Tag Archives: Pirates

It All Comes Back To Spending, Pirates Fans

Andrew McCutchen

What follows is a list. Each line is where the Pittsburgh Pirates ranked in terms of Major League payroll, among the 30 teams.

The list begins with the year Bob Nutting took over as principal owner.

2007 – 27th
2008 – 27th
2009 – 28th
2010 – 30th
2011 – 28th
2012 – 26th
2013 – 27th
2014 – 27th
2015 – 25th
2016 – 21st
2017 – 23rd

More spending does not automatically equal more wins. However, in conducting the most rigorous and deepest analysis I have seen on the subject, Noah Davis and Michael Lopez found that “more money generally means more wins.”

Gerrit Cole Pirates

Credit: Jon Dawson/Creative Commons

The truly frustrating part? The Pirates were set up for more money to directly equal more wins.

In my debut of a (short-lived) sports analytics column for Pittsburgh Magazine in March 2015, I pointed out that the Pirates were in the perfect spot to spend. They had reached the playoffs the previous two seasons, seen attendance and revenue rise, and most importantly, saved enough money through their re-building process to make that splash.

It didn’t happen.

Those 2015 Pirates were two wins short of taking the division. In 2014, the Bucs were also two wins short of the division title. In 2013, three wins short.

All of those turned out to be years where a little bit of spending — on an extra pitcher, on an extra bat — would have had an outsized impact on where the team landed in October.

It’s what allowed the Cubs to jump from $89 million to $167 million in two years.

Championship.

It’s what allowed the Astros to methodically work their way from $24 million to $45 million to $69 million to $97 million to $127 million.

Again, championship.

Andrew McCutchen Pirates

Credit: Keith Allison/Creative Commons

One other thing money allows you to do: make mistakes. You whiff on a six-figure contract? Eh. There’s more cash where that came from.

The Pirates don’t live in that world. And while I have grievances to air with Neal Huntington, in the grand scheme his bankroll is tighter than that of almost all of his fellow GMs.

And so, you get risk aversion.

You need young, cost-controlled players to compete. When a David Price or a Giancarlo Stanton hits the trade market, you can’t feel confident dealing multiple top prospects for him. They’re your currency.

You need that dreaded “financial flexibility.” Free agency? Pfft. The biggest free-agent contract your owner ever signed was 3 years, $39 million.

You get a No. 1 pick, and draft a state-of-the-art workhorse pitcher like Gerrit Cole. But you see his agent is Scott Boras. A long-term extension is a fairy tale.

You know how beloved Andrew McCutchen is, from the die-hards to the go-once-a-year-with-work-friends crowd. But on your budget, are you really going to spend on his age-32 season, his age-33 season, and so on?

Winning frugally? It can be done. But not for long. Not consistently. Not at a level that can realistically compete with the teams that, every year, are spending $50 million more than you. $70 million more. In the Dodgers’ case, $140 million more.

As for me, I’m on a word count budget. Gotta keep it under 500. Seems fitting.

Prospect Debut Day and Why Being a Pirates Fan Has Never Been Better

Jameson Taillon in his natural habitat (Scott Tidlund/Creative Commons)

Jameson Taillon in his natural habitat, a bullpen in Bradenton.

June is always a particularly fun month for baseball.

The weather is getting just about perfect. Kids are finishing up school for the year, so families start packing the ballpark every night. And as the NBA and NHL wrap up, more casual sports fans and media outlets start to notice, “Oh, right. Baseball.”

We hardcore fans? We get another treat too. Thanks to the particular silliness of the MLB collective bargaining agreement (have you ever tried explaining Super 2 to your dad?), June is usually the month teams twist the spigot marked PROSPECT PIPELINE and we all enjoy a new round of hotshot young ballplayers.

Screw off, Andy Williams. This is the most wonderful time of the year.

For many years as a Pirates fan, any Top Prospect Debut Day was actually one of the few fun events to which I could look forward.

Sure, we’re already 13 games under .500 and all is lost and baseball fandom is where your happiness is given concrete shoes and dumped in the river… but on the other hand, Jose Tabata!

Jose Tabata

Lips. Lips forever. (Scott Michaels/Creative Commons)

It was Opening Day 2.0 for the hopelessly devoted fan. If the Home Opener was the day you could dream, “Maybe this is the Buccos’ year,” then Top Prospect Debut Day was the day you could dream, “Maybe this is the baseball savior to lead us out of the wilderness.”

