Projecting Mitch Keller and Oneil Cruz Extensions

The Pirates are having a relatively successful 2023, as the team has defied expectations and is currently in second place in the NL Central, just a half-game behind the first-place Brewers. The record on the field isn’t the only thing coming up Pirate this year: the team successfully signed Bryan Reynolds to an eight-year, $106.75 million contract extension, ending the eternal and well-founded speculation about which team the Bucs would trade him to and when. With Ke’Bryan Hayes already signed to a $70 million extension — then the largest dollar figure for a contract in franchise history — Pittsburgh has discussed locking up two other foundational talents, Mitch Keller and Oneil Cruz.

Despite the Pirates signing a nine-figure deal with Reynolds, it would be a mistake to assume that it foreshadows a new era in team spending that gets them into the next tier up in the spending ranks. The last time they finished even 20th in baseball in payroll was 20 years ago, in 2003, and they’re usually in the bottom five. There they will stay, but if they spend a good proportion of that self-limited budget on their best young talent, they get their best shots at the NL Central and don’t explicitly look like a stop for young players between Triple-A and the majors. To manage this, Pittsburgh has to sign its young players sooner rather than later, and absorb additional risk.

Of these two players, Keller’s extension is probably the more urgent matter to attend to. The least expensive time to sign him would have been a few years ago, when he was struggling to adjust to the majors and the Pirates could, as noted above, defray some of the cost by taking on that additional risk that he’d never develop. Keller is eligible to hit free agency after the 2025 season, so there’s a real ticking clock here; the longer the Pirates take to come to an agreement, the less financial reason their ace has to take one and the less talent would come to Pittsburgh in the event of a trade. Now that Keller’s breakout appears to be a reality and not a fluke or merely speculation about the future, he has a lot more financial leverage than he did a year ago.

While Keller worked out most of his remaining command issues last season, he still suffered a bit from having strikeout stuff but not being great at actually collecting those Ks. The full version of ZiPS still sees his improved swinging-strike rate not supporting the impressive 50% bump in his overall strikeout rate, but it does agree that his performance in 2023 in this department represents real and significant improvement. As such, Keller has one of the biggest bumps among pitchers from his preseason long-term projection. Even the simpler in-season projection version of ZiPS still has him finishing in the top five in the NL in WAR, behind just Zac Gallen, Zack Wheeler, Spencer Strider, and Logan Webb.

Perhaps the most striking example of Keller’s continued breakout is just how improved his cohort of most similar past pitchers is. Here are the top 50 pitchers in ZiPS similarity (with the specific year at which their baseline is similar) for Keller both before 2023 and now:

You will note that I didn’t label which column was which, because I’m just that confident that you’ll know in about a half-second of glancing which list is the better one!

In sum, ZiPS suggests a fair six-year deal right now would be six years, $116 million:

This reflects the fact that he has two more years of arbitration; a projected offer as a free agent would be six years, $153 million, or seven years, $171 million.

Despite being a shortstop — for now at least — rather than a pitcher, Cruz is the riskier of the pair. He’s less established in the majors than Keller and is currently on the IL with a fractured ankle, making a projection that much trickier. But when agreeing to a mutually beneficial contract, you basically have to pay either in currency or risk, and if the Pirates don’t want to give up a ton of the former, they’ll have to be willing to pay by taking on a bunch of the latter. Even if the current injury makes the atmosphere a little too much like gambling for either side of the negotiations, a healthy Cruz — which is expected to be a thing sometime around August — should be enough to kickstart talks.

Cruz was one of my breakout picks this year, and while the ankle means that’s one that I’m unlikely to get right, he still has a great deal of upside with his game-changing power. And his contact issues, while concerning, are at least a problem that you can pinpoint; it only take a few percentage points of a bump in contact rate for ZiPS to start projecting him with Javier Báez’s prime. Cruz had already shown an uptick in his nine games this year, walking seven times as his contact rate hit 70%. Nine games is a pitifully small sample size, even for less volatile numbers, but it’s certainly better than those numbers going in the opposite direction!

Cruz has more upside than Hayes does, but the latter is healthy and closer to his potential than the former is to his higher potential, and the contract projection comes out similarly to the extension that Hayes signed: a seven-year, $67 million extension that delays Cruz’s free agency by two years.

Will contracts like these single-handedly make the Pirates a perennial contender? No, but signing young players to long-term deals at least gives them the path to long-term relevance in the NL Central and gives a fanbase that’s been beaten up for 30 years some hope that it’ll get to see PNC Park be the long-term home for the team’s core rather than a set of turnstiles.