolen bases in 122 games. That last part is hard to believe, because I have trouble wrapping my head around the idea of someone that big being that quick.

I interviewed Griffin at the combine two years ago. It was a pleasant enough conversation; he said he was learning to cook in preparation for moving out of his parents’ house. I encouraged him to purchase a crockpot.

I bring this up because while Griffin is not the largest teenager I’ve ever seen up close, that’s only because I covered football for the student paper when I was in college. Griffin is not as big as an SEC offensive tackle, but his vastness is unsettling. He is tall, he is wide, and every extremity, including his neck, is replete with muscle. And he’s put on 20 pounds of beef since I saw him last.

In the Effectively Wild predictions game, Meg advanced the proposition that Griffin could produce more WAR as a rookie than Mike Trout did in 2012 (10.1). (I took the under, not just because Meg’s prediction was outlandish by design, but for reasons I’ll get into later in this post.) In terms of all-around five-tool polish and athleticism, that’s the kind of territory we’re talking ourselves into. Certainly, Trout is one of the few recent ballplayers with a similar physical presence to Griffin’s, though even Trout is not quite this big.

As good as Griffin was in 2025, and as quickly as he moved through the minors, I never really considered an April major league debut as a serious possibility. Even avid baseball fans can forget how long the developmental arc is for a draft pick, especially a high schooler. Griffin could genuinely have been that promising a talent and not broken into the majors until 2027 or later.

He will be the 10th player from his draft class to reach the majors, and the 2024 draft was notable for being extremely heavy on college guys who were expected to move quickly. JJ Wetherholt and Carson Benge only beat Griffin to the majors by a week. In regular-season terms, Trey Yesavage, an extremely polished college pitcher who’s almost three years older than Griffin, has only three more weeks of big league experience. Charlie Condon and Travis Bazzana are still in the minors.

It’s unthinkable that Griffin would get here so quickly. Assuming he’s in the lineup on Friday, he will become just the 14th position player since 1995 to make his major league debut before he turns 20. The first 13 players on that list include two Hall of Famers and three nailed-on future first-ballot Hall of Famers. Five of the other eight players made at least one All-Star team; four made at least three. The median career WAR among this group belongs to another Pirates infield prospect, Aramis Ramirez, at 38.5.

In short, if you knew nothing about Griffin other than the fact that he was set to reach the majors at 19, you could set Hall of Very Good as a median outcome. As a single biographical datum to project from, being a teenage major leaguer is way better than being the no. 1 overall pick.

But if you just look at how these players performed in their first season in the big leagues, they tend to have another thing in common: They weren’t that good.

Only four of these players were worth more than a win in their debut year, and all of them had significant advanced experience by age 17. Soto, Reyes, and Renteria all signed as amateur free agents at 16 or younger. Renteria actually played on the Marlins’ complex at 15, and spent his age-16 campaign in full-season A-ball. Griffin got drafted at 18 and two and a half months; by the time Harper was that age, he’d played a full season of JUCO ball, including a trip to the national championship series, and he’d gone 12-for-35 in the Arizona Fall League.

Even more advanced prospects struggled early. If there’s a comp for Griffin in the majors right now, it’s Bobby Witt Jr., who had a .294 on-base percentage and posted 2.3 WAR when he got his first big league action at age 22. Witt was a star by Year 2 and a god by Year 3, but in Year 1 he looked like a kid.

For that reason, I was quite comfortable with the Pirates’ decision to leave Griffin off the Opening Day roster. He’d hit four home runs 16 Grapefruit League games, but he’d also batted .171 with 13 strikeouts in 46 plate appearances. That’s not bad at all for a 19-year-old, but it also doesn’t look like Griffin bashing in the portcullis and demanding to be taken north with the grown-ups. There’d be no harm in letting him get an extra layer of seasoning in Triple-A.

Yes, Griffin went 7-for-16 with three doubles in his first taste of action at that level, but five games barely counts as getting taken out of the fridge, let alone being seasoned. No baseball executive since Branch Rickey is going to look at that sample and think Griffin has changed even a little in the past week.

In fact, from a service time or PPI perspective, Griffin’s time in the minors makes no difference at all. It’s still early enough in the year for him to record a full year’s service (assuming he’s in the big leagues to stay), and he can still earn the Pirates a draft pick by performing well enough in award voting.

Griffin and the Pirates have reportedly made some progress on a contract extension. (At this point, any Triple-A shortstop who isn’t talking to his team about an extension must be feeling horribly left out.) Buster Olney’s sources have the two sides within tens of millions of dollars of an agreement on an eight-year contract, with Griffin’s camp asking for something akin to the eight-year, $130 million deal Roman Anthony signed last August.

If that’s true, the Pirates should be leaping over the proverbial table to take that offer, because that price is only going to go up, and rapidly. Especially because Griffin, by virtue of his youth, could hit free agency after his age-25 season, assuming the free agency timeline doesn’t change in the next CBA. Great players get paid almost regardless of age, but apart from Shohei Ohtani, the genuine record-breaking contracts — Alex Rodriguez, Trout, Harper, Soto, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. — go to players who are set to reach free agency young.

If Griffin extends now, every free agent year he gives up could be worth — without an ounce of exaggeration — $60 million or more. If the Pirates can tie Griffin up for what Anthony got (his deal maxes out with a $30 million club option for 2035), they should do it before he changes his mind.

The timing of Griffin’s call-up is so strange, a looming contract extension is the only explanation that explains it to me. The Pirates will get a PPI pick if Griffin wins Rookie of the Year and records a full year of service time, but only if he hasn’t signed an extension first. If an extension is close, or if there’s even a handshake deal in place, the Pirates would need to get Griffin onto the big league roster before they put pen to paper.

I’ve so far focused on what Griffin will mean to the Pirates, and to baseball, in the broadest possible context. Mostly because this isn’t a guy you bring up to play a couple days a week and hit lefties off the bench in the hopes of going from 82 wins to 83. This is a franchise player; I’ve zoomed out because I expect that when all is said and done, you will be able to see his impact from space.

But even if there are growing pains, it’s undeniable that he’ll help the Pirates now.

The Pirates brought in three big (or big-ish) veteran bats this offseason: Brandon Lowe, Marcell Ozuna, and Ryan O’Hearn. All of those players have major defensive limitations, as do incumbent outfielders Oneil Cruz and Bryan Reynolds.

In a perfect world, Reynolds would be a DH, Cruz would be playing right field, O’Hearn would be playing first base, Lowe would be playing at first or in an outfield corner, and shortstop Jared Triolo would probably be playing either second or third base. (If he’s in the lineup at all; Triolo’s 86 career wRC+ is in utility infielder territory.)

But Ozuna has to DH, and while Spencer Horwitz has been OK at first base, he was diabolical when the Blue Jays tried him at second. So O’Hearn is in right field, Cruz is in center (often without his sunglasses, to Skenes’ peril), Lowe is at second base, and Triolo is at short.

The result: FanGraphs editorial policy prohibits me from describing the quality of Pittsburgh’s defense in this forum. I wanted to use a portmanteau involving a popular household pet and what that pet will leave on the carpet if it isn’t housebroken; Matt said I wasn’t allowed.

Griffin’s glove alone would improve this team significantly. And even a conservative evaluation of his offensive game — one which accounts for some growing pains as he adjusts to big league pitching — would have Griffin as a middle-of-the-order bat in this lineup.

I don’t want to get too effusive about Griffin, because players of his inexperience so rarely hit the ground running in the majors. At the same time, that’s a hard urge to resist, because players this talented so rarely get the opportunity to try.