We got prospect crushes on new flames like Sean Burnett, Paul Maholm, Brad Lincoln and James McDonald. These were the Littlefield and Soon-After-Littlefield years in which any half-decent young player was labeled a TOP PROSPECT! and saddled with unfair savior-y expectations.

Then, baseballers of actual quality began to show up from the minor leagues to Pittsburgh. Neil Walker can actually hit and play second base! Pedro Alvarez can murder baseballs even if his strikeouts make you rip off your fingernails! Alex Presley had his moments, I think!

Beloved radio postgame host Rocco DeMaro called this crew The Cavalry, no doubt because these were the men on horses riding in to save us from defeat. But none of the above were superstars or saviors.

Only one player from The Cavalry actually came in, blew us away and never stopped.

When I found out Andrew McCutchen would be making his big-league introduction at PNC Park on a weekday afternoon, I begged my mom to spring me from school early (it had to have been, like, the 3rd-to-last day of the year). I got the go-ahead, because my mom is better than your mom, took the bus to the North Shore and saw a future worth cheering for.

YouTube highlights show it was your typical partly-cloudy Pittsburgh afternoon but my memory, sitting there in the center-field seats, will be that the sun never shone brighter.

A few days later, McCutchen clobbered two triples in back-to-back at-bats. Remember how exciting it was the first time we saw blur in dreadlocks stretch a double into a triple? I wrote on Facebook that “Usain Bolt has nothing on Cutch!” And I think I really believed it.

That was 7 years ago today.

Okay, 500 words to get to Jameson Taillon. It was 6 years ago today that Neal Huntington drafted the No. 8 prospect in the draft, high school pitcher Stetson Allie, to join the No. 2 prospect Taillon.

Stetson Allie and Jameson Taillon

Children were the future. (Matt Bandi/Creative Commons)

Their two paths since then show, if nothing else, the folly of counting on pitching prospects.

Allie had a 100-mph fastball but with the control of Wild Thing Ricky Vaughn soon after leaving the California Penal League. He gave up 37 walks in less than 27 minor-league innings before the Pirates handed him a bat and a first baseman’s glove.

Meanwhile, Taillon was developing as promised, flummoxing hitters with that drop-off-the-table curveball and getting to Double-A by the end of his second pro season. At age 20, he was just a couple steps from big-league dominance.

Then? Elbow injury. Tommy John surgery. Hernia surgery. I probably scrolled through thousands of tweets with some combination of the words “Taillon” and “rehab outing.”

But 6 years to the day he was drafted by the Pirates, Taillon arrived for his welcome press conference at PNC Park — all smiles. The injuries and the surgeries and the rehab? That was just the scenic route to Pittsburgh.

Tonight, he’ll go toe-to-toe toeing the same rubber as Noah Syndergaard, a pitcher almost a year younger than Taillon who nonetheless already has a full-season of Major League innings, a Marvel superhero nickname and talk-show hosts who ask IS HE BASEBALL’S BEST PITCHER QUESTION MARK.

There’s nowhere in the world Taillon would rather be tonight, and he and I have that in common.

Pirates fans seen some pretty exciting prospect premieres over the past few years: Starling Marte,  and Neal Huntington products Gerrit Cole and Gregory Polanco among them. But no longer do they, nor Taillon, need to pull a 100-loss roster out of ignominy and into the promised land.

Gregory Polanco

Gregory Polanco’s an All-Star candidate now, a prospect who’s meeting expectations (Daniel Decker/Creative Commons)

We’re in the promised land. Somehow playoff contention has become the norm, the expectation for your Pittsburgh Pirates instead of some Tim Burton-esque dreamland. We’re spoiled, and we’re well-served in reminding ourselves that we have, indeed, moved on up to the East Side.

As Taillon, Tyler Glasnow, Austin Meadows and Josh Bell show up in Pittsburgh over this next year or so, they don’t have to be The Cavalry. They don’t even all have to be great, though I and Huntington would quite like that result.

Instead, Huntington and Co. have built a team that can only needs these youngins to complement what is already on the field.

This is a good baseball team, and it doesn’t need a Savior. Top Prospect Debut Day is just another game in June, though for those of us following Taillon’s odyssey to the Majors, an exciting one.

And I didn’t have to plead to get out of school to go to this game.

How the Pirates Should Spend Their Russell Martin Money

Pittsburgh Pirates potential free agents

Russell Martin is gone. But perhaps for the Pittsburgh Pirates he is gone for the better.

Russell Martin leaves PiratesThe Pirates offered Martin a four-year contract to stay in the ‘Burgh, according to Travis Sawchik of the Tribune-Review, and I must think it was in the area of the Cubs’ $64 million offer to the departed catcher.

