The Pittsburgh Pirates have a lot of questions to address regarding their pitching staff. With the regular season just two-plus weeks away, final decisions have yet to be made on starter and bullpen roles alike. Candidates abound on both fronts, particularly the latter, with an addition and an injury-induced subtraction further muddying the waters in recent days. Here are snapshots from four conversations — three recent, and one somewhat older — with pitchers who could figure prominently in the team’s plans.

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Left on the cutting room floor from an interview I did with JT Brubaker at the conclusion of last season was what he said about his two breaking balls. The 27-year-old right-hander considers his slider his best secondary. He’s thrown it since his senior year of high school, and it’s firm. At 86.7 mph (per StatCast), it registered as the 11th-hardest among the 58 pitchers who worked at last 40 innings and had the pitch in their arsenal. Brubaker told me that while it sometimes registers as a cutter, he always considers it a slider.

Eric Longenhagen had written in his 2020 prospect profile that Brubaker’s “relatively new” curveball was his best secondary pitch. I asked the righty what might have prompted that opinion.

“Possibly the analytical side of it,” surmised Brubaker. “It’s something I’d put in the back pocket, then brought back out. I’m always been able to throw a curveball, but I’ve never been fully consistent with it.”

The pitch had actually gone into his back pocket at the bequest of the organization, as they wanted him to focus on his slider. He eventually pulled it back out in need of “something with a little more velocity separation between my changeup and slider, something in the lower lower spectrum to slow the batters down more.” Read the rest of this entry »

I invite you to look at the image below. Please, go ahead.

That’s Jordan Hicks on the mound — you know, “strike one at 104” Jordan Hicks. At the plate is Mets utilityman Luis Guillorme. Hicks, on Sunday, was making his first appearance on the mound since undergoing Tommy John surgery in mid-2019. Guillorme played an extremely solid 30 games for the Mets in 2020 and is 5-for-15 this spring.

What is happening in this picture? Look at Guillorme’s feet — his right ankle rolled, his left heel lifting off the ground, his arms flinging the bat desperately through the air. Yadier Molina extends his arm, holding his glove in place. Look at the scorebug — the 1-2 count. This could very well have been a picture of Hicks striking out Guillorme.

Except it wasn’t. Guillorme got his bat on it, somehow — not the heat Hicks is best known for, but a slider at 86 — launching the ball somewhere into the leftward distance. It was the 10th pitch of the plate appearance, the eighth he’d seen with two strikes. Molina and the umpire watched it sail away. Hicks’ next pitch, at 99, nearly took Guillorme’s head off. The count was now even, and the plate appearance was still only halfway done. Read the rest of this entry »

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If you want power, pull the ball in the air. It’s a truism because it’s true. On pulled air balls (line drives and fly balls), batters hit .558 with a 1.285 slugging percentage in 2020. When they went to the opposite field, they hit .297 with a .522 slugging percentage. It isn’t rocket science; pulling means power, and power means production.

Want another way of putting it? Those opposite-field air balls were hit with an average 86.8 mph exit velocity. Only 26.6% of them were hit at 95 mph or harder. When batters pulled the ball, they did far better — they checked in at 94 mph on average and 54.7% were 95 mph or higher. You don’t need any fancy statistics to tell you how much better that is.

Even if you take for granted that a batter hit the ball hard, it’s still better to pull the ball. When batters barreled up balls to the pull side, they slugged 3.283. A barrel is high-value by nature, but a slugging percentage of 3.283 is still hard to fathom. Those balls were hit a comical 105.6 mph on average, and hitters posted a 1.679 wOBA on them — again, you don’t need me to tell you that’s good. It’s good!

Barrel a ball to the opposite field, and the results aren’t bad, per se — after all, a barrel is a high-value hit by definition. Compared to the gaudy results on pulled barrels, though, it’s a disappointment; a 2.588 slugging percentage on 102.4 mph average exit velocity, good for a 1.347 wOBA. Good, but not as good as it could be; pulling the ball creates more juice.

Got that all straight? It’s harder to barrel the ball up when you hit it to the opposite field. Even when you do, it’s hard to get as much production out of it as you do to the pull side. Great, we have that covered. Now, meet Eloy Jiménez:

That’s an opposite-field barrel, one of 10 such batted balls Jiménez hit last year. That led baseball, and it wasn’t some volume-based fluke; 21.3% of the opposite-field balls that he hit, period, were barreled. That’s almost double his rate on pulled balls (11.9%). Did Eloy figure out how to beat the sheer inevitability of pull production being better? Read the rest of this entry »

With nearly half of spring training already over, the Pirates made a last-minute addition to their starting rotation last week, signing Trevor Cahill to a one-year, $1.5 million contract with an additional $1 million in potential incentives. Cahill becomes the second veteran arm Pittsburgh has added this offseason, joining his former teammate from the Giants, Tyler Anderson. In a season where every pitching staff will be stretched thin, both ex-Giants give the Pirates much needed rotation depth.

Cahill joins an extremely young Pirates roster. Depending on what happens with Todd Frazier, who is in camp as a non-roster invitee, Cahill could enter the season as the oldest member of the 26-man roster. Pittsburgh was very aggressive in moving whatever value they could find from their starting rotation this offseason. Joe Musgrove and Jameson Taillon were both traded away within a week of each other, and Trevor Williams and Chris Archer both left in free agency. Steven Brault and Chad Kuhl have the most seniority now with nine seasons and 5.6 total WAR between them. Mitch Keller will get another chance to translate his excellent minor league track record and prospect helium into actual production at the major league level. Because of either their advanced service time or pedigree, those three should have rotation spots locked up with Anderson slotting into the fourth slot. That leaves Cahill and JT Brubaker to round out the staff — assuming the Pirates use a six-man rotation.

