Pirates Swap Former First Rounders With Red Sox, Add Two Lefty Relievers

The Pirates have made three trade in the last two days. Yesterday, they swapped post-hype prospects with the Red Sox — struggling right-handed pitcher Quinn Priester for Triple-A 2B/LF Nick Yorke — and added veteran southpaw Jalen Beeks from the Rockies in exchange for minor league lefty Luis Peralta. Then, earlier today, Pittsburgh acquired 29-year-old lefty Josh Walker from the Mets for DSL pitcher Nicolas Carreno.

The first Pirates trade involved two pretty famous players. Both Quinn Priester (2019) and Nick Yorke (2020) were first-round picks out of high school and are still in their early twenties. At 6-foot-3, Priester’s prototypical size, mid-90s fastball, and incredible curveball were his pre-draft calling cards. Meanwhile Yorke was a tougher eval because of COVID and injury, and was somewhat of a surprising first rounder that year.

Priester pitched very well in the minors but has run into unresolved trouble in his two big league seasons (6.46 ERA, 94 career innings) because his fastball doesn’t play. He’s lost velocity compared to his prospect peak, when he was sitting 94-97 mph, but his sinking fastball also performs below its raw velocity due to its ineffective movement and hittable angle. His heater has surrendered a .284/.351/.493 line this year, and while he has a couple of other pitches (a slider/cutter and a changeup), his curveball remains the lone exceptional one. However, because it is such a big-arcing curveball that is fairly easy to identify out of his hand, Priester has been forced to de-emphasize it.

He is now a reclamation project of sorts. During Craig Breslow’s fairly new tenure as Boston’s chief baseball officer, many of the organization’s pitching prospects have gotten better very quickly. Many of them have made significant changes to their deliveries and altered the angle at which their pitches approach the plate. It’s possible the BoSox believe Priester is a candidate for something like this, or that his stuff might play better in the bullpen. At the very least the Red Sox needed a healthy starter with options right now because other 40-man starters Brandon Walter and Luis Perales are on the IL and, though he’s been better of late, Wikelman Gonzalez is walking too many batters in Double-A to be promoted with good conscience. This trade fits an in-the-moment need for the Red Sox, and they have another five years of team control of Priester to try to accentuate his talent in some way.

The Red Sox have also cleared what (at first glance) was maybe the lone 40-man crunch situation in the league by trading Eddinson Paulino in the Danny Jansen trade, and now Yorke, who is a virtual lock to be added to Pittsburgh’s 40-man this offseason if he doesn’t debut before the end of the year. Yorke has spent 2024 split between Double- and Triple-A and was hitting .278/.363/.422 combined at the time of the trade. He’s had injury issues (shoulder surgery in high school, toe, back, and wrist injuries as a pro) but has hit when he’s been healthy for the last half decade, including at Triple-A. He’s in position to get a big league look soon and is exactly what the Pirates needed: a good young hitter who can help an underperforming offense sooner than later.

Yorke’s hitting hands are very pretty, and his righty cut looks great despite his relatively mediocre bat speed and athleticism. He lacks huge top-end power and swing loft, but he consistently hits the ball hard, with a 46% hard-hit rate on the season.

Yorke’s style of hitting is primarily about making hard line drive contact back through the middle of the diamond. He is probably not going to hit many home runs and instead is going to hit a ton of singles and spray doubles – quality contact from foul line to foul line. When you start to incorporate Yorke’s defensive fit into his report, the lack of big power makes his overall profile feel a tad underwhelming. He is not a very good defensive second baseman and is the type of player who tends to be replaced with a better one late in games. He has also played left field and did so with increasing frequency in the weeks leading up to the trade. Where Yorke plays defense doesn’t really matter for the Pirates, though, because they need someone, anyone who can have an OBP over .300 soon. Yorke should compete for playing time almost immediately, especially with incumbent second baseman Nick Gonzales now shelved with a groin injury.

One very weird and specific thing to highlight about Yorke is that he has extreme reverse splits. There isn’t a great online resource for career minor league splits, so I’ve turned to what Synergy has on tape for Yorke throughout his entire pro career, including things like broadcast Grapefruit League games. The righty-hitting Yorke is slashing .284/.368/.456 against righties and .220/.293/.305 against lefties as a pro. His contact rates are virtually identical against both, so it’s not as if Yorke is especially allergic to changeups and is striking out a ton against lefties, or anything like that. He struggles to pull fastballs in general (he crushes mistake breaking balls), but this is especially true against lefties. He’s hitting .150 (!) for his career against left-handed fastballs, which he tends to swing inside of in the extreme. His hands just don’t work in a way that matches the pitch plane of lefty fastballs at all, and maybe this is a bigger red flag than I’m currently understanding it to be. Yorke projects to be a good part-time 2B/LF (and probably 1B eventually, too) who weirdly backs into the bigger half of a platoon role because of his freaky reverse splits.

As for the team’s other trade yesterday, Beeks is a rental on a $1.67 million deal. He’s having a fair season in which he’s on pace to set a career high for innings as a reliever. He’s running a 4.74 ERA, 18% strikeout rate, and a 8.5% walk rate; with Colorado he was throwing more fastballs and cutters than ever before in his career as his changeup usage has backed up. His numbers against lefties are quite strong – 24% K rate, 9.5% BB rate – and he slides into the Pirates’ third lefty bullpen spot behind Aroldis Chapman, whom I suppose could still be traded, and the newly acquired Josh Walker.

In exchange for Beeks the Rockies acquired Peralta, a 5-foot-11, 23-year-old lefty with a really great slider. He was moved to the bullpen this season and was averaging 15 strikeouts per nine innings at Pittsburgh’s High-A affiliate during the first half of the season before he was promoted to Double-A Altoona a few weeks ago. Peralta has a loose delivery and three-quarters arm slot that imparts rise/run movement on his 94 mph fastball. His low-80s slider is really nasty despite lacking spin (we’re talking 2,100 rpm, way below average) and it plays as a strike-getter and finishing pitch. Peralta will probably be added to the 40-man during the offseason and is likely to debut in Colorado at some point next season in a middle-inning lefty role.

Walker, Pittsburgh’s addition today, is a massive 6-foot-6 lefty who graduated from rookie status this season at age 29. A late-round Division II success story, he rocketed through the minors in 2021, pitched at Triple-A during parts of the next few years, and debuted with the Mets in ’23 before an oblique strain sent him to the 60-day IL. He’s been back and forth from Triple-A Syracuse to the majors a few times in 2024. A lefty with a great frame, Walker has a stiff overhand delivery that generates depth on a good curveball despite its lacking much spin. It’s a nasty enough pitch to play as a backfoot weapon against righties, as well as in a left-on-left capacity. He’s also had a little velo uptick in the early going of 2024, and his ability to consistently locate his heater to the top of the zone has helped it garner a chase rate north of 40% this year. He looks like a stable middle reliever. It’s plausible the acquisitions of Beeks and Walker are a precursor to a Chapman trade.

In exchange for Walker, the Mets got back 18-year-old Venezuelan lefty Nicolas Carreno. Carreno is a lightning-armed little guy, a 5-foot-10 kid who is sitting 95 and has a potentially good slider. He’s striking out and walking a ton of batters in his second DSL season.