So it goes. Baseball is a zero sum game — chalk it up as a plus for the 2015 Blue Jays and a minus for the 2015 Pirates.

But then the Bucs can turn the crisis into opportunity.

Let’s get into the mind of general manager Neal Huntington and spend $64 million a different way. Let’s make the 2015 team better and ensure the future of the team is strong. Let’s diversify our portfolio.

What do the Pirates need? Mostly pitching and help at first base. In order to get an accurate view of our money, we’ll use the always-pretty-good crowdsourced (CS) contract projections from FanGraphs, adjusting them up or down a million or two as I see fit.

Start with the, um, starters…

Continue reading →

Love This Time, Pirates Fans

Pirates fans, these are the good times.

I know you know this, but it bears repeating — these are the times you have been waiting for as a fan, and you ought to enjoy it.

If you were at PNC Park for tonight’s game (or even watching on TV), you felt the crowd electrify when Russell Martin hit the go-ahead home run. Rob King called it “one of the most dramatic moments in PNC Park history,” and he is absolutely right. Watching the drama of September baseball finally come to Pittsburgh feels incredible.

So my request to you, Pirates fans: be grateful. I don’t mean grateful in a “you must like Bob Nutting and never criticize management” kind of way. I don’t mean grateful in a “how could you be mad at anything when the Pirates are in the playoffs?” kind of way.

What I mean is: this is the kind of September (and forthcoming October) that we saw in other cities for 20 years, and we dreamed that the same excitement could come here. Be grateful for that. Let your emotions, high and low, run wild. The next few weeks represent the pinnacle of baseball and sporting drama.

Be grateful to be a part of these new Pirates golden years. They may not last forever.

Sports are funny for many reasons. One of them: U.S. professional team sports are not a zero-sum game. They are less than a zero-sum game. At the end of a season, there’s always: 1 fan-base celebrating, 3 or 4 fan-bases being satisfied at overachieving and about 25 fan-bases left disappointed and often angry.

Why do we as sports fans subject ourselves to this losing system? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ However, we can change it within ourselves. At the end of this Pirates season, if they don’t win the World Series, go ahead and be disappointed and angry. It’s natural.

But right now? This is the fun part. This is why we root and nonsensically devote our time, money and passion to this losing system. Because right now is hope. Right now is fun. Right now is joyous. Be grateful to feel those emotions after 20 years of apathy, and lose yourself in the right now.

Top 15 Pittsburgh Pirates Prospects for 2013 – A Compilation

Gerrit Cole
Gerrit Cole

Gerrit Cole was ranked as the Pirates’ top prospect on all six lists.

With regard to sample sizes, if some is good, more is better. I compiled the Top 10 rankings of prospects in the Pittsburgh Pirates farm system from Baseball America, ESPN’s Keith Law and Baseball Prospectus’ Jason Parks, along with the Top 20 rankings from Pirates Prospects, MLB.com’s Jonathan Mayo and SB Nation’s John Sickels.

Outside of the top seven prospects, who all appeared in the Top 10 of every list, players can have wildly different spots in individual rankings. Kyle McPherson was rated everywhere from 7th (Baseball America, Mayo) to 13th (Sickels). Tyler Glasnow was slotted as high as 8th (Pirates Prospects, Baseball Prospectus) and as low as 19th (Mayo). Wyatt Mathisen fluctuated from 7th (Baseball Prospectus) to 16th (Pirates Prospects).

None of these individual lists are necessarily wrong, and I certainly do not wish to denigrate the hard work all of these outlets/writers do to evaluate prospects. Quite the opposite, as these are the six outlets I respect most for their analysis of minor league systems. The rankings just reflect the wisdom of multiple experts to try to gather the strongest list possible.

1. RHP Gerrit Cole
2. RHP Jameson Taillon
3. OF Gregory Polanco
4. SS Alen Hanson
5. RHP Luis Heredia
6. OF Josh Bell
7. OF Barrett Barnes

8. RHP Nick Kingham
9. RHP Kyle McPherson
10. C Wyatt Mathisen
11. RHP Clay Holmes
12. RHP Tyler Glasnow
13. LHP Justin Wilson
14. 2B Dilson Herrera
15. RHP Bryan Morris

Just missed: C Tony Sanchez, RHP Vic Black, 1B Alex Dickerson, LHP Andrew Oliver

Real Progress: How to better evaluate Neal Huntington’s record as Pirates GM

Pedro Alvarez

Pedro Alvarez, a 30-home-run hitter drafted by Neal Huntington. (Keith Allison/Creative Commons)

Columnists come up with fun generalizations on occasion.