Pirates GM Ben Cherington has said that’s how he’d like to approach the season:

“We like the idea of having six starters on the team. Whether we’re actually using all six starters or are using them to come in behind guys and provide length or back and forth, we’ll see how that plays out. We just wanted to add as much starting depth as we could after the offseason moves.”

Read the rest of this entry »

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Last week, MLB announced that it was implementing several rule changes throughout the minor leagues in 2021. While the hostile takeover of the minor leagues was based primarily on economic factors, the new arrangement allows the league to act unilaterally on other issues as well, including the use of affiliate teams as testing grounds for new rules experimentations. Most of these rules had been proposed at one time or another in the recent past, and the league is spreading the adjustments across the various minor league levels:

• Base sizes: In Triple-A, the sizes of each base will be increased from 15-inch squares to 18-inch squares.
• Defensive positioning: In Double-A, teams will be required to position four players in the infield: Each player must have both feet in front of the outer boundary of the infield dirt. In the second half of the season, MLB may also require that teams keep two infielders on each side of second base, though that is not a requirement at the outset.
• Step-off rule: In High-A, pitchers will be required to disengage the rubber before attempting a pickoff throw; violations will result in a balk.
• Electronic strike zone: In the Low-A Southeast League, select games (it’s unclear which ones or how many) will use the electronic strike zone first tested in the Atlantic League and Arizona Fall League.
• Pitch timer: In the Low-A West League, pitchers will be placed on a 15-second pitch clock, which is five second faster than the clock currently used in Double-A and Triple-A.
• Pickoff limits: Across Low-A, pitchers will only be allowed to step off twice per plate appearance. Any subsequent throw over must result in successfully retiring the runner, or it’s a balk.

With those rules in hand, Brendan Gawlowski and Kevin Goldstein have thoughts.

Base Sizes

BG: The best rule adjustments foster desirable behavior without rocking the boat and I think we have that here. Shaving a few inches between bases won’t dramatically increase the number of stolen bases or infield hits, but any subtle alterations should flow in the right direction. And unlike some of these other ideas, which you can’t help but notice, a slightly larger base will be all but invisible to fans in Section 326.

KG: I mean, really, do you care? Does anyone? Depending on one’s interpretation of the 90 feet being from the center of the base rule, this puts bases two to four inches closer to each other, or roughly 0.2 to 0.4 percent. There’s no big impact on the game, which is likely why it’s being implemented at Triple-A. If anything, this could mitigate some injuries on plays that create traffic around the bag, especially 3-1 groundouts. This is fine.

Defensive Positioning

KG: My head is absolutely spinning on this one. I had a theory, I felt strongly about said theory, and then the data came and punched that theory in the face. My initial reaction was that if teams can’t shift, hitters can sell out for power and focus more on driving balls than making contact, so that while no shifts might increase BABIP, less contact would make it a zero sum game. Read the rest of this entry »

Last Wednesday, I looked at some of the hitters who cause me the greatest worry as we approach the start of the 2021 season. Today, this year’s booms-and-busts pieces finish up with the pitchers I’m most grumpy about. Like the hitters, these “busts” represent a combination of players who I think will fall significantly short of their 2020 stats, fail to meet their 2021 projections, or have some troubling flaw that gets me wondering. Only one pitcher is on this list due to injury; given pitcher injury rates, every pitcher has a disturbingly high bust potential stemming from the likelihood that they might make an unfortunate appearance on the 60-day Injured List.

Corey Kluber, New York Yankees

I know, ZiPS isn’t super concernced about Kluber, forecasting a solid 3.87 ERA and 4.12 FIP for the right-hander. But after two years of injuries, I’m far more bearish on him than the projections are. It’s good that the injuries didn’t involve anything elbow-related and that his torn teres major muscle isn’t connected to the rotator cuff. Still, one thing I’ve found in pitcher projections is that the volatility after two consecutive lost seasons is massive. Kluber may be fine, but the downside scenarios are so scary that I’m not sure he’s a good fit for the Yankees, who have a lot of risky pitchers after Gerrit Cole. Given how plentiful the worst-case scenarios are, I sadly have to put Kluber as a serious bust candidate. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Colorado Rockies. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. As there was no minor league season in 2020, there are some instances where no new information was gleaned about a player. Players whose write-ups have not been meaningfully altered begin by telling you so. Each blurb ends with an indication of where the player played in 2020, which in turn likely informed the changes to their report if there were any. As always, I’ve leaned more heavily on sources from outside of a given org than those within for reasons of objectivity. Because outside scouts were not allowed at the alternate sites, I’ve primarily focused on data from there, and the context of that data, in my opinion, reduces how meaningful it is. Lastly, in an effort to more clearly indicate relievers’ anticipated roles, you’ll see two reliever designations, both on my lists and on The Board: MIRP, or multi-inning relief pitcher, and SIRP, or single-inning relief pitcher.

For more information on the 20-80 scouting scale by which all of our prospect content is governed, you can click here. For further explanation of Future Value’s merits and drawbacks, read Future Value.

All of the numbered prospects here also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It can be found here.