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2023 Record: 76-86 (.469 win%, 4th in Division)
2024 Payroll: $77,560,000 (29th)
2024 Projected Lineup:
1. SS Oneil Cruz, .248 AVG/.322 OBP/.451 SLG, 2.3 fWAR
2. LF Bryan Reynolds, .266 AVG/.345 OBP/.455 SLG, 2.7 fWAR
3. 3B Ke’Bryan Hayes, .260 AVG/.318 OBP/.414 SLG, 2.7 fWAR
4. DH Andrew McCutchen, .240 AVG/.341 OBP/.389 SLG, 0.4 fWAR
5. CF Jack Suwinski, .240 AVG/.338 OBP/.454 SLG, 2.1 fWAR
6. C Henry Davis, .240 AVG/.338 OBP/.409 SLG, 1.5 fWAR
7. 1B Rowdy Tellez, .245 AVG/.325 OBP/.438 SLG, 0.5 fWAR
8. RF Edward Olivares, .266 AVG/.325 OBP/.430 SLG, 0.7 fWAR
9. 2B Liover Peguero, .242 AVG/.290 OBP/.375 SLG, 0.5 fWAR
10. 1B/OF Connor Joe, .246 AVG/.342 OBP/.398 SLG, 0.8 fWAR
(Use this spot for a utility player)
2024 Projected Starting Rotation:
1. Mitch Keller, 189.0 IP/4.15 ERA/1.31 WHIP, 2.9 fWAR
2. Martín Pérez, 153.0 IP/4.45 ERA/1.43 WHIP, 1.7 fWAR
3. Marco Gonzales, 137.0 IP/4.80 ERA/1.40 WHIP, 0.9 fWAR
4. Luis L. Ortiz, 102.0 IP/4.75 ERA/1.47 WHIP, 0.7 fWAR
5. Bailey Falter, 98.0 IP/4.47 ERA/1.31 WHIP, 0.8 fWAR
2024 Projected Top 4 Relievers:
1. David Bednar, 68.0 IP/3.38 ERA/1.1 WHIP, 1.5 fWAR
2. Aroldis Chapman, 62.0 IP/3.32 ERA/1.27 WHIP, 0.8 fWAR
3. Colin Holderman, 64.0 IP/4.15 ERA/1.34 WHIP, 0.5 fWAR
4. Ryan Borucki, 60.0 IP/3.97 ERA/1.28 WHIP, 0.4 fWAR
What Baseball Means to Pittsburgh?
Professional baseball has been around Pittsburgh since 1882, and the Pirates since 1891, with Honus Wagner, Roberto Clemente, Bill Mazeroski, Willie Stargell and many others forming a rich lineage of baseball in black and yellow. The city can claim as much baseball history as nearly anywhere else.
Yet living up to that great history has been much harder over the past two decades. Central to that is owner Bob Nutting, who has placed the Pirates in the bottom five in spending in all but three seasons since his takeover in 2007. The mid 2010s saw significant success, with three straight playoff berths from 2013-2015. But the young players that built those teams were rarely kept, instead being shipped off for prospects to add to a flailing farm system devoid of any talent acquired through the draft or international free agency.
Still, those teams captivated Pittsburgh and showed the deep love for baseball the city has. Gerrit Cole, an All Star on that 2015 team, recently reminisced on his time in Pittsburgh in an interview with The Athletic.
“I saw how much the Pirates mean to the city and the people of Pittsburgh. I so badly want them to have that relationship with their team again. It just means so much to those fans. It really does.”
Cole was eventually traded to the Astros, just as Andrew McCutchen, Starling Marte, Jameson Taillon, Joe Musgrove and others were cast off, too. A newly burgeoning group of young players will likely propel the Pirates to the playoffs again for a couple years, but it’s hard to expect any sustained success, knowing that the best players will eventually price themselves out of Nutting’s penny-pinching budget. The faithful fans will come back to beautiful PNC Park when the Pirates find themselves back in tight, October games, but ownership’s acceptance of mediocrity as the norm and success as the outlier won’t build any loyalty among Pittsburgh fans.