The won-loss record is the only way to judge any general manager.

– Ron Cook, noted baseball scholar. September 28, 2012

That’s right, Ron Cook. It’s the only way to judge a general manager if you don’t factor in payroll, market size, revenue, meddling owners, injuries, expiring contracts, bad managers you didn’t hire, strength of schedule or any number of other factors over which a Major League GM has little to no control.

Over the last few days, it has become fashionable to quote the Pittsburgh Pirates’ won-loss records under the last three general managers as a way of “proving” the Pirates have made no progress under Neal Huntington. I have even see writers I respect like Alan Robinson and Dejan Kovacevic repeat the records.

Doing so completely disregards the state of the Pirates franchise when Neal Huntington took the job on Sept. 25, 2007, as well as the strategy he took to fix it. Huntington had no control over how the team was built before he became GM, and yet some people want to categorize the sins of the past under his name (with regards to the 2008-10 Pirates teams).

While previous GM Dave Littlefield didn’t tear up the soil and salt the earth in his final years as general manager, he did leave the new management in a peculiar situation. The Major League club was passable, but not a contender, and the farm system was in the bottom half of MLB in terms of overall talent.

The first three years of Neal Huntington’s tenure as general manager saw a definitive strategy in mind: trade Major League players whose contracts are set to expire, and replenish the minor league teams with future players from top to bottom. The result of that strategy has produced thousands of words and arguments already, touting the successes (acquiring Jeff Karstens, Joel Hanrahan, James McDonald, etc.) as well as admonishing the failures (Tim Alderson, Andy LaRoche, Lastings Milledge, etc.). Jose Tabata, the jury is still out on you.

My point is not to evaluate whether Huntington’s thrash-and-burn strategy has worked or not. But one simply has to recognize that Huntington and Co. knew the immediate consequences of it: liquidating the Major League roster of players like Freddy Sanchez, Jason Bay, Adam LaRoche and Xavier Nady took a mediocre Major League roster and made it bad. So the Pirates surely wouldn’t win a lot of games from 2008 through 2010, but rather improve the farm system in an attempt to build a true playoff contender beyond those years.

When folks quote the Pirates’ won-loss record under Huntington, they are completely ignoring the one basic truth about his tenure: his goal was not to make the Major League team a winner by 2010. Quite the opposite, actually, as the 2010 team had the youngest offense in all of baseball. Again, I’m not here to draw a conclusion whether Huntington should keep his job. I’m simply stating the facts behind his strategy.

Since those fire sale years, the Major League product has improved. The 2009 and 2010 Pirates teams limped to a .367 winning percentage and a minus-411 run differential. But the 2011 and 2012 teams made the jump to a far more respectable .464 winning percentage and a minus-126 run differential.

Being under .500 and having a negative run differential is not the goal. But the Pirates have undoubtedly shown improvement under Neal Huntington, and there’s more talent on the way.

So fine, Ron Cook, et al. If you would like to keep quoting records, I would like to make a suggestion. Quote the won-loss records for the last three Pirates’ general managers in their fourth and fifth full seasons on the job. It is far from perfect, and certainly doesn’t eliminate the variables of which a GM cannot control. However, it draws from the notion that GMs of small-market teams should be evaluated on the performance of the team later in their tenure, not at the very beginning of a rebuilding project.

Charting the Pirates general managers in their 4th and 5th years on the job

Note that Littlefield took over in July 2001, so I took 2002 as his first season. And while Bonifay wasn’t able to improve on that 79-win product in 1997, he got almost four more seasons to do so. Littlefield? His time as GM only saw the transformation of a 62-win team into a 68-win team with little to speak of in the minors.

Huntington has built something from that 68-win team/shallow farm system left behind by Littlefield. It’s now a 77-win team (with possibly a couple more wins to go this season) featuring a far better farm system to create a sustainable product.

Yeah, I just played your game, Ron Cook. I judged the general managers based on win-loss record. And by doing so, Huntington actually looks better than all the anger about the Pirates’ 2012 collapse would have you believe. After all, he has substantially improved the Pirates’ win-loss record each of the last two seasons without shipping out any prospects better than Robbie Grossman or Rudy Owens.

A winning baseball team in Pittsburgh? It’s in progress.

Fastballs and Stress: Five Problems for James McDonald (And Reasons For Optimism)

It has been a lonely few starts on the mound for McDonald. (Jon Dawson/Creative Commons)

How quickly things change when you are in the heart of a pennant race.