2023-24 Offseason Recap:
A clear pattern has emerged over the first five offseasons of Ben Cherington’s reign as general manager: sign a series of veterans to one-year contracts, hoping you can flip them at the trade deadline for an extra prospect or two. Indeed, he has yet to hand out a multi-year contract. The menagerie of vets – Jarrod Dyson, Trevor Cahill, Roberto Pérez, Rich Hill among them – have filled roster holes and provided guidance to the young players being counted on for any sustained success of Pirates baseball.
The 2023-24 offseason followed that same plan, albeit with more notable names in free agency and a young core finally coming into focus. Aroldis Chapman, Yasmani Grandal and Martín Pérez, along with franchise legend Andrew McCutchen all signed one-year deals. More importantly, 2023 All-Star and rotation stalwart Mitch Keller signed a five-year extension, locking in another core piece along with Bryan Reynolds and Ke’Bryan Hayes, already both on long-term contracts.
Although they’ve shown little urgency over the past five years, Cherington’s regime has clearly made strides in their rebuilding effort. A playoff berth still seems unlikely, the surging Cubs, exciting Reds, and always-decent Brewers crowding the NL Central, but none of those teams project to really stand out, and with a reasonable improvement on their 76-win 2023 season, the Pirates could make a bit of noise in the division.
2024 Regular Season Preview:
The biggest obstacle to that improvement is a tepid and uncertain starting rotation.
Keller secured a second-straight opening day start and should be a consistent force at the top of the rotation, although hardly a dominant ace. He rides a powerful fastball combination to success, throwing a four-seam, cutter or sinker over 70% of the time. He pairs that heavy fastball diet with a decent sweeper, good for some swing-and-misses but not quite a wipeout pitch. His strong fastball and fantastic 6.7 BB% will keep him churning through innings, but a true breaking ball could produce a true breakout for Keller.
Similarly, Martín Pérez should be a reliable source of innings, with some potential for great production within those innings. He’s been a solidly average pitcher for all his career – his career ERA+ is an even 100 – yet a fantastic 2022 season of 196.1 innings of 2.89 ERA ball gives some hope for top of the rotation production. However, the underlying numbers indicate plenty of skepticism over that hope.
Pérez has slowly phased out the use of his four-seam fastball over the past five seasons, throwing it just 3.9% of the time in 2023, instead focusing on a sinker-cutter combination. The sinker’s value has stayed mostly consistent, but the cutter has seen wide swings in effectiveness. In 2021 and 2023, opponent batting average versus his cutter was .331 and .343, respectively, with the WOBA coming in over .400 for each season. In 2022, opponents hit just .228 with a WOBA of .252. It’s hard to find any correlation between the success and failure of his cutter in the deeper metrics, too. Unlocking the mystery of his cutter will be the key to his 2024 success.
Marco Gonzales is the surest bet for innings past Keller and Pérez. He provided consistently valuable innings to the Mariners from 2018 until a concerning nerve surgery ended his 2023 season after just 50 innings of 5.22 ERA ball. The Pirates ended up with him via the Braves as a somewhat low-cost rotation option. However, longstanding peripherals of low K% and concerningly high hard hit rates paired with his diminishing production over the last two years gives little hope that Gonzales will provide much value to the Bucs in 2024.
After those three, the rotation mix gets far more murky. Youngsters Luis L. Ortiz, Bailey Falter and Quinn Priester figure to get the first cracks at filling the back end of the rotation.
Ortiz rides a high-velocity sinker to lots of ground balls, but struggles to get strikeouts and walked opponents at a problematic 12.0% in 2023. That sinker, along with a solid slider, should provide enough for Ortiz to rack up some innings, but he’ll hardly be a positive force.
Falter showed a glimpse of potential in 2022 with the Phillies, throwing 86 innings with a sub-4.00 ERA, but was unable to replicate that production in 2023. His peripherals indicate that expectations for 2024 should likely be more in line with ‘23 than ‘22. Other than a low BB%, very few strikeouts, ground balls or generally effective pitches paint a dire picture for Falter.
Priester, the Pirates’ 2019 first rounder, has lost much of his prospect sheen as he’s struggled to limit walks and been unable to rack up strikeouts in the upper levels of the minors. Those trends continued in his 50 big league innings last year, with massive HardHit% combining with the aforementioned BB and K problems to create a paltry 7.74 ERA cocktail.
With such a bleak rotation picture, it may be tempting to throw caution to the wind and bring up top pitching prospects Paul Skenes and Bubba Chandler. Both peaked into AA for the last few games last season, and will likely start there this season, within striking distance of Pittsburgh, yet both with plenty to work on. More realistically, Jared Jones, another top prospect, spent most of his 2023 season in AAA and will be a ready candidate to help at the big league level.
The bullpen behind those starters figures to be much more reliable.
David Bednar leads the way as a stabilizing, ninth-inning force. He’s turned in three-straight outstanding seasons for the Pirates, garnering All-Star Game nods in the last two. Riding a powerful fastball, Bednar’s peripherals leave little doubt that he’ll continue to dominate.
Aroldis Chapman’s one-year, $10.5 million deal was the highest average annual value the Pirates have ever given a free agent. They spent that money to create a dynamic, late-game combo that can shorten the game with certain out-getters in the eighth and ninth, betting that Chapman can keep blowing people away with his 100 MPH fastball, even with his anxiety-inducing 14.5 BB%. 2022 saw concerning trends with the effectiveness of his fastball surface, but he quelled many of those with a dominant 2023 with the Royals and Rangers.
Elsewhere, Colin Holderman and Ryan Borucki will hope to build on solid 2023 performances. Dauri Moreta will ride his gravity-defying slider to more outs, joined by other promising young arms Carmen Mlodzinski and Roansy Contreras, who also could get some starts.
Then comes the lineup, where the collective future of Pittsburgh baseball resides much more strongly.
Oneil Cruz’s freak athleticism is a complete joy to watch, even when he strikes out a massive 35% of the time, as he did in 2022. That year, he still tracked as an above-average hitter despite his high K%, with a 108 OPS+. After a lost 2023 due to a fractured ankle, the prospect of Cruz making contact just a little more, helping to lower his strikeouts and give more chances to show off his eye-popping exit velocity, should tantalize fans and scare opponents.
Bryan Reynolds hasn’t replicated his fantastic 2021 season over the past two years, but his baseline hitting stats, and the peripherals that back them up, still indicate a valuable, above-average bat. More concerningly, his other tools have significantly fallen off over the past three years. Reynolds’ sprint speed has decreased almost a full foot per second. His value defensively has cratered too, moving from an above-average center fielder in 2021 to a below-average left fielder in 2021, accounting for -3 Outs Above Average. Even his arm strength has fallen. He’s only 29, and the continuing of this trend over the remaining seven years of his extension will severely curtail his value.
On the other hand, Ke’Bryan Hayes finally put all his tools together for a fantastic 2023 season. His 3B defense, always a calling card, won him a Gold Glove, but his bat showed the most notable improvement. Following a disappointing first half, Hayes’ covert meetings with AA hitting coach Joe Nunnally during a July IL stint turned things around. His fantastic .299/.335/.539 line over the final 49 games came from sterling exit velocities and a hugely improved K%. If he can make that jump consistent, Hayes will quickly become one of the better third basemen in baseball.
Replacing Reynolds in CF, Jack Suwinski established himself as a likely long-term piece last year. His tiny 18.2% chase rate paired with a huge 32.2 K% paints a very unusual offensive picture. In fact, he swung at just 39% of pitches, far below the 47.1% MLB average, but whiffed on 30.1% of the pitches he did swing at, far above the league average. But forgetting all that, he made very hard contact when he did hit the ball, all adding up to a solid .224/.339/.454 line and 115 OPS+, with a fantastic 14.0 BB% boosting his OBP. Paired with great speed, rangy outfielding, and his relative youth, Suwinski has an exciting future in Pittsburgh.
Despite a high draft profile, Henry Davis still needs to show more to become a certain part of the Pirates’ future. Drafted as a catcher, he has yet to convince Pirates brass that he has a future there, but it’s unclear if his bat is powerful enough to justify similarly middling defense in a corner outfield position. Indeed, he spent his 2023 MLB cup-of-coffee in RF, but turned in only a .213/.302/.351 line, with mediocre batted ball numbers across the board. The Pirates brought in Yasmani Grandal to provide some veteran support for Davis, who will likely get a longer chance at catcher this year. If he can’t establish himself there, his future will remain in jeopardy.