Six starts ago, Pirates pitcher James McDonald was putting up some of the best numbers in baseball — 3rd in the National League in both ERA and baserunners per inning. Six starts ago, Buccos fans were steamed that McDonald was not on the All-Star team, and talking about him as a Cy Young dark horse (myself included). Six starts ago, McDonald was seen as a pitcher that would lead Pittsburgh’s charge to the first postseason in a generation.

In reality, six starts is not a whole lot of time to evaluate a pitcher. One time through a tough lineup can sway the numbers a lot, a few bloop hits could drop in or a pitcher could just come out flat on a given night.

Yet one can not deny that fans are seeing a vastly different James McDonald than they saw a month ago.

It is a pennant race, and patience is at a premium. As the Pirates sit right on the Wild Card bubble heading into Thursday, and it is possible that McDonald could be relegated to the bullpen.

That decision is up to Clint Hurdle. But I wanted to look at what has changed for “J-Mac” over those six starts since the All-Star Break (or ASB). Props go out to Brooks Baseball and FanGraphs for the raw data; I could not have done it without them.

1. Command falls to pre-2012 form – In the first half of the season, McDonald was vastly improved at throwing strikes. Part of it seemed to be the influence of veteran pitcher A.J. Burnett and catcher Rod Barajas. McDonald was aggressive in the zone and it got results. But since the break, his strike rate has dropped below his career rate.

2. Fastball velocity is down – I took a look at McDonald’s fastballs (both his four-seam fastball and two-seam sinker) and found a noticeable drop in average velocity. His fastball offerings are down a full mile per hour since the All-Star Break. Keep in mind that McDonald’s 171-inning season in 2011 was the first time he had ever pitched more than 72 innings in a Major League season. Now he is at 141 innings this year and counting, so this McDonald that averages 92 mph on fastballs will likely remain for the rest of the year.

3. Opponents are getting their bats on his fastball – With McDonald’s drop in fastball velocity, hitters have found it much easier to put the pitch into play.

4. His slider has not been as effective – McDonald used the slider as a knockout in the first half, relying on it especially against right-handed hitters. Since then, it has still been a good pitch, but it is more hittable and not the dominant offering it had been. Perhaps the drop in velocity is a factor?

5. Many long innings – People often measure a pitcher’s stress level in a game by pitch count, and their stress level over a season by innings count. Hell, I just did the latter a couple paragraphs ago! But it is also good to see if he is throwing a lot of high-stress innings, which I measure as innings with 25 pitches or more. Given McDonald’s troubles, he has a lot more of these innings that take a lot of pitches to finish. Before the break, he averaged 15.3 pitchers per inning. Since then, he has averaged 19.3 per inning.

Okay, so all of those charts identify the particular problems McDonald has struggled with over the last month or so. But there are reasons to think that he might improve. In fact, there are some very good reasons to think that McDonald will pitch better over the last several starts of his season (assuming he stays in the rotation).

1. He is still making hitters swing and miss — especially with his curve – One of the main elements of McDonald’s game has been generating whiffs. His stuff is dominant at times, especially when he has his fastball-slider combination working. But since the All-Star break, McDonald has mixed in his curveball more often — and for good reason. Since the break, his curve has gotten hitters to flail almost as well as his slider does. Keep the curves coming.

2. Bad BABIP luck – If you’re not familiar with BABIP, it stands for batting average on balls in play. Many sabermetricians say that unless a pitcher generates a lot of groundballs or a lot of line drive, fluctuations in BABIP are largely due to luck. Specifically, if a pitcher’s season BABIP is lower than his career BABIP, that’s good luck. If it is higher, that is bad luck.

McDonald has been unlucky since the All-Star Break. One big reason this should improve is the Pirates’ quality defense, which has the 3rd-highest rate of balls in play converted to outs in all of baseball.

3. Bad home run luck – Another sabermetrics theory on balls in play: pitchers mostly control giving up fly balls, less so for home runs. So in practice, if his season home-run-to-fly-ball rate is higher than his career rate: bad luck. If it is lower than his career rate: good luck. You can see that, like BABIP, McDonald’s luck has been a tale of two halves.

4. His line drive rate has held steady – Despite McDonald’s fastball and slider being put into play more often, opposing have not exactly smacked him around. This falls in line with our feelings that his recent BABIP is simply bad luck. A pitcher should not have that high of a BABIP unless there are a lot of liners being allowed.

So there you have it. The bad and the good of James McDonald. The referendum on whether he will stay in the rotation could come Thursday in his next start, though it would be wise to be patient and see if his luck turns.