Infielder Liover Peguero is another young player likely to get significant opportunity, but a tepid offensive profile places him firmly as a side piece to the more promising forces of Cruz, Reynolds, Hayes, Suwinski and potentially Davis.
After them, various veterans will fill out the remaining holes of the lineup, serving as potential July trade chips and placeholders for more promising prospects.
Key among those is Andrew McCutchen, who remained a consistent on-base force in 2023, but without the power and speed that previously made him so exciting. Rowdy Tellez and Connor Joe will likely platoon at 1B, providing solid and consistent performance.
Player to Watch #1: 3B Ke’Bryan Hayes
Bryan Reynolds burst forth in 2019 as the likely future face of the franchise, but it might be Hayes who eventually takes that mantle. Hayes continued building on his strong hard contact rates with a 92.2 MPH average exit velocity that ranked 12th among qualified hitters in 2023, but it was a massive increase in launch angle that marked the starkest change for Hayes.
In 2022, he pounded balls into the dirt, registering just a 5.7 degree average launch angle, which followed an even worse 2.6 mark in 2021. In 2023, he pulled that up all the way to 13.2 degrees, above the MLB average of 12.2. His power responded accordingly, shown by his SLG% rising from a tiny .345 to .453, well above the MLB average. He totaled only 15 home runs, but 10 of those came in his second-half breakout. That newfound power combined with outstanding defense will soon eclipse the fading profile of Reynolds, giving Pirates fans a star to cheer for.
Player to Watch #2: SP Paul Skenes
Skenes has tantalized baseball fans for nearly a full year now, starting with his emergence at LSU last season. It’s hard not to be sucked in by his massive 6’6” frame, electric fastball and wipeout slider, but it may be wise to give the righty some chance to develop this season.
His unbelievable stuff has allowed somewhat unreliable command to slide, and he still doesn’t quite have a third option. Expanding on a changeup and getting in the strike zone just a little more will give the Pirates the true ace they need. In a season unlikely to rack up wins, that development should be prioritized even if his electric two-pitch arsenal could get outs right now.
Player to Watch #3: C Endy Rodriguez
If not for a season-ending UCL injury in December, Rodriguez would slot in among Cruz and Davis as high-end young players trying to fully establish themselves this season. Instead, Rodriguez will watch from the sidelines as Davis tries to establish himself as a long-term answer at catcher – Rodriguez’s strongest position.
However, Rodriguez is a versatile defender too, logging innings at 1B, 2B and all three OF spots along catcher through his minor league career. The Pirates prioritized Rodriguez as a catcher over Davis last season, who instead played RF, but there’s still no clear positional pecking order for the future between the two of them.
So even though Rodriguez won’t play this season, his future with the Pirates will be heavily influenced by the outcomes.
Position Group to Watch: Starting Pitching Depth
Your guess at who the 4 and 5 starters will be at the end of the season is truly as good as mine. On the bright side, there will be plenty of room for a younger guy to get some running time if he finds a bit of success. But, that also means none of their inexperienced starters might step up, and they could be left with journeymen Chase Anderson or Wily Peralta filling out the back of the rotation as a young and powerful offense struggles to keep the team in distant Wild Card contention.
The value they find back of the rotation will determine whether they make the jump from decent rebuilding team to fringe contender.
2024 Record Prediction: 78-84
There’s a lot to like about this young Pirates team. Ke’Bryan Hayes and Jack Suwinski should keep getting better. Bryan Reynolds is easy to count on. Oneil Cruz will be back after a lost 2023 season. Mitch Keller made his first All-Star team last year. David Bednar and Aroldis Chapman are a potent late-inning relief mix. I think their burgeoning young players will continue improving the team’s record, as has happened over the past four years.
But, I think they’re still one season away from being true contenders. The rotation is a big concern, the back end of the lineup is still fairly unknown and the overall lack of depth caps their potential. Cherington’s plan is certainly coming to fruition and a horizon of good Pirates baseball over the next six or seven years seems likely, but he’s certainly in no rush to get there.
Categories: 2024 Season Preview, Articles, Season Analysis
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